title: Anne Sullivan

text: In February 1877 Anne was sent to the Soeurs de la Charité hospital in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she had another unsuccessful operation. While there she helped the nuns in the wards and went on errands in the community until July of that year, when she was sent to the city infirmary, where she had one more unsuccessful operation, and was then transferred back to Tewksbury under duress. Instead of returning to the facility for predominantly ill and insane patients, she was housed with single mothers and unmarried pregnant women.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: During a subsequent inspection of Tewksbury in 1880 by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, now State Inspector of Charities, Anne besought him to allow her to be admitted to the Perkins School for the Blind. Within months her plea was granted.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: Anne began her studies at the Perkins School on October 7, 1880. Although her first years at Perkins were humiliating because of her rough manners, she managed to connect with a few teachers and made progress with her learning. While there she befriended Laura Bridgman, a graduate of Perkins and the first blind and deaf person to be educated there; Anne learned the manual alphabet from Laura. During her time there she had a series of eye operations that significantly improved her vision. In June 1886 she graduated at age 20 as the valedictorian of her class. She stated:


title: Anne Sullivan

text: The summer following Sullivan's graduation, the director of Perkins, Michael Anagnos, was contacted by Arthur Keller, who was in search of a teacher for his seven-year-old blind and deaf daughter, Helen. Anagnos immediately recommended Sullivan for this position and she began her work on March 3, 1887, at the Kellers' home in Tuscumbia, Alabama. As soon as she arrived she argued with Helen's parents about the Civil War and over the fact that they had owned slaves. However she also quickly connected with Helen. It was the beginning of a 49-year relationship: Sullivan evolved from teacher to governess and finally to companion and friend.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: Sullivan's curriculum involved a strict schedule, with constant introduction of new vocabulary; however she quickly changed her teaching method after seeing it did not suit Keller. Instead she began to teach her vocabulary based on her own interests, by spelling each word out into Keller's palm; within six months this method proved to be working, since Keller had learned 575 words, some multiplication tables and the Braille system.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: Sullivan strongly encouraged Helen's parents to send her to the Perkins School, where she could have an appropriate education. Once they had agreed Sullivan took Keller to Boston in 1888 and stayed with her there. Sullivan continued to teach her bright protégée, who soon became famous for her remarkable progress. With the help of the school's director, Anagnos, Keller became a public symbol for the school, helping to increase its funding and donations and making it the most famous and sought-after school for the blind in the country. However an accusation of plagiarism against Keller greatly upset Sullivan: she left and never returned but did remain influential to the school. Sullivan also remained a close companion to Keller and continued to assist in her education, which ultimately included a degree from Radcliffe College.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: On May 3, 1905, Sullivan married Harvard University instructor and literary critic John Albert Macy (1877–1932), who had helped Keller with her publications. When she married, Sullivan was already living with Keller as her personal teacher, so Macy moved into the household of both women. However, within a few years, the marriage began to disintegrate. By 1914, they separated, though he is listed as living as a "lodger" with them in the 1920 U.S. Census. As the years progressed after their separation, Macy appears to have faded from her life, and the two never officially divorced. Macy died in 1932 of a heart attack. Sullivan never remarried.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: In 1932, Keller and Sullivan were each awarded honorary fellowships from the Educational Institute of Scotland. They were also awarded honorary degrees from Temple University. In 1955, Keller was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University, and in 1956, the director's cottage at the Perkins School was named the Keller-Macy Cottage.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: Sullivan had been seriously visually impaired for almost all of her life, but by 1901, after having a stroke at age 35, she became completely blind. On October 15, 1936, she had a coronary thrombosis, fell into a coma, and died five days later at the age of 70 in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York, with Keller holding her hand. Keller described Sullivan as being very agitated during her last month of life, but during the last week, she was said to return to her normal generous self. Sullivan was cremated and her ashes interred in a memorial at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. She was the first woman to be recognized for her achievements in this way. When Keller died in 1968, she was cremated as well and her ashes were interred alongside those of Sullivan.


title: Anne Sullivan

text: Sullivan is the main character in "The Miracle Worker" by William Gibson, originally produced for television in 1957, in which she was portrayed by Teresa Wright. "The Miracle Worker" then moved to Broadway and later was produced as a 1962 feature film. Both the play and the film featured Anne Bancroft as Sullivan. Patty Duke, who played Keller on Broadway and in the 1962 film, later played Sullivan in a 1979 television remake. Blythe Danner portrayed her in "The Miracle Continues" and Roma Downey portrayed her in the TV movie "Monday After the Miracle" (1998). Alison Elliott portrayed her in a 2000 television movie. Alison Pill played her on Broadway in the short-lived 2010 revival, with Abigail Breslin as Keller.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: In gay culture, a bear is a larger and often hairier man who projects an image of rugged masculinity.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The bear concept can function as an identity or an affiliation, and there is ongoing debate in bear communities about what constitutes a bear. Some bears place importance on presenting a clear masculine image and may disdain or shun men who exhibit effeminacy, while others consider acceptance and inclusivity of all behavioral types to be an important value of the community.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: In the mid-1980s, gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area who called themselves "bears" met informally at Bear Hug (sex) parties and via the newly-emerging Internet. The term "bear" was popularized by Richard Bulger, who, along with his then partner Chris Nelson (1960–2006), founded "Bear Magazine" in 1987. George Mazzei wrote an article for "The Advocate" in 1979 called "Who's Who in the Zoo?", that characterized gay men as seven types of animals, including bears.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: At the onset of the bear movement, some bears separated from the gay community at large, forming "bear clubs" to create social and sexual opportunities of their own. Many clubs are loosely organized social groups; others are modeled on leather biker-patch clubs, with a strict set of bylaws, membership requirements, and charities. Bear clubs often sponsor large yearly events"bear runs" or "bear gatherings"like the annual events such as Southern HiBearNation in Melbourne, Bear Pride and Bear Essentials in Sydney, Bearstock in Adelaide, HiBearNation in St. Louis, Missouri, SF Bear Weekend, CBL's Bear Hunt, Bear Pride in Chicago, Atlanta Bear Pride, Texas Bear Round Up (TBRU) in Dallas, Orlando Bear Bash, and Bear Week in Provincetown (since 2001), drawing regional, national and international visitors. Many LGBT events attract a significant bear following, such as Southern Decadence in New Orleans.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: "Sociology of the Urban Gay Bear", written by Les K. Wright, was the first article to appear in print, in "Drummer" magazine, edited by Jack Fritscher. Fritscher was the founding editor of San Francisco's "California Action Guide" (1982). With "California Action Guide", Fritscher became the first editor to publish the word "bear" (with the gay culture meaning) on a magazine cover (November 1982). As well, with producer Mark Hemry in 1984, Fritscher co-founded the pioneering Palm Drive Video featuring homomasculine entertainment. Palm Drive Video expanded in 1996 to Palm Drive Publishing, San Francisco. For Palm Drive, Fritscher wrote, cast, and directed more than 150 video features. His work includes documentary footage of the first bear contest (Pilsner Inn, February 1987). A bear contest is a feature at many bear events, a sort of masculine beauty pageant awarding titles and sashes (often made of leather) to winners. This footage is no longer for sale, as Fritscher declined to shift to DVD format and shut down the video company.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: One example of a bear contest was International Mr. Bear, formerly held each February at the International Bear Rendezvous in San Francisco. It attracted contestants, often with local titles, from all over the world. The first International Mr. Bear was held in 1992, and the last was held in 2011. The contest included Bear, Daddy, Cub, and Grizzly titles with the contestant who received the highest score winning the bear title, regardless of what type he was. Example: "Mr. Washington, D.C. Bear, 2006". Gay "leather-bears" have competed in leather contests, and "muscle-bears" are another subculture noted by their muscular body mass.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The International Bear Brotherhood Flag is the pride flag of the bear community. Craig Byrnes created this flag in 1995.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The Bear History Project, founded by Les L. Wright in 1995, documented the emergence and early evolution of bear identity and bear community. It became the source material for much of The Bear Book (1999) and The Bear Book II (2001). Publication of The Bear Book led to the Library of Congress adding "bear" as a category. The Bear History Project is archived in the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University. It continues to be added to.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The bear community has spread all over the world, with bear clubs in many countries. Bear clubs often serve as social and sexual networks for their members, who can contribute to their local gay communities through fund-raising and other functions. Bear events have become very common, to include smaller-sized cities and many rural areas. Most gay oriented campgrounds now include some type of bear-related event during their operating season.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The bear community constitutes a specialty niche in the commercial market. It offers T-shirts and other accessories as well as calendars and porn movies and magazines featuring bear icons, e.g., Jack Radcliffe. Catalina Video has a bear-themed line, the "Furry Features Series". Other adult studios which feature bear-type men are "Bear Magazine", "100% BEEF Magazine", BearFilms, Bear, Butch Bear, Raging Stallion, and Titan Media. There are also social media websites and smartphone apps that market to men of the bear community.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: As the bear community has matured, so has its music and literature, as well as other (non-pornographic) arts, media, and culture. Examples include Bearapalooza, a traveling bear music festival; Bear Bones Books, an imprint of LGBTQ publisher Lethe Press, which markets fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles written by and for bears; BearRadio.net, which streams bear and LGBT music and bear-themed podcast shows. "Bear Icons, the first bear-themed art exhibit (1999-2002), toured to Boston, Provincetown, New York City, and Washington, DC. The larger organized bear runs often host a "bear market" area where artisans, musicians, and others offer items for sale.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: As more gay men have identified themselves as bears, more bars, especially leather or western bars, have become bear-friendly. Some bars cater specifically to bear patrons.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: Jack Fritscher notes that bears celebrate "secondary sexual characteristics of the male: facial hair, body hair, proportional size, baldness." Since the late 2000s, cisgender women and transgender men with similar characteristics who identify as bears have begun to be recognized in the culture.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: Over the years, bear culture has subdivided itself. Many claim discrimination has increased within the bear community, as some men who self-identify as "bears" or "musclebears" do not welcome higher-bodyfat men (see chub) at their events. A common criticism of the bear community is that some self-described bears tend to exclude men who do not fit their standards of a "real bear". Fat (or lack of it) is seen by some as a political issue, some of whom see their overweight condition as a form of self-acceptance. Some also note a lack of racial diversity in the bear community, generally perceiving hirsuteness to be a standard of physical attractiveness that genetically favors white men aesthetically, socially and sexually among bears.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The December 2007 issue of "Instinct" magazine featured an article by writer and director Kevin Smith on its "The Last Word" page. Smith wrote about his gay brother Don and about his (Kevin's) being on the cover of "A Bear's Life" magazine and the related cover story, and his feelings about being a "bear icon" in the gay community. Smith later made a cameo appearance in the 2012 film "", playing himself in a brief conversation with a main character who works in the film industry.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: In the 2015 Pixar movie "Inside Out", the character Disgust says there are no bears in San Francisco. The character Anger disagrees, saying, "I saw a really hairy guy. He looked like a bear."


