title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: Others expressed mixed feelings. John Turturro, who cast Allen in his romantic comedy "Fading Gigolo", said, "He was a respectful person to me professionally. Now is a different time. I wouldn't cast him now. ... I don't regret having worked with him". Greta Gerwig initially declined to answer questions about her work with Allen in "To Rome with Love" (2012). In 2018, while promoting "Lady Bird", Gerwig came under scrutiny for her work with Allen. On NPR's "Fresh Air", when she was asked about working with Allen, Gerwig said, "I think I'm living in that space of fear of being worried about how I talk about it and what I say." She responded to a similar question after "Lady Bird" won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy by saying, "[my] job right now I think is to occupy the position of writer and director." After being publicly criticized by Dylan Farrow for ignoring her allegations, Gerwig apologized for working with Allen. She elaborated in an interview with "The New York Times": "Dylan Farrow's two different pieces made me realize that I increased another woman's pain, and I was heartbroken by that realization. I grew up on his movies, and they have informed me as an artist, and I cannot change that fact now, but I can make different decisions moving forward." Fanning said that she regretted her decision "if it hurt anyone" but did not apologize for working with Allen. Joaquin Phoenix said, "When I worked with Woody, I knew about the stuff that had come up years ago. I know his daughter ended up writing an open letter. I was not aware of that when we worked together." In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press", Jeff Daniels said, "Would I do another one with Woody? The difficult decision would be to turn him down, because of "The Purple Rose of Cairo"." Peter Sarsgaard, when asked whether he would work with Allen, said, "It's such a complicated question. I've already done a Woody Allen movie". Chloe Sevigny said, "I have my own turmoil that I'm grappling with over that decision. Would I work with him again? Probably not." Marion Cotillard said, "I have to say today, yeah, if he were to ask me again ... I don't think it would ever happen because the experience we had together was very odd. I admire some of his work but we had no connection on set."


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: Those expressing support for Allen included Barbara Walters and Diane Keaton, as well as Javier Bardem, Jude Law, Alec Baldwin, and Bill Maher. Cherry Jones said, "There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don't know the truth ... When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope." Scarlett Johansson said, "I love Woody, I believe him, and I would work with him anytime." She added, "I see Woody whenever I can, and I have had a lot of conversations with him about it. I have been very direct with him, and he's very direct with me. He maintains his innocence, and I believe him." Emily Mortimer said, "I believe in due process...I think these things really need to go through all the legal processes before anyone can judge. I don't really have an answer to those questions." When Christiane Amanpour asked Cate Blanchett about the allegations against Allen, she replied, "At the time, I said it's a very painful and complicated situation for the family, which I hope they have the ability to resolve", and added, "If these allegations need to be reexamined, which, in my understanding, they've been through court, then I'm a big believer in the justice system and setting legal precedents...If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in support of that." Kate Winslet declined to comment on the matter, saying, "As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don't know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false. Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person." She did however describe the experience of working with Allen as "extraordinary." Later she changed her stance, "It's like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It's unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It's fucking disgraceful. And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can't turn back the clock. I'm grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren't able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?" Javier Bardem said, "I am very shocked by this sudden treatment. Judgments in the states of New York and Connecticut found him innocent...I don't agree with the public lynching that he's been receiving, and if Woody Allen called me to work with him again, I'd be there tomorrow morning. He's a genius." Alan Alda said, "I'd work with him again if he wanted me. I'm not qualified to judge him. I don't know all the facts. I don't know if he's guilty or innocent. But you can be uncertain—that's what I go on. I just don't have enough information to convince me I shouldn't work with him. And he's an enormously talented guy." Michael Caine, who initially expressed regret about working with Allen and said he would never work with him again, later said, "If he had a trial and someone proved he had done something, I wouldn't do it, no. But I didn't read of him being on trial and being found guilty or fined or sent to prison or anything. This is all things that people say. You can't go on hearsay the whole time." Jeff Goldblum said, "I think there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I also admire his body of work. So I would consider working with him again until I learned something more." Larry David, who read Allen's autobiography, "Apropos of Nothing", called it "a fantastic book, so funny. You feel like you're in the room with him... it's just a great book and it's hard to walk away after reading that book thinking that this guy did anything wrong." When asked about Allen while promoting "Da 5 Bloods", Spike Lee said, "I'd just like to say Woody Allen's a great, great filmmaker, and this cancel thing is not just Woody. And I think that when we look back on it, [we're] gonna see that, short of killing somebody, I don't know if you can just erase somebody like they never existed. Woody's a friend of mine ... I know he's going through it right now."


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: In his memoir, Allen addresses Dylan's allegation, writing that, unlike other cases of sexual abuse that could have been ignored without being taken seriously or adequately investigated, the accusation against him was immediately and thoroughly investigated by two groups of experts which concluded that the evidence proved that there was no sexual abuse, that Dylan's statements had "a rehearsed quality" and she was likely "coached or influenced by her mother". Regarding the criticism against Yale New Haven for having destroyed the original case notes, Allen maintains that that was Yale New Haven's and the FBI's usual procedure to preserve privacy. Moreover, the New York State Child Welfare scrupulously investigated the case for 14 months and concluded that there was no credible evidence of abuse and that the allegation was unfounded.


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: Allen recounts a Yale New Haven interview session in which Farrow explained to experts how Dylan was so disturbed by the sexual abuse that she turned to her sister Lark for physical comfort. Allen noted that Lark was in New York on the day of the alleged abuse and couldn't have physically interacted with Dylan, following which Farrow changed her account and said that, "Dylan hugged [Lark] spiritually." Allen also contends that Maco's investigation should have been closed the moment his experts ruled out the possibility of abuse, and states Maco's statement that there was "probable cause" was unfounded. Allen also writes that a nanny and a housekeeper who worked at Farrow's house said that on multiple occasions the prosecutor came to the residence and he and Farrow went out to lunch. Allen regrets that this does not seem the most impartial way to conduct an investigation.


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: Allen also claims that during the custody trial, a court clerk habitually drove Farrow home from the courthouse and that that was an "unfair conduit to the judge"; referred to Moses's testimony that he witnessed how Farrow coached Dylan; and reported the testimony of a babysitter to whom Dylan said, "Mummy wants me to lie." Allen alleges that long before the allegation of abuse emerged, Farrow took Dylan to a child therapist because the girl had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy and that, in the midst of family turmoil, Farrow suggested to the child that she had been abused which resulted in Dylan sincerely believing it.


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: The sexual abuse allegation was the subject of a 2021 HBO documentary series, "Allen v. Farrow". Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the series features home videos and interviews with family members, including Dylan Farrow, and is told largely from her point of view and Mia Farrow's. Allen, Soon-Yi Previn and Moses Farrow declined to participate and were not interviewed for the documentary. It has received largely favorable reviews, but has been criticized for one-sidedness and omission of facts.


title: Woody Allen sexual abuse allegation

text: Allen and Soon-Yi Previn denounced the series, which they accused of treating them unfairly and perpetuating falsehoods. The filmmakers rejected the charges.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also "mt-Eve, mt-MRCA") is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago, consistent with a date later than the speciation of "Homo sapiens" but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineally descended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.).


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to the biblical Eve, which has led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Early research using molecular clock methods was done during the late 1970s to early 1980s. Allan Wilson, Mark Stoneking, Rebecca L. Cann and Wesley Brown found that mutation in human mtDNA was unexpectedly fast, at 0.02 substitution per base (1%) in a million years, which is 5–10 times faster than in nuclear DNA. Related work allowed for an analysis of the evolutionary relationships among gorillas, chimpanzees (common chimpanzee and bonobo) and humans. With data from 21 human individuals, Brown published the first estimate on the age of the mt-MRCA at 180,000 years ago in 1980. A statistical analysis published in 1982 was taken as evidence for recent African origin (a hypothesis which at the time was competing with Asian origin of "H. sapiens").