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley consists of four works of art along Ringold Alley honoring leather culture; it opened in 2017. One of the works of art is metal bootprints along the curb which honor 28 people (including T. Michael "Lurch" Sutton, biker and co-founder of the Bears of San Francisco) who were an important part of the leather communities of San Francisco.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: A variety of media has been established specifically to cater to bears. The Internet comic strip "Bear with Me" centers around the life of the bear Andy McCubbin, a rich entrepreneur and heir to the Howell/McCubbin fortune, and his friends and family. A vast majority of the other characters are also bears. The comics are created by Tim Vanderburg under the pen name Bruin. In Tim Barela's comic strip, "Leonard & Larry", a majority of the male characters are bearded men, some self-identified as bears, most not. Another webcomic, "Blur the Lines", frequently features bearish men and the two main characters, Rick and Drew, associate with the bear community; the former identifies as a chub, whereas the latter identifies as a chaser/cub. (See below for term definitions.) The events and characters depicted in the strip are inspired by the life of the author and artist, Bob Kusiak, who is also involved to some extent with the bear community.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: Films depicting the bear community include "BearCity", "" and "Cachorro", and the comedy web series "Where the Bears Are", "BULK: The Series", and "Skeleton Crew".


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: In 2012, Bear World Magazine was first published online in monthly PDF format. The magazine was the first lifestyle magazine for the bear community, offering an alternative from the beefcake and pornographic magazines in print. Over the years, Bear World Magazine has grown into the world's leading bear lifestyle magazine having transformed into a popular news and magazine website.


title: Bear (gay culture)

text: In 2013, gay singer-songwriter Tom Goss released his song "Bears", singing about the bear community's open-mindedness and size-inclusivity.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Edith Norma Shearer (August 11, 1902June 12, 1983) was a Canadian-American actress who was active on film from 1919 through 1942. Shearer often played spunky, sexually liberated ingénues. She appeared in adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, and William Shakespeare, and was the first five-time Academy Award acting nominee, winning Best Actress for "The Divorcee" (1930).


title: Norma Shearer

text: Reviewing Shearer's work, Mick LaSalle called her "the exemplar of sophisticated 1930s womanhood ... exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards". He described her as a feminist pioneer, "the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen".


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer was of Scottish, English, and Irish descent. Her childhood was spent in Montreal, where she was educated at Montreal High School for Girls and Westmount High School. Her life was one of privilege, due to the success of her father's construction business. However, the marriage between her parents was unhappy. Andrew Shearer was prone to manic depression and "moved like a shadow or a ghost around the house", while her mother Edith Fisher Shearer was attractive, flamboyant, and stylish. Young Norma was interested in music, as well, but after seeing a vaudeville show for her ninth birthday, she announced her intention to become an actress. Edith offered support, but as Shearer entered adolescence, she became secretly fearful that her daughter's physical flaws would jeopardize her chances. Shearer herself "had no illusions about the image I saw in the mirror". She acknowledged her "dumpy figure, with shoulders too broad, legs too sturdy, hands too blunt", and was also acutely aware of her small eyes that appeared crossed due to a squint in her right eye. By her own admission, though, she was "ferociously ambitious, even as a young girl", and planned to overcome her deficiencies through careful camouflage, sheer determination, and charm.


title: Norma Shearer

text: The childhood and adolescence that Shearer once described as "a pleasant dream" ended in 1918, when her father's company collapsed, and her older sister, Athole, suffered her first serious mental breakdown. Forced to move into a small, dreary house in a "modest" Montreal suburb, Shearer found her determined attitude was only strengthened by the sudden plunge into poverty: "At an early age, I formed a philosophy about failure. Perhaps an endeavor, like my father's business, could fail, but that didn't mean Father had failed."


title: Norma Shearer

text: Edith Shearer thought otherwise. Within weeks, she had left her husband and moved into a cheap boarding house with her two daughters. A few months later, encouraged by her brother, who believed his niece should try her luck in "the picture business", then operating largely on the East Coast, Edith sold her daughter's piano and bought three train tickets for New York City. Also in her pocket was a letter of introduction for Norma, acquired from a local theatre owner, to Florenz Ziegfeld, who was currently preparing a new season of his famous "Ziegfeld Follies".


title: Norma Shearer

text: In January 1920, the three Shearer women arrived in New York, each of them dressed up for the occasion. "I had my hair in little curls", Shearer remembered, "and I felt very ambitious and proud." Her heart sank, however, when she saw their rented apartment: "There was one double bed, a cot with no mattress and a stove with one gas jet. The communal bathroom was at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway. Athole and I took turns sleeping with mother in the bed, but sleep was impossible anyway—the elevated trains rattled right past our window every few minutes."


title: Norma Shearer

text: The introduction to Ziegfeld proved equally disastrous. He turned Shearer down flat, reportedly calling her a "dog", and criticized her crossed eyes and stubby legs. She continued doing the rounds with her determination undimmed: "I learned that Universal Pictures was looking for eight pretty girls to serve as extras. Athole and I showed up and found 50 girls ahead of us. An assistant casting director walked up and down looking us over. He passed up the first three and picked the fourth. The fifth and sixth were unattractive, but the seventh would do, and so on, down the line until seven had been selected—and he was still some ten feet ahead of us. I did some quick thinking. I coughed loudly, and when the man looked in the direction of the cough, I stood on my tiptoes and smiled right at him. Recognizing the awkward ruse to which I'd resorted, he laughed openly and walked over to me and said, 'You win, Sis. You're Number Eight.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Other extra parts followed, including one in "Way Down East", directed by D. W. Griffith. Taking advantage of a break in filming and standing shrewdly near a powerful arc light, Shearer introduced herself to Griffith and began to confide her hopes for stardom. "The Master looked down at me, studied my upturned face in the glare of the arc, and shook his eagle head. Eyes no good, he said. A cast in one and far too blue; blue eyes always looked blank in close-up. You'll never make it, he declared, and turned solemnly away."


title: Norma Shearer

text: Still undeterred, Shearer risked some of her savings on a consultation with Dr. William Bates, a pioneer in the treatment of strabismus. He wrote out a series of muscle-strengthening exercises that after many years of daily practice would successfully conceal Shearer's cast for long periods of time on the screen. She spent hours in front of the mirror, exercising her eyes and striking poses that concealed or improved the physical flaws noted by Ziegfeld or Griffith. At night, she sat in the galleries of Broadway theatres, studying the entrances of Ina Claire, Lynn Fontanne, and Katharine Cornell.


title: Norma Shearer

text: In desperate need of money, Shearer resorted to some modeling work, which proved successful. On her modeling career, she commented: "I could smile at a cake of laundry soap as if it were dinner at the Ritz. I posed with a strand of imitation pearls. I posed in dust-cap and house dress with a famous mop, for dental paste and for soft drink, holding my mouth in a whistling pose until it all but froze that way." She became the new model for Kelly-Springfield Tires, was bestowed with the title "Miss Lotta Miles" and depicted seated inside the rim of a tire, smiling down at traffic from a large floodlit billboard.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Finally, a year after her arrival in New York, she received a break in film: fourth billing in a B-movie titled "The Stealers" (1920). In January 1923, Shearer received an offer from Louis B. Mayer Pictures, a studio in Northeast Los Angeles that was run by a small-time producer, Louis B. Mayer. Irving Thalberg had moved to Louis B. Mayer Pictures as vice president on February 15, 1923, but had already sent a telegram to Shearer's agent, inviting her to come to the studio. After three years of hardship, she found herself signing a contract. It called for $250 a week for six months, with options for renewal and a test for a leading role in a major film called "The Wanters".


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer left New York around February 17. Accompanied by her mother, she felt "dangerously sure of herself" as her train neared Los Angeles. When she was not welcomed, even an hour after her arrival, she realized that there would be no star treatment from her new studio. Dispirited, she allowed Edith to hail a taxi.


title: Norma Shearer

text: The next morning, Shearer went to the Mayer Company on Mission Road to meet with Thalberg. Shearer was momentarily thrown by their confused introduction, but soon found herself "impressed by his air of dispassionate strength, his calm self-possession and the almost black, impenetrable eyes set in a pale olive face".


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer was less impressed, however, with her first screen test: "The custom then was to use flat lighting, to throw a great deal of light from all directions, in order to kill all shadows that might be caused by wrinkles or blemishes. But the strong lights placed on either side of my face made my blue eyes look almost white, and by nearly eliminating my nose, made me seem cross-eyed. The result was hideous."


title: Norma Shearer

text: The day after the test had been screened for Mayer and Thalberg, cameraman Ernest Palmer found Shearer frantic and trembling in the hallway. Speaking with her, he was struck by her "fierce, almost raging disappointment", and after viewing the test himself, agreed that she had been "poorly handled". Under Palmer's own supervision, a second test was made and judged a success by the studio brass. The lead in "The Wanters" seemed hers, until the film's director objected, finding her "unphotogenic". Again, Shearer was to be disappointed, relegated to a minor role.


title: Norma Shearer

text: She accepted her next role in "Pleasure Mad", knowing "it was well understood that if I didn't deliver in this picture, I was through". After only a few days of shooting, things were not looking good. Shearer was struggling. Finally, the film's director complained to Mayer that he could get nothing out of the young actress, and when summoned to Mayer's office, she fully expected the axe to fall: "But to my surprise, Mr. Mayer's manner was paternal. 'There seems to be a problem,' he said, 'tell me about it.' I told him that the director had shouted at me and frightened me. Nobody had warned me that Mayer was a better actor than any of us, and I was unprepared for what happened next. He staged an alarming outburst, screaming at me, calling me a fool and a coward, accusing me of throwing away my career because I couldn't get on with a director. It worked. I became tearful, but obstinate. 'I'll show you!' I said to him. 'You'll see!' Delighted, Mayer resumed the paternal act. 'That's what I wanted to hear', he said, smiling." Returning to the set, Shearer plunged into an emotional scene. "I took that scene lock, stock, and barrel, fur, fins and feathers", she remembered, earning her the respect of her director and her studio. As a reward, Thalberg cast her in six films in eight months.


title: Norma Shearer

text: The apprenticeship served Shearer well. On April 26, 1924, Louis B. Mayer Pictures was merged with Metro Pictures and the Samuel Goldwyn Company to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Shearer was cast with Lon Chaney and John Gilbert in the studio's first official production, "He Who Gets Slapped". The film was a conspicuous success and contributed to the meteoric rise of the new company, and to Shearer's visibility. By late 1925, she was carrying her own films, and was one of MGM's biggest attractions, a "bona fide" star. She signed a new contract; it paid $1,000 a week and would rise to $5,000 over the next five years. She bought a house for herself and Edith at 2004 Vine Street, which was located under the Hollywoodland sign.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Having become a star, Shearer's new challenge was to remain one. Many other talented actresses were at the studio, and she realized she would have to fight hard to stay ahead of the pack. Seeing that sensational newcomer Greta Garbo was one of a kind, she went to Thalberg and "demanded recognition as one of another kind". It was just one of the many visits she paid to his office, always to plead for better material, better parts. Thalberg would listen patiently, then invariably advise her to keep toeing the line, that MGM knew best, and that the movies she complained about had made her a popular actress. Occasionally, Shearer would burst into tears, but this seemed to make "no more impression than rain on a raincoat".


title: Norma Shearer

text: Privately, Thalberg was very impressed by Shearer. In a story conference, when her name was suggested to him for the part of a girl threatened with rape, Thalberg shook his head, and, with a wry smile, he said, "She looks too well able to take care of herself."


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer, for her part, found herself increasingly attracted to her boss. "Something was understood between us, an indefinite feeling that neither of us could analyze." Thalberg's appeal was not primarily sexual. What attracted Shearer was his commanding presence and steely grace, the impression he gave that wherever he sat was always the head of the table. In spite of his youth – he was only 26 – Thalberg became a father figure to the 23-year-old actress.


title: Norma Shearer

text: At the end of a working day in July 1925, Shearer received a phone call from Thalberg's secretary, asking if she would like to accompany Thalberg to the premiere of Chaplin's "The Gold Rush". That night, they made their first appearance as a couple. A few weeks later, Shearer went to Montreal to visit her father. While there, she had a reunion with an old school friend, who remembered: "At the end of lunch, over coffee, Norma leant in across the table. 'I'm madly in love', she whispered. 'Who with?' I asked. 'With Irving Thalberg', she replied, smiling. I asked how Thalberg felt. 'I hope to marry him', Norma said, and then, with the flash of the assurance I remembered so well, 'I believe I will.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Over the next two years, both Shearer and Irving saw other people. Louise Brooks remembered: "I held a dinner party sometime in 1926. All the place cards at the dinner table were books. In front of Thalberg's place was Dreiser's "Genius", and in front of Norma's place, I put "The Difficulty of Getting Married". It was so funny because Irving walked right in and saw "Genius", and sat right down, but Norma kept walking around. She wouldn't sit down in front of "The Difficulty of Getting Married" – no way!"


title: Norma Shearer

text: By 1927, Shearer had made a total of 13 silent films for MGM. Each had been produced for under $200,000, and had, without fail, been a substantial box-office hit, often making a $200,000+ profit for the studio. She was rewarded for this consistent success by being cast in Ernst Lubitsch's "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg", her first prestige production, with a budget over $1,000,000. While she was finishing "The Student Prince", Shearer received a call summoning her to Thalberg's office. She entered to find Thalberg sitting at his desk before a tray of diamond engagement rings. He granted her the option to choose her own ring; she picked out the biggest. After weeks of rumors, provoked by wearing the ring, it was announced in August 1927 that they were to wed. On September 29, 1927, they were married in the Hollywood wedding of the year. Shearer had two children with Thalberg – Irving Thalberg, Jr. (1930–1987), and Katherine (1935–2006). Before they were married, Shearer converted to Judaism so she could marry Thalberg.


title: Norma Shearer

text: One week after the marriage, "The Jazz Singer" was released. The first feature-length motion picture with sound, it effectively changed the cinematic landscape overnight and signaled the end of the silent motion-picture era. It also spelled the end of many silent careers, and Shearer was determined hers would not be one of them. Her brother, Douglas Shearer, was instrumental in the development of sound at MGM, and every care was taken to prepare her for the microphone.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Her first talkie, "The Trial of Mary Dugan" (1929), turned out to be a tremendous success. Shearer's "medium-pitched, fluent, flexible Canadian accent, not quite American, but not at all foreign", was critically applauded, and thereafter widely imitated by other actresses, nervous about succeeding in talkies. Despite the popularity of her subsequent early talking films, "The Last of Mrs. Cheyney" and "Their Own Desire" (both 1929), Shearer feared the public would soon tire of her "good girl" image, and took the advice of friend and co-star Ramón Novarro to visit an unknown photographer named George Hurrell. There, she took a series of sensual portraits that convinced her husband that she could play the lead in MGM's racy new film, "The Divorcee" (1930).


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in "The Divorcee", and a series of highly successful pre-Code films followed, including "Let Us Be Gay" (1930), "Strangers May Kiss" (1931), "A Free Soul" (1931) with Leslie Howard and Clark Gable, "Private Lives" (1931), and "Strange Interlude" (1932). All of these were box-office hits, placing Shearer in competition with Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow as MGM's top actress through the remainder of the decade.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer's marriage to Thalberg gave her a degree of power in Hollywood that was resented by rivals such as Crawford, who complained that Shearer would always be offered the best roles and best conditions: "How can I compete with Norma when she's sleeping with the boss?"


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer's pre-Code films included period dramas and theatrical adaptations. "Smilin' Through" (1932), which co-starred Fredric March, was one of the most successful films of the period. An adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's four-hour experimental "Strange Interlude" (1932), which also starred Clark Gable, was a disappointing adaptation of O'Neill, but a showcase for Shearer, thus a major hit.


title: Norma Shearer

text: The enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 forced Shearer to drop her celebrated "free soul" image, and move exclusively into period dramas and "prestige" pictures. Of these, "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" (1934) proved her most successful at the box office, making a profit of $668,000, in part because the film contained elements that slipped by the newly instituted Production Code. In that film, she played a role made famous by Katharine Cornell. Shearer also took on another play popularized by Cornell in "Romeo and Juliet" (1936) (her first film of the 1930s to lose money), and "Marie Antoinette" (1938) (a budget of almost $2,500,000 was too great for the studio to expect a profit), though their elaborate sets and costumes helped make the films immensely popular with audiences.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress on six occasions, winning only for "The Divorcee" in 1930. She was nominated the same year for "Their Own Desire", for "A Free Soul" in 1931, "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" in 1934, "Romeo and Juliet" in 1936, and "Marie Antoinette" in 1938. Marion Davies later recalled that Shearer came to a party at San Simeon in her Marie Antoinette costume; Davies said she was not about to remove the door so Shearer could enter, so Norma made her grand entrance through wider doors leading from another room. Four chairs were arranged so she could sit at the table in her voluminous skirts.


title: Norma Shearer

text: George Cukor, who directed Shearer in "Romeo and Juliet", offered this character sketch of the actress:


title: Norma Shearer

text: In 1939, she attempted an unusual role in the dark comedy "Idiot's Delight", adapted from the 1936 Robert E. Sherwood play. It was the last of Shearer's three films with Clark Gable, after "A Free Soul" (1931) and "Strange Interlude" (1932). "The Women" (1939) followed, with an entirely female cast of more than 130 speaking roles.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer was also one of the many actresses considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With The Wind" (1939). However, she expressed no interest, joking, "Scarlett is a thankless role. The one I'd really like to play is Rhett!"