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: By 1985, data from the mtDNA of 145 women of different populations, and of two cell lines, HeLa and GM 3043, derived from an African American and a !Kung respectively, were available. After more than 40 revisions of the draft, the manuscript was submitted to "Nature" in late 1985 or early 1986 and published on 1 January 1987. The published conclusion was that all current human mtDNA originated from a single population from Africa, at the time dated to between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The dating for "Eve" was a blow to the multiregional hypothesis, which was debated at the time, and a boost to the theory of the recent origin model.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Cann, Stoneking and Wilson did not use the term "Mitochondrial Eve" or even the name "Eve" in their original paper. It is however used by Cann in an article entitled "In Search of Eve" in the September–October 1987 issue of "The Sciences". It also appears in the October 1987 article in "Science" by Roger Lewin, headlined "The Unmasking of Mitochondrial Eve." The biblical connotation was very clear from the start. The accompanying research news in "Nature" had the title "Out of the garden of Eden."


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Wilson himself preferred the term "Lucky Mother" and thought the use of the name Eve "regrettable." But the concept of Eve caught on with the public and was repeated in a "Newsweek" cover story (11 January 1988 issue featured a depiction of Adam and Eve on the cover, with the title "The Search for Adam and Eve"), and a cover story in "Time" on 26 January 1987.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Shortly after the 1987 publication, criticism of its methodology and secondary conclusions was published. Both the dating of mt-Eve and the relevance of the age of the purely matrilineal descent for population replacement were subjects of controversy during the 1990s; Alan Templeton (1997) asserted that the study did "not support the hypothesis of a recent African origin for all of humanity following a split between Africans and non-Africans 100,000 years ago" and also did "not support the hypothesis of a recent global replacement of humans coming out of Africa."


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: 's placement of a relatively small population of humans in sub-Saharan Africa was consistent with the hypothesis of Cann (1982) and lent considerable support for the "recent out-of-Africa" scenario.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: In 1999, Krings et al. eliminated problems in molecular clocking postulated by Nei (1992) when it was found that the mtDNA sequence for the same region was substantially different from the MRCA relative to any human sequence.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: In 1997, published a study of mtDNA mutation rates in a single, well-documented family (the Romanov family of Russian royalty). In this study, they calculated a mutation rate upwards of twenty times higher than previous results. This study has been cited by Creationists to justify the emergence of "Eve" only 6,000 years ago.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Although the original research did have analytical limitations, the estimate on the age of the mt-MRCA has proven robust. More recent age estimates have remained consistent with the 140–200 kya estimate published in 1987: A 2013 estimate dated Mitochondrial Eve to about 160 kya (within the reserved estimate of the original research) and Out of Africa II to about 95 kya. Another 2013 study (based on genome sequencing of 69 people from 9 different populations) reported the age of Mitochondrial Eve between 99 and 148 kya and that of the Y-MRCA between 120 and 156 kya.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Without a DNA sample, it is not possible to reconstruct the complete genetic makeup (genome) of any individual who died very long ago. By analysing descendants' DNA, however, parts of ancestral genomes are estimated by scientists. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA are commonly used to trace ancestry in this manner. mtDNA is generally passed un-mixed from mothers to children of both sexes, along the maternal line, or matrilineally. Matrilineal descent goes back to our mothers, to their mothers, until all female lineages converge.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Branches are identified by one or more unique markers which give a mitochondrial "DNA signature" or "haplotype" (e.g. the CRS is a haplotype). Each marker is a DNA base-pair that has resulted from an SNP mutation. Scientists sort mitochondrial DNA results into more or less related groups, with more or less recent common ancestors. This leads to the construction of a DNA family tree where the branches are in biological terms clades, and the common ancestors such as Mitochondrial Eve sit at branching points in this tree. Major branches are said to define a haplogroup (e.g. CRS belongs to haplogroup H), and large branches containing several haplogroups are called "macro-haplogroups".


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The mitochondrial clade which Mitochondrial Eve defines is the species "" itself, or at least the current population or "chronospecies" as it exists today. In principle, earlier Eves can also be defined going beyond the species, for example one who is ancestral to both modern humanity and Neanderthals, or, further back, an "Eve" ancestral to all members of genus "" and chimpanzees in genus "". According to current nomenclature, Mitochondrial Eve's haplogroup was within mitochondrial haplogroup L because this macro-haplogroup contains all surviving human mitochondrial lineages today, and she must predate the emergence of L0.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The variation of mitochondrial DNA between different people can be used to estimate the time back to a common ancestor, such as Mitochondrial Eve. This works because, along any particular line of descent, mitochondrial DNA accumulates mutations at the rate of approximately one every 3,500 years per nucleotide. A certain number of these new variants will survive into modern times and be identifiable as distinct lineages. At the same time some branches, including even very old ones, come to an end when the last family in a distinct branch has no daughters.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common matrilineal ancestor for all modern humans. Whenever one of the two most ancient branch lines dies out (by producing only non matrilinear descendants at that time), the MRCA will move to a more recent female ancestor, always the most recent mother to have more than one daughter with living maternal line descendants alive today. The number of mutations that can be found distinguishing modern people is determined by two criteria: firstly and most obviously, the time back to her, but secondly and less obviously by the varying rates at which new branches have come into existence and old branches have become extinct. By looking at the number of mutations which have been accumulated in different branches of this family tree, and looking at which geographical regions have the widest range of least related branches, the region where Eve lived can be proposed.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: "Newsweek" reported on Mitochondrial Eve based on the Cann "et al." study in January 1988, under a heading of "Scientists Explore a Controversial Theory About Man's Origins". The edition sold a record number of copies.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The popular name "mitochondrial Eve", of 1980s coinage, has contributed to a number of popular misconceptions. At first, the announcement of a "mitochondrial Eve" was even greeted with endorsement from young earth creationists, who viewed the theory as a validation of the biblical creation story.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Due to such misunderstandings, authors of popular science publications since the 1990s have been emphatic in pointing out that the name is merely a popular convention, and that the mt-MRCA was not in any way the "first woman". Her position is purely the result of genealogical history of human populations later, and as matrilineal lineages die out, the position of mt-MRCA keeps moving forward to younger individuals over time.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: In "River Out of Eden" (1995), Richard Dawkins discussed human ancestry in the context of a "river of genes", including an explanation of the concept of Mitochondrial Eve. "The Seven Daughters of Eve" (2002) presented the topic of human mitochondrial genetics to a general audience. "The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa" by Stephen Oppenheimer (2003) was adapted into a Discovery Channel documentary.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: One common misconception surrounding Mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time. However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the effective population size of the ancient human never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women living during Eve's time may have descendants alive today but not in a direct female line.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: The definition of Mitochondrial Eve is fixed, but the woman in prehistory who fits this definition can change. That is, not only can our knowledge of when and where Mitochondrial Eve lived change due to new discoveries, but the actual Mitochondrial Eve can change. The Mitochondrial Eve can change, when a mother-daughter line comes to an end. It follows from the definition of Mitochondrial Eve that she had at least two daughters who both have unbroken "female" lineages that have survived to the present day. In every generation mitochondrial lineages end – when a woman with unique mtDNA dies with no daughters. When the mitochondrial lineages of daughters of Mitochondrial Eve die out, then the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" shifts forward from the remaining daughter through her matrilineal descendants, until the first descendant is reached who had two or more daughters who together have all living humans as their matrilineal descendants. Once a lineage has died out it is irretrievably lost and this mechanism can thus only shift the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" forward in time.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Because mtDNA mapping of humans is very incomplete, the discovery of living mtDNA lines which predate our current concept of "Mitochondrial Eve" could result in the title moving to an earlier woman. This happened to her male counterpart, "Y-chromosomal Adam," when an older Y line, haplogroup A-00, was discovered.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Sometimes Mitochondrial Eve is assumed to have lived at the same time as Y-chromosomal Adam (from whom all living males are descended patrilineally), and perhaps even met and mated with him. Even if this were true, which is currently regarded as highly unlikely, this would only be a coincidence. Like Mitochondrial "Eve", Y-chromosomal "Adam" probably lived in Africa. A recent study (March 2013) concluded however that "Eve" lived much later than "Adam" – some 140,000 years later. (Earlier studies considered, conversely, that "Eve" lived earlier than "Adam".) More recent studies indicate that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam may indeed have lived around the same time.