title: Norma Shearer

text: Critics praised the suspenseful atmosphere in her next film, "Escape" (1940), where she played the lover of a Nazi general who helps an American free his mother from a concentration camp. With increasing interest in the war in Europe, the film performed well at the box office, but Shearer passed up roles in highly successful films "Now, Voyager" and "Mrs. Miniver", to star in "We Were Dancing" and "Her Cardboard Lover" (1942), which both failed at the box office. In 1942, Shearer unofficially retired from acting.


title: Norma Shearer

text: After Thalberg's unexpected death on September 14, 1936, Shearer retained a lawyer to ensure that Thalberg's percentages of films on which he had worked were still paid to his estate, which was contested by MGM. When she took the story to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, the studio was forced to give in and granted all the profits from MGM movies made and released from 1924 to 1938, meaning the estate eventually received over $1.5 million in percentage payments. Nevertheless, Shearer's contract was renewed for six films at $150,000 each. During this time, she embarked on a brief romance with the younger actor James Stewart, and then with the married actor George Raft. Raft (who had separated from his wife years earlier, soon after they married) stated publicly that he wanted to marry Shearer. However, his wife's refusal to allow a divorce and the disapproval of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer caused Shearer to end the affair.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Following her retirement in 1942, she married Martin Arrougé (March 23, 1914 – August 8, 1999), a former ski instructor 11 years her junior. Despite often attending public events in her later life, Shearer gradually withdrew from the Hollywood social scene. In 1960, her secretary stated: "Miss Shearer does not want any publicity. She doesn't talk to anyone. But I can tell you that she has refused many requests to appear in motion pictures and TV shows." Arrougé and Shearer remained married until her death.


title: Norma Shearer

text: On June 12, 1983, Shearer died of bronchial pneumonia at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, where she had been living since 1980.


title: Norma Shearer

text: She is entombed in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in a crypt marked Norma Arrouge, along with her first husband, Irving Thalberg.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer's fame declined after her retirement in 1942. She was rediscovered in the late 1950s, when her films were sold to television, and in the 1970s, when her films enjoyed theatrical revivals. By the time of her death in 1983, she was best known for her "noble" roles in "Marie Antoinette" and "The Women".


title: Norma Shearer

text: A Shearer revival began in 1988, when Turner Network Television began broadcasting the entire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film library. In 1994, Turner Classic Movies began showcasing her films, most of which had not been seen since the reconstitution of the Production Code in 1934. Shearer's work was seen anew, and the critical focus shifted from her "noble" roles to her pre-Code roles.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer's work gained more attention in the 1990s through the publication of a series of books. The first was a biography by Gavin Lambert. Next came "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" by Mick LaSalle, film critic at the "San Francisco Chronicle". Mark A. Vieira published three books on subjects closely related to Shearer: a biography of her husband, producer Irving Thalberg; and two biographies of photographer George Hurrell. Shearer was noted not only for the control she exercised over her work, but also for her patronage of Hurrell and Adrian, and for discovering actress Janet Leigh and actor-producer Robert Evans.


title: Norma Shearer

text: For her contribution to the motion-picture industry, Shearer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6636 Hollywood Boulevard. On June 30, 2008, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series to honour Norma Shearer, along with others for Raymond Burr, Marie Dressler, and Chief Dan George.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer and Thalberg are reportedly the models for Stella and Miles, the hosts of the Hollywood party in the short story "Crazy Sunday" (1932) by F. Scott Fitzgerald.


title: Norma Shearer

text: Most of Shearer's MGM films are broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, and many of them are also available on DVD from Warner Home Video. In 2008, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. In 2015, a number of Shearer films became available in high-definition format, authored by Warner Home Video, in most cases, from the nitrate camera negatives: "A Free Soul", "Romeo and Juliet", "Marie Antoinette", and "The Women".


title: Norma Shearer

text: Shearer was the first person to receive five Academy Award nominations for acting. Her brother Douglas Shearer and she are the first Oscar-winning siblings.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: The City of Paris is divided into twenty "arrondissements municipaux", administrative districts, more simply referred to as arrondissements (). These are not to be confused with departmental arrondissements, which subdivide the larger French departments.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: The number of the arrondissement is indicated by the last two digits in most Parisian postal codes (75001 up to 75020). In addition to their number, each arrondissement also has a name, often for a local monument. For example, the 5th arrondissement is also called "Panthéon" in reference to the eponymous building. The first four arrondissements have a shared administration, called Paris Centre.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: The twenty arrondissements are arranged in the form of a clockwise spiral (often likened to a snail shell), starting from the middle of the city, with the first on the Right Bank (north bank) of the Seine.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: In French, notably on street signs, the number is often given in Roman numerals. For example, the Eiffel Tower belongs to the "VII arrondissement" while Gare de l'Est is in the "X arrondissement". In daily speech, people use only the ordinal number corresponding to the arrondissement, e.g. "Elle habite dans le sixième", "She lives in the 6th (arrondissement)".


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: Due to suburbanization, the population of Paris has gradually shifted outward, with only two arrondissements still growing.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: Uniquely among French cities, Paris is both a municipality ("commune") and a department ("département"). Under the PLM Law ("Loi PLM") of 1982, which redefined the governance of Paris, Lyon, and Marseille (hence the PLM acronym), there are both a city council called the Council of Paris and 20 arrondissement councils in Paris. The PLM Law also set limits to the prerogatives of the mayor of Paris, who has to deal with the powers granted to the prefect of police on security issues.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: The 20 arrondissement councils (conseils d'arrondissement) are similar in operation to a municipal council (conseil municipal) but with very few powers. Its members are elected at municipal elections in the same way as in municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants. Each arrondissement council is made up of 2/3 members elected specifically as arrondissement councillors, while Council of Paris members representing the arrondissement also sit "ex officio" on their local arrondissement council. For example, the council of the 19th arrondissement has 42 members, of which 28 are "conseillers d'arrondissement" who only sit on the arrondissement council, while 14 are "conseillers de Paris" who also sit on the city council. At its first meeting after the elections, each arrondissement council elects its mayor.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: Each arrondissement is subdivided administratively into four "quartiers". Paris thus has 80 "quartiers administratifs", each containing a police station. For a table giving the names of the eighty "quartiers", see Quarters of Paris.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: On 11 October 1795, Paris was divided into twelve arrondissements. They were numbered from west to east, with the numbers 1–9 situated on the Right Bank of the Seine and the numbers 10–12 on the Left Bank. Each arrondissement was subdivided into four "quartiers", which corresponded to the 48 original districts created in 1790.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: Emperor Napoleon III and the Prefect of the Seine Baron Haussmann developed a plan to incorporate several of the surrounding communes into the Paris jurisdiction in the late 1850s. Parliament passed the necessary legislation in 1859, and the expansion took effect when the law was promulgated on 3 November 1859 (though city taxes were not extended to the new neighborhoods until 1 July 1860). The previous twelve arrondissements were done away with, and twenty new arrondissements were created. In historical records, when it is necessary to distinguish between the two systems, the original arrondissements are indicated by adding the term "ancienne" ("former" or "old"), for example, "2ème ancienne" or "7ème anc".


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: Before the reorganization, non-married couples who lived together were said to have "married at the town hall of the 13th arrondissement" (""se marier à la mairie du 13e arrondissement""), as a jocular reference to there being no 13th. When Haussmann released his plan for the new boundaries and numbering system, residents of Passy objected because it placed them in the new 13th arrondissement. The mayor of Passy, Jean-Frédéric Possoz, devised the idea of a numbering the arrondissements in a spiral pattern beginning on the Right Bank, which put Passy in the 16th. This system turned the Louvre area, which contained the Tuileries Palace and other imperial palaces, into the 1st. The Gobelins area would become the 13th instead.


title: Arrondissements of Paris

text: In early 2016, mayor Anne Hidalgo proposed that the first four arrondissements should have their administrations merged, and the Council of Paris approved this on 15 February. The four have a combined population of about 100,000, with the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 3rd arrondissements in that order being the four smallest in Paris. The matter was taken up in the National Assembly in August 2016, and approved in February 2017. In a postal referendum from 8 to 14 October 2018, the town hall of the 3rd arrondissement was chosen to house the new shared administration, and the name "Paris Centre" was chosen for the sector. The reform was implemented on 29 June 2020, the day after the second round of the 2020 Paris municipal election, with the four arrondissements now sharing a mayor and a district council. The four arrondissements continue to exist, but are no longer used as administrative and electoral sectors.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward, Inc. is an American video game developer. They developed the video game "Call of Duty", along with seven other installments in the "Call of Duty" series. Vince Zampella, Grant Collier, and Jason West established Infinity Ward in 2002 after working at 2015, Inc. previously. All of the 22 original team members of Infinity Ward came from the team that had worked on "" while at 2015, Inc. Activision helped fund Infinity Ward in its early days, buying up 30 percent of the company. The studio's first game, World War II shooter "Call of Duty", was released on the PC in 2003. The day after the game was released, Activision bought the rest of Infinity Ward, signing employees to long-term contracts. Infinity Ward went on to make "Call of Duty 2", "", "", "", "", "", the ,


title: Infinity Ward

text: Co-founder Collier left the company in early 2009 to join parent company Activision. In 2010, West and Zampella were fired by Activision for "breaches of contract and insubordination", they soon founded a game studio called Respawn Entertainment. On May 3, 2014, Neversoft was merged into Infinity Ward.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward was founded as an Activision division by Grant Collier, Jason West, and Vince Zampella in 2002. The studio was formed by several members of 2015 Games, LLC., the studio that developed the successful "" for Electronic Arts (EA) in 2002. Dissatisfied with the current contract they had under EA, Collier, West, and Zampella engaged with Activision to help establish Infinity Ward, which became one of the primary studios within Activision for the competing "Call of Duty" series. Initially, Activision provided Infinity Ward for 30% stake in the company to start development on the first game "Call of Duty", acquiring full ownership after the title was successfully launched in 2003. During this period, the studio was about 25 employees including many who followed Collier, West, and Zampella from 2015. Activision allowed Infinity Ward a great deal of freedom in how it developed its titles.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Shortly after this release, Microsoft contacted Activision to seek a "Call of Duty" title as a launch title for the upcoming Xbox 360 console. Infinity Ward agreed to prepare "Call of Duty 2" for release in the last quarter of 2005. Collier said the request would help them lose the stigma of being only a personal computer developer, and so to make sure the console version was on parity, they tripled their staff to about 75 employees. Much of the focus of Infinity Ward's development was improving its game engine to include realistic special effects, such as smoke grenades to hinder sight, or bullets piercing through weak materials. "Call of Duty 2" was a major success, having an 85% attach rate to new Xbox 360 console sales, and selling 1.4 million units its first year. At this point, Activision brought in Treyarch, one of their internal studios, to help develop additional "Call of Duty" games, with Infinity Ward spending the time and effort to improve the game's engine for one game, and Treyarch using the updated engine to create a new title. Treyarch released the next sequel "Call of Duty 3" while Infinity Ward itself developed "", which instead of taking place during World War II, was set in a contemporary period with a fictional conflict between superpowers. At the time of "Modern Warfare"s release, Infinity Ward had more than 100 employees.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Following the critical and financially successful release of "" in 2007, Jason West (president, co-CCO, and CTO) and Vince Zampella (CEO) began contract negotiations with Activision. They promised to deliver "" in 2009, but in exchange asked for extremely large bonuses and creative control of the "Call of Duty" series. Activision agreed, but added a clause to the contract that should they be fired, the rights to "Call of Duty" would fall back to Activision.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Following the execution of the contract in 2008, Activision began seeking ways to find reason to fire West and Zampella to trigger the new clause. This in turn led to West and Zampella look to means to make Infinity Ward a studio outside of Activision's control. Events came to a head in February 2010 when Activision hired a lawfirm to investigate Infinity Ward. On March 1, 2010, West and Zampella were released by Activision for "insubordination", forfeiting the bonuses they had negotiated. The pair went on to form Respawn Entertainment in April 2010 as an independent studio, through working closely with EA on a yet-announced project. Several dozen of Infinity Ward's employees resigned in the following months, many taking up positions at Respawn.


title: Infinity Ward

text: West and Zampella had been replaced on an interim basis by Activision CTO Steve Pearce and head of production Steve Ackrich. By November 2010, Activision had installed new management at Infinity Ward, and Vivendi chairman and CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy stated that Infinity Ward "got over" their problems and are fully reconstructed and that Activision is very happy with the result. The executive went on to say that there will be three studios working on the "Call of Duty" franchise including the newly formed studio Sledgehammer Games.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Several lawsuits followed in the wake of West and Zampella's departure. The pair themselves initially filed suit against Activision shortly after their release to reclaim "substantial royalty payments" that Activision failed to pay them in the weeks leading up to their firing, estimated to be ; this figure eventually rose to over by May 2012, based on Activision's SEC filings. Activision countersued the pair in April 2010, calling their actions to fire them justified and asserting the two were "self-serving schemers". Activision amended its suit in December 2010 to include EA as a defendant, stating that their competitor had worked with West and Zampella to "destabilize, disrupt and ... destroy Infinity Ward", and sought in damages. Separately, several former and current members of Infinity Ward under the name "Infinity Ward Employee Group" (IWEG) sued Activision for between for unpaid bonuses for work on "Modern Warfare 2" and an additional in punitive damages. Ultimately by May 2012, Activision had settled with the IWEG for , while private settlements were separately reached between Activision and EA, and between Activision, West and Zampella.


title: Infinity Ward

text: On March 27, 2012, Robert Bowling issued the following statement on his Twitter account: "Today, I resign from my position as Creative Strategist of Call of Duty, as a lead of Infinity Ward, and as an employee of Activision". In response to this, Activision issued the following statement, "We sincerely thank Robert for his many years of service. He's been a trusted and valued member of the Infinity Ward team. We wish him all the best on his decision to pursue future opportunities". Bowling allegedly left because he was unhappy with the slow evolution of the game, as he responded with "Too much 'pew pew' not enough new new" to a question on the subject.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Signs of disagreement between Bowling and Infinity Ward arose in a live interview with Machinima when he stated the following: "I feel like we are in a fucking era where everyone is so focused on subscriber numbers and all that stuff that we need to get back to what I feel like we did so much better in the old days of just plain good will, like stuff like the LAN patch, yeah it is lower priority but let's get it out the fucking door. Let's just do it." This could be a contributing factor to his resignation. Another factor could have been from the amount of harsh criticism Bowling received on Twitter from the fans and players.


title: Infinity Ward

text: In May 2014, Neversoft was merged with Infinity Ward to form a single 'super-studio' after both collaborated on the development of "". Neversoft studio head Joel Jewett and studio director Scott Pease retired shortly after the completion of the merger.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward presently operates in four locations – California, Texas, Poland, and Mexico. The studio in Krakow, Poland opened in December 2017. The studio serves as a research and development center, and is headed by principal rendering engineer Michal Drobot. The Poland studio assisted in rebuilding the IW engine for the 2019 reboot of and "". In October 2021, Infinity Ward opened a new studio in Austin, Texas.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward's first title, "Call of Duty", won 90 Game of the Year awards and 50 Editor's Choice Awards. It also continues to be among the highest-rated games, according to GameRankings. "" enjoyed massive commercial and critical success, selling over 13 million copies from its release in November 2007 through May 2009.


title: Infinity Ward

text: In 2010, Infinity Ward was ranked third by Develop 100 only running up to developer Nintendo and Bungie for the top 100 developers based on the sales of their games in the UK.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward's sequel to "", "", earned over $550 million in sales in its first five days on the market, with $310 million of those sales made in the first 24 hours after the game's release.


title: Infinity Ward

text: The sequel to "Modern Warfare 2", "", sold 6.5 million copies in the US and UK alone and grossed $400 million within 24 hours of going on sale.


title: Infinity Ward

text: Infinity Ward used an enhanced version of the id Tech 3 engine from Quake III Arena for the first "Call of Duty" in 2003. For "Call of Duty 2", Infinity Ward heavily modified the engine, featuring more powerful visuals and DirectX 9 support, and was known internally as the "IW" game engine. The version that was used for "Call of Duty 2" was designated as IW 2.0. "" runs on a highly upgraded version of the engine from "Call of Duty 2" dubbed "IW 3.0", with features that include true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth of field. The "Call of Duty: Black Ops" sub-series and the James Bond video game "" were developed by Treyarch using modified versions of Infinity Ward's engine.


title: Infinity Ward

text: "", uses an upgraded engine dubbed "IW 4.0", which is a generation more advanced than the engine used in "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare". "" uses IW 5.0 (MW3 Engine), an improved version of the IW 4.0 engine. Improvements on the engine allow better streaming technology which allows larger regions for the game while running at a minimum of 60 frames per second, improvements to the audio of the engine have also been made.


title: Infinity Ward

text: "" features an upgraded next-generation version of the IW 5.0 seen in "". IW 6.0 is compatible with next-gen systems such as Xbox One and PlayStation 4 so polygon counts, texture detail and overall graphical fidelity has been increased. IW 6.0 is also compatible with Microsoft Windows, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox 360. The IW 6.0 engine features technology from Pixar, SubD, which increases the level of detail of models as one gets closer to them. Mark Rubin has said about the HDR lighting "We used to paint it in and cover up the cracks, but now it's all real-time". "Ghosts" uses Iris Adjust tech which allows the player to experience from a person's point of view how their eyes would react to changes in lighting conditions realistically. Other features include new animation systems, fluid dynamics, interactive smoke, displacement mapping and dynamic multiplayer maps. ""'s IW 7.0 features weightlessness system, game physics improvement, improved AI and improved non-player characters behaviors.


title: Infinity Ward

text: "" is developed on a highly upgraded version of the engine first used in 2019's "Modern Warfare". The engine is co-developed by Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games, and will be used in future installments of the series in a unified effort to ensure that every studio is working with the same tools.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov (; 9 October 195927 February 2015) was a Russian physicist and liberal politician. He was involved in the introduction of reforms into the Russian post-Soviet economy. In the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, he was the first governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (1991–1997). Later he worked in the government of Russia as Minister of Fuel and Energy (1997), Vice Premier of Russia and Security Council member from 1997 to 1998. In 1998, he founded the Young Russia movement. In 1998, he co-founded the coalition group Right Cause and in 1999, he co-formed Union of Right Forces, an electoral bloc and subsequently a political party. Nemtsov was also a member of the Congress of People's Deputies (1990), Federation Council (1993–97) and State Duma (1999–2003).