title: Mitochondrial Eve

text: Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common "matrilineal" ancestor, not the "most recent common ancestor". Since the mtDNA is inherited maternally and recombination is either rare or absent, it is relatively easy to track the ancestry of the lineages back to a MRCA; however, this MRCA is valid only when discussing mitochondrial DNA. An approximate sequence from newest to oldest can list various important points in the ancestry of modern human populations:


title: Swiss Super League

text: The Swiss Super League (known as the Credit Suisse Super League for sponsorship reasons) is a Swiss professional league in the top tier of the Swiss football league system and has been played in its current format since the 2003–04 season. As of January 2022, the Swiss Super League is ranked 14th in Europe according to UEFA's ranking of league coefficients, which is based upon Swiss team performances in European competitions. The 2022–23 season will be the 126th season of the Swiss top-flight, making it the longest continuously running top-flight national league.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The Super League is played over 36 rounds from the end of July to May, with a winter break from mid-December to the first week of February. Each team plays each other four times, twice at home and twice away, in a round-robin.


title: Swiss Super League

text: As teams from both Switzerland and Liechtenstein participate in the Swiss football leagues, only a Swiss club finishing in first place will be crowned champion—should a team from Liechtenstein win, this honor will go to the highest-placed Swiss team. Relative to their league coefficient ranking the highest-placed teams will compete in UEFA competitions—again with exception of teams from Liechtenstein, who qualify through the Liechtenstein Cup. The bottom team will be relegated to the Challenge League and replaced by the respective champion for the next season. The club finishing in 9th place will compete against the second-placed team of the Challenge League in a relegation play-off over two games, home and away, for a spot in the succeeding tournament.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The Swiss Football Association was founded in 1895, but were initially unable to organize an annual competition, citing the teams' travel costs. The first inofficial championship, competed for the "Ruinart Cup", was organized by Genevan newspaper "La Suisse sportive" as a response in 1897. It was mainly contested by teams from the French-speaking area, with the exception of FC Zürich and Grasshopper Club Zürich, the latter of which eventually won the tournament. The inaugural official championship was therefore organized for the following season, in 1898–99, and won by Anglo-American Club against Old Boys Basel. It was, however, only competed by Swiss-German teams (with the exception of a team from Neuchâtel) until 1900, due to a dispute about playing on Sundays.


title: Swiss Super League

text: Teams from the canton of Zürich continued to dominate the league until 1907–08, with Grasshoppers winning a further three, FC Winterthur winning two, and FC Zürich winning one title. Other champions from that time included Servette, St. Gallen, and Young Boys, who subsequently also won three in a row from 1908–1911. Over the next decade, FC Aarau, Montriond LS (now Lausanne-Sport), SC Brühl, and Cantonal Neuchâtel FC each won their first title as nobody managed to monopolize the league. During the 1920s and 1930s, championships were achieved almost exclusively by modern Super League regulars, namely Grasshoppers, Servette, Zürich, Young Boys, Lausanne-Sport, and FC Lugano. FC Bern was the exception in 1923; however, their championship was denied after the use of an unauthorized player.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The league was reformed into the Nationalliga in 1931 and initially changed from three regional groups to two groups with 9 teams each. The league composition thereafter varied on several occasions, ranging from 12 to 16 teams competing in a single group. Contrary to its neighboring countries, national football was not suspended during World War II due to Switzerland's neutrality, but the post-war years nevertheless brought change. The 1944–45 season saw the separation of the league into the Nationalliga A and B, with the winner of the former declared Swiss champion. The 1946–47, 1947–48, 1952–53, and 1953–54 seasons saw further maiden victories achieved by FC Biel-Bienne, AC Bellinzona, FC Basel, and FC La-Chaux-de-Fonds, respectively. In 1954, broadcasting rights were sold to SRG SSR for the first time, with the company initially being restricted in showing games on TV. For the 1956–57 season, jersey numbers were declared mandatory, with Young Boys initiating an unprecedented streak of four titles the same season.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The 1966–67 season first saw the emergence of Basel as a dominant team, as they won 7 of the following 14 seasons. As shirt sponsors first appeared by 1976, the SRG SSR refused to broadcast teams that wore advertisements on their kits. As a result, the broadcaster and the league reached a compromise, where the former would only show sponsors in reports lasting a maximum of 6 minutes, and teams would be obligated to wear neutral jerseys for longer appearances. The 1980s and 1990s saw Grasshoppers dominate and Neuchâtel Xamax, FC Luzern, and FC Sion win their first titles in 1986–87, 1988–89, and 1991–92. In 1985, the number of foreigners on a team was increased from one to two, promptly leading to a new transfer record of 1.3 million francs with Servette acquiring Mats Magnusson. In 1992–93 Aarau won the championship the first time in 79 years, while St. Gallen earned their first title in 97 years at the turn of the millennium.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The rebranding of the Nationalliga A into the Super League occurred in 2003, when the league was restructured from 12 to 10 teams for the 2003–04 season, simplifying the format by removing the relegation playoff round. A return to 12 teams was discussed on multiple occasions in 2009 and 2018, but ultimately rejected, among others due to reservations about the early relegation battle.


title: Swiss Super League

text: This new era initially proved to be one of domination for Basel, as 11 of the first 14 seasons were won by them, including a record-breaking streak of 8 championships between 2009 and 2017. After a change in leadership in 2017, however, they were dethroned by Young Boys, who won the next four straight championships.


title: Swiss Super League

text: In April 2022, another proposal by the SFL committee to increase the league size to 12 was announced. The proposal includes three stages: an initial round-robin qualifying stage with all 12 teams (22 rounds); an intermediary stage, with two groups (1st-6th placed in the Championship and 7-12th placed in the Qualification Group) of six teams each (10 rounds); the format of the third and final playoff phase is still to be determined. Despite pushback from fans and a general negative response from club officials, the proposal to increase the league size as well as the proposed format change were approved by the general assembly of the Swiss Football League on 20 May 2022.


title: Swiss Super League

text: The new format will be implemented for the 2023–24 season, while the transitional 2022–23 season season will have only the last placed team playing a relegation playoff against the 3rd place of the Challenge League. A change of format for the Swiss Challenge League is not yet clear.


title: Swiss Super League

text: In October 2022, following heavy fan protests, reigning champions FC Zürich officially submitted a request to repeal the decision to introduce the play-off modus. Instead they propose to use the system used in the Scottish Premiership. An according fan petition gathered 18,000 signatures (including national team star Breel Embolo) in the first day of its publication and Super League heavy-weights BSC Young Boys officially supported the motion immediately. This triggered a renewed vote by the general assembly.


title: Swiss Super League

text: On 11 November 2022, the new proposal to instead use the "Scottish Model" was approved by the general assembly of the Swiss Football League. By the time of the vote, the petition opposing the Play-Off system had gathered over 60,000 signatures. The increased number of teams was not up for a re-vote, though. The new format is as follows:


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Robert Guillaume (born Robert Peter Williams; November 30, 1927 – October 24, 2017) was an American actor and singer, known for his role as Benson DuBois in the ABC television series "Soap" and its spin-off, "Benson", as well as for voicing the mandrill Rafiki in "The Lion King" and related media thereof. In a career that spanned more than 50 years he worked extensively on stage, television and film. For his efforts he was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Nathan Detroit in "Guys and Dolls", and twice won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of the character Benson DuBois, once in 1979 on "Soap" and in 1985 on "Benson". He also won a Grammy Award in 1995 for his spoken word performance of an audiobook version of "The Lion King". He is also known for his role as playing Eli Vance in the video game Half-Life 2.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Guillaume was born Robert Peter Williams in St. Louis to an alcoholic mother. After she abandoned him and several siblings, they were raised by their grandmother, Jeannette Williams. He studied at Saint Louis University and Washington University in St. Louis and served in the United States Army before pursuing an acting career. He adopted the surname Guillaume (French for William) as his stage name.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: After leaving university, Guillaume joined the Karamu Players in Cleveland and performed in musical comedies and opera. He toured the world in 1959 as a cast member of the Broadway musical "Free and Easy". He made his Broadway debut in "Kwamina" in 1961. His other stage appearances included "Golden Boy" (with Sammy Davis Jr.), "Tambourines to Glory", "Guys and Dolls", for which he received a Tony Award nomination, "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris", and "Purlie!" His additional roles included Katherine Dunham's "Bambouche" and in "Fly The Blackbird".


title: Robert Guillaume

text: In 1964, he portrayed Sportin' Life in a revival of "Porgy and Bess" at New York City Center. Guillaume was a member of the Robert de Cormier Singers, performing in concerts and on television. He recorded an LP album, Columbia CS9033, titled "Just Arrived" as a member of The Pilgrims, a folk trio, with Angeline Butler and Millard Williams. Columbia records producer, Tom Wilson, had set out to create the Pilgrims as an answer to the popular folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary. By early 1964, the Pilgrims had recorded a handful of songs and Wilson was looking for the right song for the group's debut single when then unknown singer/songwriter named Paul Simon arrived for a meeting with Wilson and eventually pitched his new composition, "The Sound of Silence". Wilson liked the song, had Simon record a demo for the group, but when Simon and his friend, Art Garfunkel, sang the song for Wilson in person, he signed them to a record contract instead of using it for The Pilgrims. (In the sixties Guillaume was working in Vienna, Austria at the Vienna Volksoper, Marcel Prawy engaged him for the role of Sportin' Life in "Porgy and Bess".)


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Later in his stage career, he was cast in the lead role in the Los Angeles production of "The Phantom of the Opera", replacing Michael Crawford.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Guillaume made several guest appearances on sitcoms, including "Good Times", "The Jeffersons", "Sanford and Son", "" and in the 1990s sitcoms "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and "A Different World". Guillaume also played Dr. Franklin in season 6, episode 6 ("Chain Letter") of the series "All in the Family", in which he coyly referenced "Marcus Welby, M.D.", a TV series in which he had guest-starred in 1970.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: His series-regular debut was on the ABC series "Soap", playing Benson, a butler, from 1977 to 1979. Guillaume continued the role in a spin-off series, "Benson", which ran for 158 episodes from 1979 until 1986.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: In 1985, Guillaume appeared in the television mini-series "North and South" as abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery and became a leader of the anti-slavery movement prior to the American Civil War.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: He also appeared as marriage counselor Edward Sawyer on "The Robert Guillaume Show" (1989), Detective Bob Ballard on "Pacific Station" (1991–1992), and television executive Isaac Jaffe on Aaron Sorkin's short-lived but critically acclaimed "Sports Night" (1998–2000). Guillaume suffered a mild stroke on January 14, 1999, while filming an episode of the latter series. He recovered and his character was later also depicted as having had a stroke. He also made a guest appearance on "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter". He made one of his final TV appearances during season 5 on ""


title: Robert Guillaume

text: His voice was employed for characters in television series "Captain Planet and the Planeteers", "Fish Police", and "". He was known for the voice of Rafiki in the movie "The Lion King" and its sequels and spin-offs. He lent his deep tenor voice as Mr. Thicknose in "". He also supplied the voice for Eli Vance in the 2004 video game "Half-Life 2" and its immediate episodic sequels.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Guillaume was married twice; first to Marlene Williams in 1955, with whom he had two sons, Kevin and Jacques. Despite Guillaume choosing to follow his career early in the marriage, they did not divorce until 1984. He had a daughter in 1980, Melissa, whom he raised with her mother, Patricia. He then married Donna Brown in 1986; the couple had a daughter, Rachel. He fathered but did not raise another daughter, Patricia, by a different mother; she was born in 1950 and was raised by her grandparents. His son Jacques died on December 23, 1990, at the age of 32, of complications of AIDS.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: In 1999, Guillaume suffered a stroke while working on "Sports Night" at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. The stroke was minor, causing relatively slight damage and little effect on his speech. After six weeks in the hospital, he underwent a therapy of walks and gym sessions.


title: Robert Guillaume

text: Guillaume has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. On November 28, 1984, Guillaume received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in the television industry.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: Angelo Bruno (born Angelo Annaloro; ; (May 21, 1910 – March 21, 1980) was a Sicilian-American mobster, notable for being boss of the Philadelphia crime family for two decades until his assassination. Bruno was known as "the Gentle Don" due to his preference for conciliation over violence, in stark contrast to his successors.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: Born in Villalba, Province of Caltanissetta, Sicily, Bruno immigrated to the United States as a child and settled in South Philadelphia with his brother, Vito. He was the son of a foundry worker who opened a small grocery store at 4341 North Sixth Street in Feltonville, Philadelphia. Angelo helped his father at the store until 1922, at the age of twelve when he first entered school but attended for only a few years before dropping out of South Philadelphia High School to open his own grocery store at Eighth and Annin streets in Passyunk Square, Philadelphia. Bruno was a close associate of New York Gambino crime family boss Carlo Gambino. Living with Bruno was a cousin of mobster John Simone. Bruno dropped the name Annaloro and replaced it with his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Bruno. His sponsor into the Philadelphia mafia was Michael Maggio, a convicted murderer with a national reputation, and the founder of M. Maggio Cheese Corp. (since bought up by Crowley Foods).


title: Angelo Bruno

text: Bruno was married to Assunta "Sue" Bruno (née Maranca; 1913–2007), his childhood sweetheart, from 1931 until his death. They had two children, Michael and Jean. Bruno owned an extermination company in Trenton, New Jersey, an aluminum products company in Hialeah, Florida, and a share in the Plaza Hotel in Havana, Cuba. Bruno's first arrest was in 1928 for reckless driving. Subsequent arrests included firearms violations, operating an illicit alcohol still, illegal gambling, and receiving stolen property.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: In 1959, Bruno succeeded Joseph Ida as boss of the Philadelphia family. Over the next twenty years, Bruno successfully avoided the intense media and law enforcement scrutiny and outbursts of violence that plagued other crime families. Bruno himself avoided lengthy prison terms despite several arrests; his longest term was two years for refusing to testify before a grand jury. Bruno forbade family involvement in narcotics trafficking, preferring more traditional Cosa Nostra operations, such as bookmaking and loansharking. However, Bruno did permit other gangs to distribute heroin in Philadelphia for a share of the proceeds. This arrangement angered some family members who wanted a share of the drug-dealing profits.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: Bruno preferred to operate through bribery and soft power rather than murder. For example, he banished violent soldier Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo to the then-backwater of Atlantic City, New Jersey after he was charged with manslaughter.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: On March 21, 1980, the 69-year-old Bruno was killed by a shotgun blast to the head as he sat in his car in front of his home near the intersection of 10th Street and Snyder Avenue in the Lower Moyamensing neighborhood of South Philadelphia; his driver, John Stanfa, was wounded. It is believed that the killing was ordered by Antonio Caponigro, Bruno's consigliere. A few weeks later, Caponigro's lifeless body was found, naked and battered, in the trunk of a car in the Bronx. The Commission had reportedly ordered Caponigro's murder because he assassinated Bruno without their sanction. Other Philadelphia family members found to be involved in Bruno's murder were tortured and killed.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: The murder sparked a mob war in Philadelphia, which claimed over 20 lives over the next four years, including the succeeding boss Philip "Chicken Man" Testa, and his son Salvatore Testa.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: In February 2016, author and historian Celeste Morello began an effort to designate Bruno's home a historical landmark. In March 2016, a historical landmark advisory committee ruled against the request.


title: Angelo Bruno

text: Bruno is portrayed by Chazz Palminteri in the film "Legend" (2015) and Harvey Keitel in the film "The Irishman" (2019).