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: From 2000 until his death, he was an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. He criticized Putin's government as an increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic regime, highlighting widespread embezzlement and profiteering ahead of the Sochi Olympics, and Russian political interference and military involvement in Ukraine. After 2008, Nemtsov published in-depth reports detailing the corruption under Putin, which he connected directly with the President. As part of the same political struggle, Nemtsov was an active organizer of and participant in Dissenters' Marches, Strategy-31 civil actions and rallies "For Fair Elections".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was assassinated on 27 February 2015, beside his Ukrainian partner Anna Durytska, on a bridge near the Kremlin in Moscow, with four shots fired from the back. At the time of his assassination, he was in Moscow helping to organize a rally against the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the Russian financial crisis. At the same time, he was working on a report demonstrating that Russian troops were fighting alongside pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin had been denying, and was unpopular externally but also in Russia. In the weeks before his death, he expressed fear that Putin would have him killed. In late June 2017, five Chechnya-born men were found guilty by a jury in a Moscow court for agreeing to kill Nemtsov in exchange for 15 million rubles (US$253,000); neither the identity nor whereabouts of the person who hired them is officially known.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was born in Sochi in 1959 to Yefim Davidovich Nemtsov and Dina Yakovlevna Nemtsova (née Eidman). His mother, a physician, is Jewish.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was raised in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod. His parents divorced when he was five years old. In his autobiography, Nemtsov recounts that his Russian Orthodox paternal grandmother had him baptized as an infant, and that he became a practicing Orthodox Christian. He found out about his baptism many years later.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: From 1976 to 1981, Nemtsov studied physics at N. I. Lobachevsky State University in the city of Gorky, receiving a degree in 1981.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Aged 25 in 1985, he defended his dissertation for a PhD in Physics and Mathematics from the State University of Gorky. Until 1990, he worked as a research fellow at the Radiophysical Research Institute, and produced more than 60 academic publications related to quantum physics, thermodynamics and acoustics.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: He proposed a theoretical model for an acoustic laser and a novel design of antennas for space probes.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Nemtsov organized a protest movement in his hometown which effectively prevented construction of a nuclear-fired boiler plant in the region.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In 1989, Nemtsov unsuccessfully ran for the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies on a reform platform which for the time was quite radical, promoting ideas such as multiparty democracy and private enterprise.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In Russia's first free elections of 1990, he ran for the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic representing Gorky, later renamed Nizhny Novgorod. Nemtsov was elected, the only non-communist candidate. He defeated twelve others. Once in Parliament he joined the "Reform Coalition" and "Centre-Left" political groups.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In the Russian parliament, Nemtsov was on the legislative committee, working on agricultural reform and the liberalization of foreign trade. In this position he met Boris Yeltsin, who was impressed with his work. During the October 1991 attack on the government by Yeltsin opponents, Nemtsov vehemently supported the president and stood by him during the entire clash. After those events, Yeltsin rewarded Nemtsov's loyalty with the position of presidential representative in his home region of Nizhny Novgorod.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In November 1991, Yeltsin appointed him Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region. He was re-elected to that position by popular vote in December 1995. His tenure was marked by a wide-ranging, chaotic free market reform program nicknamed "Laboratory of Reform" for Nizhny Novgorod and resulted in significant economic growth for the region. Nemtsov's reforms won praise from former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who visited Nizhny Novgorod in 1993.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: From the very outset of Nemtsov's tenure as governor, according to Serge Schmemann, Nemtsov "embarked on a whirlwind campaign to transform the region, drawing enthusiastic support from a host of Western agencies." Although the province was closed to foreigners for years and "there wasn't even enough paper money for the privatization program", he was optimistic about Moscow's future and consequently "pushed ahead on his own, even issuing his own money—chits, to be eventually exchanged for rubles that came to be known as 'Nemtsovki.'" Nemtsov very openly looked to the West as a model for Russia's future. Nemtsov, Schmemann observed, adopted the westernized title "Governor" rather than the Russian "Head of Administration".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: After Nemtsov's death, Leonid Bershidsky recalled meeting him in 1992 during his tenure as governor. "A brilliant young physicist", recounted Bershidsky, "he was trying to practice liberal economics in a gloomy Soviet-era industrial city that had long been off-limits to foreigners." Bershidsky described his eloquence and demeanor as that of "a Hollywood movie politician transplanted into the Russian hinterland."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In December 1993, Nemtsov was elected to the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament. During the election campaign he was backed by Russia's Choice and Yabloko, which were then the principal liberal parties in the country.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In 1996, Nemtsov brought Yeltsin a petition with one million signatures against the first war in Chechnya, which he had signed himself.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In March 1997, Nemtsov was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, with special responsibility for reform of the energy sector. He was tasked with restructuring the monopolies and reforming the housing and social sectors. He became popular with the public and appeared favoured to become President of Russia in 2000. Boris Yeltsin introduced him to Bill Clinton as his chosen successor. In the summer of 1997, opinion polls gave Nemtsov over 50% support as a potential presidential candidate. His political career, however, suffered a blow in August 1998 following the crash of the Russian stock-market and the ensuing economic crisis.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov had worked in Moscow's "White House" for only a year and a half, although he stated he had some success. He ended the corrupt act of stashing budget funds in commercial banks. He also managed to introduce an anti-corruption law for all state purchases in the government. He also helped to end the illegal export of raw materials and made oil sales more transparent. "And, most importantly, while I was the minister responsible for fuel and energy, oil was at barely 10 US dollars per barrel, and still we managed to save Russia. Things were difficult, what with social unrest, strikes, the war in Chechnya, the 'default', and still – let me repeat – we did save Russia."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: As part of Chubais' economic team, Nemtsov was forced to resign his position of Deputy Prime Minister. After the dismissal of Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin in 1998, Nemtsov was reappointed Deputy Prime Minister, but resigned shortly afterwards when Yeltsin dissolved the government. According to "The Economist", Nemtsov, unlike many other top government figures, "emerged from the troubled 1990s with his reputation intact."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: As early as 1998, Nemtsov had a personal website on RuNet. Nemtsov.ru sought to provide information to its users that was not available elsewhere and also was one of the first attempts by a politician to establish two-way communication with an audience.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In August 1999, Nemtsov became one of the co-founders of the Union of Right Forces, a then new liberal-democratic coalition which received nearly 6 million votes, or 8.6% of the vote, in the parliamentary elections in December 1999. Nemtsov himself was elected to the State Duma, or lower house of Parliament, and became its Deputy Speaker in February 2000. In May 2000, Sergei Kiriyenko resigned and Nemtsov was elected leader of the party and its parliamentary group. Over 70% of delegates at the Union of Rightist Forces congress in May 2001 confirmed him as party leader. According to Nemtsov, the Union "always consisted of two factions, a Nemtsov faction and a Chubais faction", with the former "based on principles and ideology whereas the Chubais faction was pragmatic, existing by the rules of realpolitik."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In 2002, his name appeared on a list of several individuals the hostage-takers during the Moscow theater hostage crisis were willing to speak to directly. Nemtsov did not take part in the negotiations and later said that Putin had ordered him not to go.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: By 2003, Nemtsov was in a difficult political position – while he vehemently believed President Vladimir Putin's policies were rolling back democracy and civic freedoms in Russia, he needed to collaborate with the powerful co-chairman of the Union of Rightist Forces, Anatoly Chubais, who favoured a conciliatory line towards the Kremlin. In the parliamentary elections of December 2003, the Union of Rightist Forces platform headed by both Nemtsov and Chubais received just 2.4 million votes, 4% of the total, and thus fell short of the 5% threshold necessary to enter Parliament and as a result lost its seats. In January 2004, Nemtsov resigned from the party leadership. He became Chairman of the Council of Directors of Neftianoi, an oil company, and also a political advisor to Ukrainian president Viktor Yuschenko.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In January 2004, Nemtsov co-authored an article in "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" entitled "Appeal to the Putinist Majority", with his longtime adviser and party colleague Vladimir V. Kara-Murza. This article warned of the danger of an impending Putin dictatorship. Later the same month, he co-founded "Committee 2008", an umbrella group of the Russian opposition which also included Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Bukovsky and other prominent liberals.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In February 2004, Nemtsov was appointed as a director of the Neftyanoi Bank, and as Chairman of Neftyanoi Concern, an oil firm and the bank's parent company. In December 2005, however, prosecutors announced an investigation of the bank following allegations of money laundering and fraud. Nemtsov subsequently stepped down from both his positions, saying that he wanted to minimize political fallout for the bank from his continuing involvement in Russian politics. Nemtsov also alleged that his bank perhaps was targeted because of his friendship and support of former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who had stated his intention to run for president in 2008.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, Nemtsov came out as a strong supporter of the eventual winner Viktor Yushchenko, while the Russian government backed his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych. Shortly after the Orange Revolution, as the elections and series of protests in Ukraine came to be called, Yushchenko appointed Nemtsov as an economic adviser. Nemtsov's main goal was to improve business ties between Ukraine and Russia, damaged after the Putin government strongly supported Yushchenko's opponent in the presidential election. Yushchenko's selection of Nemtsov was controversial owing to Nemtsov's vocal criticism of Putin.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: The relationship between Nemtsov and the Ukrainian government became unstable in the middle of 2005 following accusations that Nemtsov had criticized Ukrainian cabinet decisions, and a group of legislators called for Yushchenko to fire Nemtsov. Despite the criticism, he remained as an economic adviser to Yushchenko until October 2006, when the office of the Ukrainian president announced that Nemtsov had been "relieved of his duties as a free lance presidential adviser".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was briefly a candidate for the presidency of Russia in the 2008 election. On 26 December 2007, Nemtsov withdrew his candidacy for the 2008 election, saying that he did not want to draw votes away from the other candidate of the "democratic opposition", Mikhail Kasyanov. Nemtsov said he was no longer running partly because of a belief that the government had predetermined the election's winner.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: On 13 December 2008, Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov co-founded the political opposition movement "Solidarnost" (Solidarity). The organization hoped to unite the opposition forces in Russia. Nemtsov said in February 2011 that Solidarity had "done everything it could to resolve" conflicts within the opposition and that those "who are trying to create a rift among the opposition, whether consciously or unconsciously, are helping Putin stay in power."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: At a "Solidarnost" meeting on 12 March 2009, Nemtsov announced that he would run for mayor of Sochi in the city's 26 April election. As a Sochi native, he had criticized plans to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics in the town. He believed it was this criticism which led Nashi members to attack him with ammonium chloride on 23 March 2009.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In a March 2010 interview, Nemtsov criticized the decision to hold a Winter Olympics in Sochi, saying that Putin had "found one of the only places in Russia where there is no snow in the winter. ... Sochi is subtropical. There is no tradition of skating or hockey there. In Sochi, we prefer football, and volleyball, and swimming. Other parts of Russia need ice palaces—we don't." The construction at the Olympics site was "disastrous" for the local economy, he added, saying that about 5,000 citizens had been removed from their homes to build Olympic facilities. He also added that "thanks to the corruption and incompetence of authorities, [these people have] not yet been adequately compensated for their property or been given equivalent housing elsewhere, as they were promised. Billions of dollars have simply disappeared."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: On 27 April 2009, it was announced that the acting Sochi mayor and United Russia candidate Anatoly Pakhomov had won the election with 77% of the vote. Nemtsov, who came second with around 14% of the vote, contested the fairness of the election, alleging that he was denied media access and that government workers had been pressured to vote for Pakhomov.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was among the 34 original signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto "Putin must go", published on 10 March 2010. Six months later, in September 2010, together with Vladimir Ryzhkov, Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Milov, Nemtsov formed the "For Russia without Lawlessness and Corruption" party, which, three months later was transformed into the People's Freedom Party. In May 2011, the party submitted an application for registration to the Ministry of Justice, but one month later it was denied.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In response to the question "Nemtsov, Milov and Ryzhkov and others, what do they really want?" in a live television broadcast on 16 December 2010, Putin stated that during the 1990s "they dragged a lot of billions along with Berezovsky and those who are now in prison... They have been pulled away from the manger, they had been spending heavily, and now they want to go back and fill their pockets". In January 2011, Nemtsov, Milov and Ryzhkov brought suit over Putin's statement before the Moscow City Court, but the following month the suit was dismissed. According to the judge, Tatiana Adamova, the names of Nemtsov, Milov and Ryzhkov were used merely as common names to refer to a certain class of politicians.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In a May 2013 report, Nemtsov stated that up to $30 billion had been stolen from funds allocated for the Sochi Olympics. He accused the Putin administration of cronyism and embezzlement of funds on a level so grand it posed a threat to Russian national security. He suggested "establishing a civic committee in charge of the investigation of the crimes committed around the Olympic project."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was arrested on 25 November 2007 during an unauthorized protest against President Putin near the State Hermitage Museum. Nemtsov and other opposition figures had complained of official harassment, and the police force had been used a number of times to break up what was then known as Dissenters' Marches. Nemtsov was released later that day.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: On 31 December 2010, he was arrested with other opposition leaders during a rally against government restrictions on public protests. He was sentenced on 2 January 2011 to 15 days in jail. The arrests were condemned by US Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and by Amnesty International, which described him as a prisoner of conscience. "The Economist" called his arrest "a new low" in the governance of Russia. "The mistreatment of him seems pointlessly malevolent. ... He poses no threat to the government. The rally was authorized and he was on his way home when the police stopped him. He was charged with disobeying the police and swearing, despite video footage that showed him asking the police to 'calm down'. A judge would not admit this as evidence. The court disregarded witness statements supporting him and would not let him appeal against his conviction."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In a February 2011 interview, Nemtsov recalled that the cell in which he was imprisoned "was a stone dungeon, about one and a half by three metres, veiled in semi-darkness so it was impossible to read. There was no bed, no pillows or mattresses, just the floor." He stated that his glasses, belt, and shoelaces were confiscated and he was given substandard living quarters. He attributed the decision to detain him to Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Chief of the Russian President's Administration and called it "a political decision." Nemtsov filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, which accepted it and agreed to handle the case through its new urgent procedure.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: During the 6 December 2011 protests in Moscow, Nemtsov was arrested with at least one hundred other demonstrators.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: After his dismissal from the government, Nemtsov became an important actor in the political discourse and eventually in the opposition to Putin's government. Nemtsov's political beliefs have caused some to characterize him as a "new liberal".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In February 2011, Nemtsov said: "Everyone is unhappy with Putin, save perhaps his closest friends." He noted that "for three consecutive years capital has been flowing out of the country, with some 40 billion dollars being taken out of the country in 2010 alone." As a result, "even within his party of corrupt thieves there are not so many people willing to follow him until the very end."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov said:[Putin had] used the Moscow theatre siege to impose a regime of total censorship on TV; he went on to destroy "NTV", and then "TV6". He used the nightmare of Beslan to remove democratic elections of regional governors. In short, he 'drowned' everyone apart from the terrorists." Nemtsov also stated:There is a myth spreading about how, in the 1990s, we democrats were pals with oligarchs while Putin was fighting them. It was exactly the other way around. We did not let Berezovsky get a foothold in [the world's largest natural gas company] Gazprom, we did not allow him to take over the Svyazinvest company [Russia's largest telecom holding]. Yet Putin used to go to his birthday parties and bring flowers to his wife. It was Berezovsky who lobbied for Putin to become president and then financed his campaign.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov told "Newsweek" in September 2011 that Putin's decision to run for president again "was predictable, but we were shocked by the hypocrisy and cynicism of the announcement: he declared he was coming back long before the elections. Putin and Medvedev did not even bother to share their decision to swap their chairs with the United Russia party before the congress. Russians had no choice but face his final decision; his usurpation of political power is sickly humiliating." Nemtsov said that all of his "friends in big business" planned "to take their capital out of Russia", while some "prefer to emigrate."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In a March 2012 op-ed for "The Wall Street Journal", Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov expressed support for "the repeal of the Jackson–Vanik amendment that impedes American trade relations with Russia". Nemtsov and Kasparov stated that at "opposition meetings following the fraudulent March 4 election", they and their associates "publicly resolved that Mr. Putin is not the legitimate leader of Russia." They explained that they wanted "the U.S. and other leading nations of the Free World [to] cease to provide democratic credentials to Mr. Putin", and asked that the U.S. replace Jackson–Vanik with the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act and thus improve relations between the United States and the people of Russia all while refusing aid to the Putin regime.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In December 2013, Nemtsov said on behalf of his party:We support Ukraine's course toward European integration [...] By supporting Ukraine, we also support ourselves.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov condemned the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine:My condolences to the families of the victims. The bastards, who did this, must be destroyed. The separatists the other day bragged they had the Buk missiles, with which they wanted to take down an AN-26. If those are them, they must get no mercy.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Nemtsov was among the few Russian statesmen to vocally oppose the annexation of Crimea by Russia. Nemtsov stated that he viewed Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine, that he considered its annexation by the Russian Federation to be illegal, and that the people of Crimea and not Russian legislators should decide which country they want to live in. In an op-ed published on 1 September 2014 in the "Kyiv Post", Nemtsov lamented the "fratricidal war" between Russia and Ukraine.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: This is not our war, this is not your war, this is not the war of 20-year-old paratroopers sent out there. This is Vladimir Putin's war.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: He accused Putin of "trying to dissect Ukraine and create in the east of the country a puppet state, Novorossiya, that is fully economically and politically controlled by the Kremlin." Meanwhile, wrote Nemtsov, "Russia itself is sinking into lies, violence, obscurantism and imperial hysteria." He stated that he sometimes thinks Putin is insane, but at other times he recognizes that Putin is driven by one goal: the "preservation of personal power and money at any cost." Ukraine had overthrown "a thieving president," and Putin needed to punish it "to make sure that no Russian would get these thoughts."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Ukraine chose the European way, which implies the rule of law, democracy and change of power. Ukraine's success on this way is a direct threat to Putin's power because he chose the opposite course – a lifetime in power, filled with arbitrariness and corruption.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: I cannot understand what Putin expects when he arms 20,000 Kadyrovites. Putin diligently finances Chechnya by sending there trains loaded with money. The republic receives a minimum of 60 billion rubles a year in grants. Only Allah knows how much money is being siphoned off through different programs, such as Northern Caucasus Resorts.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In April 2014, in an interview with journalists Boris Nemtsov called Putin a mental patient. This statement was used as the basis for initiation of criminal proceeding against Nemtsov but, eventually, the case was requalified to administrative offence.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Less than three weeks before his murder, on 10 February, Nemtsov wrote on Russia's "Sobesednik" news website that his 87-year-old mother was afraid Putin would kill him. He added that his mother was also afraid for former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. When asked if he himself was afraid for his life, Nemtsov answered: "Yes, not as strongly as my mother, but still..." In an extended version of the interview, Nemtsov reportedly added: "I am just joking. If I were afraid of Putin, I wouldn't be in this line of work."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Two weeks prior to his assassination, Nemtsov had met "with an old friend", Yevgenia Albats, editor of "The New Times" magazine, to discuss his research into Putin's role in the Ukraine conflict. Albats said that Nemtsov "was afraid of being killed", adding:And he was trying to convince himself, and me, they wouldn't touch him because he was a [former] member of the Russian government, a vice premier, and they wouldn't want to create a precedent. Because as he said, one time the power will change hands in Russia again, and those who served Putin wouldn't want to create this precedent.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Just before midnight, at 23:31 local time on 27 February 2015, Nemtsov was shot several times from behind. He was crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, close to the Kremlin walls and Red Square. He died at the scene. He was murdered less than two days before he was due to take part in a peace rally against Russian involvement in the war in Ukraine and the financial crisis in Russia.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: BBC News reported: "In his last tweet, Mr. Nemtsov sent out an appeal for Russia's divided opposition to unite at an anti-war march he was planning for Sunday." BBC News also quoted him as saying: "If you support stopping Russia's war with Ukraine, if you support stopping Putin's aggression, come to the Spring March in Maryino on 1 March."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: The night after Nemtsov's murder, his papers, writings and computer hard drives were confiscated in a police search of his apartment on Malaya Ordynka street.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak said that Nemtsov had been preparing a report proving the presence of Russian military in eastern Ukraine despite official denials.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Two weeks before his murder, Nemtsov had "met with an old friend to discuss his latest research into what he said was dissembling and misdeeds in the Kremlin." Yevgenia Albats, editor of "The New Times" magazine, said that Nemtsov worked on a report which he planned to call "Putin and the War", because it focused on Russia's role in the Ukraine conflict. Albats commented on her fear for Nemtsov's life.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Some people had accused Russian security services of responsibility for the crime. Vladimir Milov, a former deputy minister of energy and fellow opposition figure, said: "There is ever less doubt that the state is behind the murder of Boris Nemtsov" and stated that the objective had been "to sow fear." Opposition activist Maksim Kats held Putin responsible: "If he ordered it, then he's guilty as the orderer. And even if he didn't, then [he is responsible] as the inciter of hatred, hysteria, and anger among the people." Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters: "Putin noted that this cruel murder has all the hallmarks of a contract hit and is extremely provocative".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Russian opposition leader and Nemtsov's ally Ilya Yashin claimed that Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov was behind the assassination of Nemtsov, saying that "Chechnya today is a quasi-Islamic state within the Russian federation that does not obey Russian rules, and whose only connection with the federal authorities is the systematic receipt of money from the federal budget. Russian society stays silent because people are afraid of Kadyrov. And he exploits this fear as an instrument to muffle critics." Zhanna Nemtsova repeatedly said she wanted Kadyrov to be questioned about what he knew about the assassination of her father.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Shortly after Nemtsov's murder, journalist Julia Ioffe stated several theories about the crime had begun to circulate. "Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere", she wrote. "At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will flounder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all." Ioffe said that the Kremlin was already "muddying the waters".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: "LifeNews", a publication tied to Russia's security agencies, had suggested "three possible theories", namely that the killing was "revenge for forcing Duritskaya to get an abortion", or that it "had something to do with money Nemtsov was receiving from allies abroad", or that it was "an attempt to smear the Kremlin." A statement by the government's Investigative Committee theorized that Nemtsov was "killed by someone from his own opposition movement who wanted to create a martyr" and even suggested "that the assassination was connected to the "Charlie Hebdo" killings.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: According to Bellingcat analysis Nemtsov was followed prior to the assassination by the same FSB team that would subsequently follow Vladimir Kara-Murza, Dmitry Bykov and Alexei Navalny before their suspected poisonings.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky opined that Russia had been affected by "a Weimar atmosphere" in which there were "no longer any limits." Opposition activist Leonid Volkov maintained that Russians now lived "in a different political reality."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: United States President Barack Obama called on Russia's government to launch "a prompt, impartial, and transparent" investigation to ensure that "those responsible for this vicious killing are brought to justice". German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the "cowardly murder". A statement by her office demanded that Putin "assure himself that this assassination is elucidated and that its perpetrators are held accountable".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: On 6 December 2017, the Council of the District of Columbia held a hearing to decide on symbolically renaming a section of Wisconsin Avenue as Boris Nemtsov Plaza. The Embassy of the Russian Federation fronts the section of street proposed for the designation. On 9 January 2018, the Council unanimously approved the "Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2017" which authorized the renaming. The section of the street was renamed.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: On 12 March 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed bills intended to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for his country's actions, including a measure condemning the Russian leader and his government for their alleged roles in covering up the 2015 assassination of Putin political opponent Boris Nemtsov