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Finno-Ugric ( or ; Fenno-Ugric) or Finno-Ugrian (Fenno-Ugrian), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by some contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio as inaccurate and misleading. The three most-spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric, although linguistic roots common to both branches of the traditional Finno-Ugric language tree (Finno-Permic and Ugric) are distant.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The term "Finno-Ugric", which originally referred to the entire family, is sometimes used as a synonym for the term "Uralic", which includes the Samoyedic languages, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The validity of Finno-Ugric as a phylogenic grouping is under challenge, with some maintaining that the Finno-Permic languages are as distinct from the Ugric languages as they are from the Samoyedic languages spoken in Siberia, or even that none of the Finno-Ugric, Finno-Permic, or Ugric branches has been established. Received opinion is that the easternmost (and last-discovered) Samoyed had separated first and the branching into Ugric and Finno-Permic took place later, but this reconstruction does not have strong support in the linguistic data.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Attempts at reconstructing a Proto-Finno-Ugric proto-language, a common ancestor of all Uralic languages except for the Samoyedic languages, are largely indistinguishable from Proto-Uralic, suggesting that Finno-Ugric might not be a historical grouping but a geographical one, with Samoyedic being distinct by lexical borrowing rather than actually being historically divergent. It has been proposed that the area in which Proto-Finno-Ugric was spoken reached between the Baltic Sea and the Ural Mountains.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Traditionally, the main set of evidence for the genetic proposal of Proto-Finno-Ugric has come from vocabulary. A large amount of vocabulary (e.g. the numerals "one", "three", "four" and "six"; the body-part terms "hand", "head") is only reconstructed up to the Proto-Finno-Ugric level, and only words with a Samoyedic equivalent have been reconstructed for Proto-Uralic. That methodology has been criticised, as no coherent explanation other than inheritance has been presented for the origin of most of the Finno-Ugric vocabulary (though a small number has been explained as old loanwords from Proto-Indo-European or its immediate successors).


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The Samoyedic group has undergone a longer period of independent development, and its divergent vocabulary could be caused by mechanisms of replacement such as language contact. (The Finno-Ugric group is usually dated to approximately 4,000 years ago, the Samoyedic a little over 2,000.) Proponents of the traditional binary division note, however, that the invocation of extensive contact influence on vocabulary is at odds with the grammatical conservatism of Samoyedic.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The consonant "*š" (voiceless postalveolar fricative, ) has not been conclusively shown to occur in the traditional Proto-Uralic lexicon, but it is attested in some of the Proto-Finno-Ugric material. Another feature attested in the Finno-Ugric vocabulary is that "*i" now behaves as a neutral vowel with respect to front-back vowel harmony, and thus there are roots such as "*niwa-" "to remove the hair from hides".


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Regular sound changes proposed for this stage are few and remain open to interpretation. Sammallahti (1988) proposes five, following Janhunen's (1981) reconstruction of Proto-Finno-Permic:


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Sammallahti (1988) further reconstructs sound changes "*oo", "*ee" → "*a", "*ä" (merging with original "*a", "*ä") for the development from Proto-Finno-Ugric to Proto-Ugric. Similar sound laws are required for other languages as well. Thus, the origin and raising of long vowels may actually belong at a later stage, and the development of these words from Proto-Uralic to Proto-Ugric can be summarized as simple loss of "*x" (if it existed in the first place at all; vowel length only surfaces consistently in the Baltic-Finnic languages.) The proposed raising of "*o" has been alternatively interpreted instead as a lowering "*u" → "*o" in Samoyedic (PU *"lumi" → "*lomə" → Proto-Samoyedic "*jom").


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Janhunen (2007, 2009) notes a number of derivational innovations in Finno-Ugric, including "*ńoma" "hare" → "*ńoma-la", (vs. Samoyedic "*ńomå"), "*pexli" "side" → "*peel-ka" → "*pelka" "thumb", though involving Proto-Uralic derivational elements.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The Finno-Ugric group is not typologically distinct from Uralic as a whole: the most widespread structural features among the group all extend to the Samoyedic languages as well.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Modern linguistic research has shown that Volgaic languages is a geographical classification rather than a linguistic one, because the Mordvinic languages are more closely related to the Finno-Lappic languages than the Mari languages.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The relation of the Finno-Permic and the Ugric groups is adjudged remote by some scholars. On the other hand, with a projected time depth of only 3,000 to 4,000 years, the traditionally accepted Finno-Ugric grouping would be far younger than many major families such as Indo-European or Semitic, and would be about the same age as, for instance, the Eastern subfamily of Nilotic. But the grouping is far from transparent or securely established. The absence of early records is a major obstacle. As for the Finno-Ugric Urheimat, most of what has been said about it is speculation.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Some linguists criticizing the Finno-Ugric genetic proposal also question the validity of the entire Uralic family, instead proposing a Ural–Altaic hypothesis, within which they believe Finno-Permic may be as distant from Ugric as from Turkic. However, this approach has been rejected by nearly all other specialists in Uralic linguistics.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: One argument in favor of the Finno-Ugric grouping has come from loanwords. Several loans from the Indo-European languages are present in most or all of the Finno-Ugric languages, while being absent from Samoyedic.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: According to Häkkinen (1983) the alleged Proto-Finno-Ugric loanwords are disproportionally well-represented in Hungarian and the Permic languages, and disproportionally poorly represented in the Ob-Ugric languages; hence it is possible that such words have been acquired by the languages only after the initial dissolution of the Uralic family into individual dialects, and that the scarcity of loanwords in Samoyedic results from its peripheric location.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The number systems among the Finno-Ugric languages are particularly distinct from the Samoyedic languages: only the numerals "2" and "5" have cognates in Samoyedic, while also the numerals, "1", "3", "4", "6", "10" are shared by all or most Finno-Ugric languages.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Below are the numbers 1 to 10 in several Finno-Ugric languages. Forms in "italic" do not descend from the reconstructed forms.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The numbers '9' and '8' in Finnic through Mari are considered to be derived from the numbers '1' and '2' as '10–1' and '10–2'. One reconstruction is *"yk+teksa" and *"kak+teksa", respectively, where *"teksa" cf. "deka" is an Indo-European loan; notice that the difference between /t/ and /d/ is not phonemic, unlike in Indo-European. Another analysis is *"ykt-e-ksa", *"kakt-e-ksa", with *"e" being the negative verb.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: 100-word Swadesh lists for certain Finno-Ugric languages can be compared and contrasted at the Rosetta Project website:


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The four largest ethnic groups that speak Finno-Ugric languages are the Hungarians (14.5 million), Finns (6.5 million), Estonians (1.1 million), and Mordvins (0.85 million). Majorities of three (the Hungarians, Finns, and Estonians) inhabit their respective nation states in Europe, i.e. Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, while a large minority of Mordvins inhabit the federal Mordovian Republic within Russia (Russian Federation).


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The indigenous area of the Sámi people is known as Sápmi and it consists of the northern parts of the Fennoscandian Peninsula. Some other peoples that speak Finno-Ugric languages have been assigned autonomous republics within Russia. These are the Karelians (Republic of Karelia), Komi (Komi Republic), Udmurts (Udmurt Republic) and Mari (Mari El Republic). The Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug was set up for the Khanty and Mansi of Russia. A once-autonomous Komi-Permyak Okrug was set up for a region of high Komi habitation outside the Komi Republic.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: In the Finno-Ugric countries of Finland, Estonia and Hungary that find themselves surrounded by speakers of unrelated tongues, language origins and language history have long been relevant to national identity. In 1992, the 1st "World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples" was organized in Syktyvkar in the Komi Republic in Russia, the 2nd World Congress in 1996 in Budapest in Hungary, the 3rd Congress in 2000 in Helsinki in Finland, the 4th Congress in 2004 in Tallinn in Estonia, the 5th Congress in 2008 in Khanty-Mansiysk in Russia, the 6th Congress in 2012 in Siófok in Hungary, the 7th Congress in 2016 in Lahti in Finland, and the 8th Congress in 2021 in Tartu in Estonia. The members of the Finno-Ugric Peoples' Consultative Committee include: the Erzyas, Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, Ingrian Finns, Ingrians, Karelians, Khants, Komis, Mansis, Maris, Mokshas, Nenetses, Permian Komis, Saamis, Tver Karelians, Udmurts, Vepsians; Observers: Livonians, Setos.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: In 2007, the 1st "Festival of the Finno-Ugric Peoples" was hosted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and visited by Finnish President, Tarja Halonen, and Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: The linguistic reconstruction of the Finno-Ugric language family has led to the postulation that the ancient Proto-Finno-Ugric people were ethnically related, and that even the modern Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples are ethnically related. Such hypotheses are based on the assumption that heredity can be traced through linguistic relatedness, although it must be kept in mind that language shift and ethnic admixture, a relatively frequent and common occurrence both in recorded history and most likely also in prehistory, confuses the picture and there is no straightforward relationship, if at all, between linguistic and genetic affiliation. Still, the premise that the speakers of the ancient proto-language were ethnically homogeneous is generally accepted.


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: Modern genetic studies have shown that the Y-chromosome haplogroup N3, and sometimes N2, is almost specific though certainly not restricted to Uralic- or Finno-Ugric-speaking populations, especially as high frequency or primary paternal haplogroup. These haplogroups branched from haplogroup N, which probably spread north, then west and east from Northern China about 12,000–14,000 years before present from father haplogroup NO (haplogroup O being the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Southeast Asia).


title: Finno-Ugric languages

text: A study of the Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples of northern Eurasia (i.e., excluding the Hungarians), carried out between 2002 and 2008 in the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Helsinki, showed that the Finno-Ugric-speaking populations do not retain genetic evidence of a common founder. Most possess an amalgamation of West and East Eurasian gene pools that may have been present in central Asia, with subsequent genetic drift and recurrent founder effects among speakers of various branches of Finno-Ugric. Not all branches show evidence of a single founder effect. North Eurasian Finno-Ugric-speaking populations were found to be genetically a heterogeneous group showing lower haplotype diversities compared to more southern populations. North Eurasian Finno-Ugric-speaking populations possess unique genetic features due to complex genetic changes shaped by molecular and population genetics and adaptation to the areas of Boreal and Arctic North Eurasia.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs attended the University of Leipzig, where his father was a professor of theology, and became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the "Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold", the SPD's paramilitary organisation. He was expelled from the SPD in 1932, and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He went into hiding after the 1933 Reichstag fire, and fled to the United Kingdom, where he received his PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Nevill Mott, and his DSc from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked as an assistant to Max Born.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: After the Second World War broke out in Europe, he was interned in the Isle of Man, and later in Canada. After he returned to Britain in 1941, he became an assistant to Rudolf Peierls, working on "Tube Alloys"—the British atomic bomb project. He began passing information on the project to the Soviet Union through Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed "Sonya", a German communist and a major in Soviet military intelligence who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East. In 1943, Fuchs and Peierls went to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project. In August 1944, Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of implosion, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. After the war, he returned to the UK and worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as head of the Theoretical Physics Division.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In January 1950, Fuchs confessed that he had passed information to the Soviets over a seven-year period beginning in 1942. A British court sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment and he was subsequently stripped of his British citizenship. He was released in 1959, after serving nine years, and migrated to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) central committee. He was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was born in Rüsselsheim, Grand Duchy of Hesse, on 29 December 1911, the third of four children of a Lutheran pastor, Emil Fuchs, and his wife Else Wagner. His father served in the army during World War I but later became a pacifist and a socialist, joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1921. He eventually became a Quaker. Fuchs had an older brother Gerhard, an older sister Elisabeth, and a younger sister, Kristel. The family moved to Eisenach, where Fuchs attended the "Gymnasium", and took his "Abitur". At school, Fuchs and his siblings were taunted over his father's unpopular socialist political views, which they came to share. They became known as the "red foxes", Fuchs being the German word for fox. Fuchs was left-handed, but was forced to write with his right hand.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs entered the University of Leipzig in 1930, where his father was a professor of theology. He became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the SPD, a party that his father had joined in 1912, and the "Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold", the party's paramilitary organisation. His father took up a new position as professor of religion at the Pedagogical Academy in Kiel, and in the autumn Fuchs transferred to the University of Kiel, which his brother Gerhard and sister Elisabeth also attended. Fuchs continued his studies in mathematics and physics at the university. In October 1931, his mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. The family later discovered that his maternal grandmother had also taken her own life.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In the March 1932 German presidential election, the SPD supported Paul von Hindenburg for President, fearing that a split vote would hand the job to the Nazi Party (NSDAP) candidate, Adolf Hitler. However, when the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) ran its own candidate, Ernst Thälmann, Fuchs offered to speak for him, and was expelled from the SPD. That year Fuchs and all three of his siblings joined the KPD. Fuchs and his brother Gerhard were active speakers at public meetings, and occasionally attempted to disrupt NSDAP gatherings. At one such gathering, Fuchs was beaten up and thrown into the river.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Fuchs decided to leave Kiel, where the NSDAP was particularly strong and he was a well-known KPD member. He enrolled at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. On 28 February, he took an early train to Berlin for a KPD meeting there. On the train, he read about the Reichstag fire in a newspaper. Fuchs correctly assumed that opposition parties would be blamed for the fire, and quietly removed his hammer and sickle lapel pin. The KPD meeting in Berlin was held in secret. Fellow party members urged him to continue his studies in another country. He went into hiding for five months in the apartment of a fellow party member. In August 1933, he attended an anti-fascist conference in Paris chaired by Henri Barbusse, where he met an English couple, Ronald and Jessie Gunn, who invited Fuchs to stay with them in Clapton, Somerset. He was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in October 1933.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs arrived in England on 24 September 1933. Jessie Gunn was a member of the Wills family, the heirs to Imperial Tobacco and benefactors of the University of Bristol. She arranged for Fuchs to meet Nevill Mott, Bristol's professor of physics, and he agreed to take Fuchs on as a research assistant. Fuchs earned his PhD in physics there in 1937. A paper on "A Quantum Mechanical Calculation of the Elastic Constants of Monovalent Metals" was published in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society" in 1936. By this time, Mott had a number of German refugees working for him, and lacked positions for them all. He did not think that Fuchs would make much of a teacher, so he arranged a research post for Fuchs, at the University of Edinburgh working under Max Born, who was himself a German refugee. Fuchs published papers with Born on "The Statistical Mechanics of Condensing Systems" and "On Fluctuations in Electromagnetic radiation" in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society". He also received a Doctorate in Science degree from Edinburgh. Fuchs proudly mailed copies back to his father in Germany.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In Germany, Emil had been dismissed from his academic post, and, disillusioned with the Lutheran Church's support of the NSDAP, had become a Quaker in 1933. He was arrested for speaking out against the government and was held for a month. Elisabeth married a fellow communist, Gustav Kittowski, with whom she had a child they named Klaus. Elisabeth and Kittowski were arrested in 1933, and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, but were freed at Christmas. Gerhard and his wife Karin were arrested in 1934, and spent the next two years in prison. Gerhard, Karin, Elisabeth and Kittowski established a car rental agency in Berlin, which they used to smuggle Jews and opponents of the government out of Germany.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: After Emil was arrested in 1933, Kristel fled to Zurich, where she studied education and psychology at the University of Zurich. She returned to Berlin in 1934, where she too worked at the car rental agency. In 1936, Emil arranged with Quaker friends in the United States for Kristel to attend Swarthmore College there. She visited Fuchs in England "en route" to America, where she eventually married an American communist, Robert Heineman, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She became a permanent resident in the United States in May 1938. In 1936, Kittowski and Elisabeth were arrested again, and the rental cars were impounded. Gerhard and Karin fled to Czechoslovakia. Elisabeth was released and went to live with Emil, while Kittowski, sentenced to six years, later escaped from prison and also made his way to Czechoslovakia. In August 1939, Elisabeth committed suicide by throwing herself from a train, leaving Emil to raise young Klaus.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs applied to become a British subject in August 1939, but his application had not been processed before the Second World War broke out in Europe in September 1939. There was a classification system for enemy aliens, but Born provided Fuchs with a reference that said that he had been a member of the SPD from 1930 to 1932, and an anti-Nazi. There matters stood until June 1940, when the police arrived and took Fuchs into custody. He was first interned on the Isle of Man and then, in July, he was sent to an internment camps in Canada, first on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City and later at a site near Sherbrooke, Quebec. During his internment in 1940, he continued to work and published four more papers with Born: "The Mass Centre in Relativity", "Reciprocity, Part II: Scalar Wave Functions", "Reciprocity, Part III: Reciprocal Wave Functions" and "Reciprocity, Part IV: Spinor Wave Functions", and one by himself, "On the Statistical Method in Nuclear Theory".