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: After Nemtsov's murder, Serge Schmemann of "The New York Times" paid tribute to him in an article headlined "A Reformer Who Never Backed Down." Schmemann wrote: "Tall, handsome, witty and irreverent, Mr. Nemtsov was one of the brilliant young men who burst onto the Russian stage at that exciting moment when Communist rule collapsed and a new era seemed imminent." Julia Ioffe of "The New York Times" described Nemtsov after his death as "a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin", who was "a deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous man" who "seemed to genuinely be everyone's friend".


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Several suspects have been implicated in the assassination, all of whom are Chechens. The alleged shooter is a former officer in the security force of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who was also accused by opposition leader Ilya Yashin of having murdered Nemtsov.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Five Chechen men were prosecuted for his murder. In late June 2017, these men were found guilty by a jury in a court at Moscow for agreeing to kill Nemtsov in exchange for 15 million rubles (US$253,000); neither the identity nor whereabouts of the person who hired them has been publicly revealed.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: At a memorial rally held in Moscow on 1 March, the date on which Nemtsov had planned to lead an opposition march, mourners carried signs that read: "He was fighting for a free Russia," "Those shots were in each of us," "He died for the future of Russia," and "They were afraid of you, Boris." Several thousand people also marched in St. Petersburg. Serge Schmemann of "The New York Times" wrote that the Moscow rally seemed like "a memorial march for the hopes and dreams that lay alongside Mr. Nemtsov's murdered body in the middle of the night on the bridge to Red Square."


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In August 2015, Nemtsov's daughter Zhanna Nemtsova was the recipient of Poland's Democracy Award for her father's work. On 9 October 2015, opposition activists in Moscow erected a monument dedicated to Nemtsov at his tomb at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, plot 16. The monument, unveiled on what would have been his 56th birthday, shows Nemtsov's name with five bullet holes puncturing it.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: In late February 2017, a peaceful protest and commemorative plaque dedication are planned in Nizhny Novgorod, in commemoration of his ideology and the freedom of speech that led to his assassination.


title: Boris Nemtsov

text: Beginning in 2008, Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov published several white papers criticising Putin's government and proposing alternative ways of development for the country:


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Richard Stevenson Parker Jr. (born June 4, 1952), known professionally as Parker Stevenson, is an American actor best known for playing Frank Hardy in the 1970s TV series "The Hardy Boys" and Craig Pomeroy on the 1990s TV series "Baywatch".


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson was born on the Main Line of Philadelphia, as Richard Stevenson Parker Jr., one of two sons of Richard Stevenson Parker Sr., an investment advisor, and Sarah Meade, an actress who worked on Broadway and in numerous television commercials. His mother took him to a filming session when he was five years old, which resulted in him making two small television appearances. The elder Parker, who had moved his family to Rye, New York, disapproved of the whole business, and although Richard Jr. himself appeared in a few plays at Brooks Preparatory School, he then had no intention of becoming an actor and wanted to be an architect.


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson's first notable screen appearance was a starring role in the 1972 movie "A Separate Peace", credited as Parker Stevenson. After graduating from Brooks School and Princeton University, where he studied architecture, he moved to Hollywood and landed a role opposite Sam Elliott in the 1976 film "Lifeguard."


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson became well known from starring with teen heartthrob Shaun Cassidy in "The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries" series, produced by Glen A. Larson's production company through MCA-Universal Television (now NBCUniversal) under license from the Stratemeyer Publication Syndicate, from 1977 to 1979 on ABC. In 1983, he co-starred in the movie "Stroker Ace" as Burt Reynolds's brash race-car driving nemesis, Aubrey James. The film was a critical and financial failure.


title: Parker Stevenson

text: In 1986, Stevenson starred as Billy Hazard in the television miniseries "." He co-starred with then-wife Kirstie Alley, who portrayed his sister Virgilia Hazard. He starred on the short-lived 1988 TV series "Probe" in the lead role of Austin James. He was part of the original cast of "Baywatch" in the 1989 season, returning for the syndicated 1997 and 1998 seasons. He had a recurring role as a computer tycoon on "Melrose Place" during the second season. He starred in "Legion." In 2014, he had a guest role on the Western/mystery series "Longmire".


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson has been a photographer since he was young; his work can be found at his photography website.


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson was married to his first wife, actress Kirstie Alley, on December 22, 1983, and they divorced in 1997. They adopted two children: a son, in 1992, and a daughter in 1995.


title: Parker Stevenson

text: Stevenson married celebrity chef Lisa Schoen on September 29, 2018, at the Demetria Vineyards in Los Olivos, California.


title: John Wycliffe

text: John Wycliffe (; also spelled Wyclif, Wickliffe, and other variants; 1328 – 31 December 1384) was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford. He became an influential dissident within the Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism. Wycliffe questioned the privileged status of the clergy, who had bolstered their powerful role in England, and the luxury and pomp of local parishes and their ceremonies.


title: John Wycliffe

text: Wycliffe advocated translation of the Bible into the common vernacular. According to tradition, Wycliffe is said to have completed a translation direct from the Vulgate into Middle English – a version now known as Wycliffe's Bible. While it is probable that he personally translated the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is possible he translated the entire New Testament. At any rate, it is assumed that his associates translated the Old Testament. Wycliffe's Bible appears to have been completed prior to 1384 with additional updated versions being done by Wycliffe's assistant John Purvey, and others, in 1388 and 1395. More recently, historians of the Wycliffite movement have suggested that Wycliffe had at most, a minor role in the actual translations.