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: While interned in Quebec, he joined a communist discussion group led by Hans Kahle. Kahle was a KPD member who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. After fleeing to Britain with his family, Kahle had helped Jürgen Kuczynski organise the KPD in Britain. Kristel arranged for mathematics professor Israel Halperin, the brother-in-law of a friend of hers, Wendell H. Furry, to send Fuchs some magazines, likely scientific journals. Max Born lobbied for his release. On Christmas Day 1940, Fuchs and Kahle were among the first group of internees to board a ship to return to Britain.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs returned to Edinburgh in January, and resumed working for Born. In May 1941, he was approached by Rudolf Peierls of the University of Birmingham to work on the "Tube Alloys" programme – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, he became a British subject on 7 August 1942 and signed an Official Secrets Act declaration form. As accommodation was scarce in wartime Birmingham, he stayed with Rudolf and Genia Peierls. Fuchs and Peierls did some important work together, which included a fundamental paper about isotope separation.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Soon after, Fuchs contacted Jürgen Kuczynski, who was now teaching at the London School of Economics. Kuczynski put him in contact with Simon Davidovitch Kremer (codename: "Alexander"; 1900-1991), the secretary to the military attaché at the Soviet Union's embassy, who worked for the GRU (Russian: "Главное Разведывательное Управление"), the Red Army's foreign military intelligence directorate. After three meetings, Fuchs was teamed up with a courier so he would not have to find excuses to travel to London. She was Ursula Kuczynski (codename: "Sonya"), the sister of Jürgen Kuczynski. She was a German communist, a major in Soviet Military Intelligence and an experienced agent who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In late 1943, Fuchs (codename: "Rest"; he became "Charles" in May 1944) transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on gaseous diffusion as a means of uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project. Although Fuchs was "an asset" of GRU in Britain, his "control" was transferred to the NKGB (Russian: "Народный Kомиссариат Государственной Безопасности"), the Soviet Union's civilian intelligence organisation, when he moved to New York. He spent Christmas 1943 with Kristel and her family in Cambridge. He was contacted by Harry Gold (codename: "Raymond"), an NKGB agent in early 1944.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: From August 1944, Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb. At one point, Fuchs did calculation work that Edward Teller had refused to do because of lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly that goes highly prompt critical, and his report on blast waves is still considered a classic. Fuchs was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test in July 1945. In April 1946 he attended a conference at Los Alamos that discussed the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon; one month later, he filed a patent with John von Neumann, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. Bethe considered Fuchs "one of the most valuable men in my division" and "one of the best theoretical physicists we had."


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs, who was known as "Karl" rather than "Klaus" at Los Alamos, dated grade school teachers Evelyn Kline and Jean Parker. He befriended Richard Feynman. Fuchs and Peierls were the only members of the British Mission to Los Alamos who owned cars, and Fuchs lent his Buick to Feynman so Feynman could visit his dying wife in hospital in Albuquerque.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Klaus Fuchs's main courier was Harry Gold. Allen Weinstein, the author of "The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America" (1999), has pointed out: "The NKVD had chosen Gold, an experienced group handler, as Fuchs' contact on the grounds that it was safer than having him meet directly with a Russian operative, but Semyon Semyonov was ultimately responsible for the Fuchs relationship."


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: At the request of Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in October 1945, Fuchs stayed on at the laboratory into 1946 to help with preparations for the Operation Crossroads weapons tests. The US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) prohibited the transfer of information on nuclear research to any foreign country, including Britain, without explicit official authority, and Fuchs supplied highly classified U.S. information to nuclear scientists in Britain and to his Soviet contacts.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: , British official files on Fuchs were still being withheld. As of 2020, the National Archives listed one dossier on Fuchs, KV 2/1263, including the "Prosecution file. With summary of early interrogations ... and details of the scientifical/technical information passed to the Russians". The date of release of this material was not stated. According to an October 2020 book review, author Nancy Thorndike Greenspan "appears to have had access to some of the Fuchs files that have been withheld at Kew, such as the AB/1 series, which has been closed for access for most human beings".


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs was highly regarded as a scientist by the British, who wanted him to return to the United Kingdom to work on Britain's postwar nuclear weapons programme. He returned in August 1946 and became the head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. From late 1947 to May 1949 he gave Alexander Feklisov, his Soviet case officer, the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb and the initial drafts for its development as the work progressed in England and America. Meeting with Feklisov six times, he provided the results of the test at Eniwetok Atoll of uranium and plutonium bombs and the key data on production of uranium-235.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Also in 1947, Fuchs attended a conference of the Combined Policy Committee (CPC), which was created to facilitate exchange of atomic secrets at the highest levels of governments of the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Donald Maclean, another Soviet spy, was also in attendance as British co-secretary of CPC.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: By September 1949, information from the Venona project indicated to GCHQ that Fuchs was a spy, but the British intelligence services were wary of indicating the source of their information. The Soviets had broken off contact with him in February. Fuchs may have been subsequently tipped off by Kim Philby. After a great deal of research for his 2019 biography, "Trinity", Frank Close confirmed that while MI5 suspected Fuchs for over two years, "it was decrypters at GCHQ who supplied clear proof of his guilt ... not the crack American team that is normally given all the credit", according to a review of the book.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Under interrogation by MI5 officer William Skardon at an informal meeting in December 1949, Fuchs initially denied being a spy and was not detained. According to Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, author of a 2020 book, "Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs", Skardon told Fuchs that if he admitted his earlier espionage activity, he could be permitted to continue to work at Harwell. In October 1949, Fuchs had approached Henry Arnold, the head of security at Harwell, with the news that his father had been given a chair at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, and this information became a factor as well. In early January Fuchs was informed that he must resign his position at Harwell because of his father’s appointment in East Germany. He was offered help in finding a university post.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Meeting with Skardon for a fourth time on 24 January 1950, Fuchs voluntarily confessed that he had shared information with the Soviets. According to Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, Skardon’s report on their meeting “made no mention of his promise to Fuchs to stay on at Harwell if he confessed,” but at the subsequent debfriefing it was agreed “to maintain FUCHS in his present state of mind, and for this state of mind to be in no way disturbed”. To make it possible to prosecute Fuchs, Skardon proposed that Fuchs be asked to prepare a signed statement, which he then did at the War Office in London. The document included the statement “I was given the chance of admitting it and staying at Harwell or clearing out.”


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Three days later, he also directed a statement more technical in content to Michael Perrin, the deputy controller of atomic energy within the Ministry of Supply. Fuchs told interrogators that the NKGB had acquired an agent in Berkeley, California, who had informed the Soviet Union about electromagnetic separation research of uranium-235 in 1942 or earlier. Fuchs's statements to British and American intelligence agencies were used to implicate Harry Gold, a key witness in the trials of David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States. Fuchs later stated that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through courier Harry Gold in 1945, and further information about Edward Teller's unworkable "Super" design for a hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947. Fuchs also stated that "The last time when I handed over information [to Russian authorities] was in February or March 1949".


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs was arrested on 2 February 1950, charged with violations of the Official Secrets Act. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan quotes from police notes on a visit between fellow scientist Peierls and Fuchs in detention shortly after the news of the arrest broke. When Peierls asked Fuchs why he had spied, Fuchs answered: "Knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind." According to a "New York Times" review by the conservative historian Ronald Radosh, Greenspan argues that "his goal became to balance world power and to prevent nuclear blackmail." Radosh states that "this was a post facto justification. The reason Fuchs spied was simply that he was a Communist and a true believer in Stalin and the Soviet Union".


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Hans Bethe once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew to have truly changed history. Because the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default, it is unknown whether Fuchs's fission information had a substantial effect. Considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: According to "On a Field of Red", a history of the Comintern (Communist International) by Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, Fuchs's greatest contribution to the Soviets may have been disclosing how uranium could be processed for use in a bomb. Fuchs gave Gold technical information in January 1945 that was acquired only after two years of experimentation at a cost of $400 million. Fuchs also disclosed the amount of uranium or plutonium the Americans planned to use in each atomic bomb.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Whether the information Fuchs passed relating to the hydrogen bomb would have been useful is still debated. Most scholars agree with Hans Bethe's 1952 assessment, which concluded that by the time Fuchs left the thermonuclear program in mid-1946, too little was known about the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb for his information to be useful to the Soviet Union. The successful Teller-Ulam design was not devised until 1951. Soviet physicists later noted that they could see as well as the Americans eventually would that the early designs by Fuchs and Edward Teller were useless.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Later archival work by the Soviet physicist German Goncharov suggested that Fuchs's early work did not help Soviet efforts towards the hydrogen bomb, but it was closer to the final correct solution than anyone recognised at the time. It also indeed spurred Soviet research into useful problems that eventually provided the correct answer. In any case, it seems clear that Fuchs could not have just given the Soviets the "secret" to the hydrogen bomb since he did not actually know it himself.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In his 2019 book, "Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History", Frank Close asserts that "it was primarily Fuchs who enabled the Soviets to catch up with Americans" in the race for the nuclear bomb. The author of the 2020 book "Atomic Spy" gives his efforts less value. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan suggests that the Soviets would have developed their bomb even without his help, "though probably not until 1951". On the other hand, the earlier development of the Soviet bomb may have had one significant benefit to the world, a balance of power; the author is convinced that this prevented the United States from using their bomb on North Korea.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: It is likely that Fuchs's espionage led the U.S. to cancel a 1950 Anglo-American plan to give Britain American-made atomic bombs.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy." Fuchs had entered guilty pleas, and his attorney Derek Curtis-Bennett limited his case to a general plea for mitigation on the grounds of his state of mind and desire to assist the Soviets in defeating the Nazis and winning the war. Fuchs consented to the advice not to raise the question of inducement in his decision to admit guilt. After a trial lasting less than 90 minutes that was based on his confession, Lord Goddard sentenced Fuchs to 14 years' imprisonment, the maximum for espionage, because the Soviet Union was classed as an ally at the time. In February 1951, he was formally stripped of his British citizenship.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: The head of the British H-bomb project, Sir William Penney, visited Fuchs in prison in 1952. While imprisoned, Fuchs was friendly with the Irish Republican Army prisoner Seamus Murphy with whom he played chess and helped to escape.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs was released on 23 June 1959 after he had served nine years and four months of his sentence (as was then required in England where long-term prisoners were entitled by law to one third off for good behaviour in prison) at Wakefield Prison and promptly emigrated to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: On arrival at Berlin Schönefeld Airport in the GDR, Fuchs was met by Grete (Margarete) Keilson, a friend from his years as a student communist. They were married on 9 September 1959.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In the GDR, Fuchs continued his scientific career and achieved considerable prominence as a leader of research. He became a member of the SED central committee in 1967, and in 1972 was elected to the Academy of Sciences where from 1974 to 1978 he was the head of the research area of physics, nuclear and materials science; he was then appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979. From 1984, Fuchs was head of the scientific councils for energetic basic research and for fundamentals of microelectronics. He received the Patriotic Order of Merit, the Order of Karl Marx and the National Prize of East Germany.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation" (2009) by Thomas Reed and Daniel Stillman, it is argued that a tutorial Fuchs gave to Qian Sanqiang and other Chinese physicists helped them to develop the first Chinese atomic bomb, the "596", which was tested five years later. Three historians of nuclear weapons history, Robert S. Norris, Jeremy Bernstein, and Peter D. Zimmerman, challenged this particular assertion as "unsubstantiated conjecture" and asserted that "The Nuclear Express" is "an ambitious but deeply flawed book".


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: Fuchs died in Berlin on 28 January 1988. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the "Pergolenweg" of the Socialists' Memorial in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: A documentary film about Fuchs, "Väter der tausend Sonnen" ("Fathers of a Thousand Suns"), was released in 1990.


title: Klaus Fuchs

text: In 2022 Fuchs was the primary focus of the second season of the BBC World Service's podcast The Bomb.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: In ancient Rome, the Vestal Virgins or Vestals (, singular ) were priestesses of Vesta, virgin goddess of Rome's sacred hearth.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vestals were unlike any other public priesthood. They were chosen before puberty from a number of suitable candidates, freed from any legal ties and obligations to their birth family, and enrolled in Vesta's priestly college of six priestesses. They were supervised by a senior vestal but chosen and governed by Rome's leading male priest, the ; in the Imperial era, this meant the emperor.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Successful acolytes vowed a thirty-year committment to serve Vesta, to study and carry out her rites in service of the Roman State, and to maintain their chastity. As well as their obligations on behalf of Rome, Vestals had extraordinary rights and privileges, some of which were granted to no others, male or female.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vestals took it in turns to supervise Vesta's hearth, so that at least one was stationed there at all times. Vestals who allowed the sacred fire to go out were punished with whipping. Vestals who lost their chastity were guilty of , and were punished with living burial, a bloodless death that must seem voluntary. Their sexual partners were publicly whipped to death. In over a thousand years from the legendary foundation of Vesta's to its disbanding, this punishment was rare and notable, used "no more than a handful" of times. Most vestals retired with a generous pension and universal respect. They were then free to marry, though few of them did. Some appear to have renewed their vows.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: In 382 AD, the Christian emperor Gratian confiscated the public revenues assigned to the cult of Vesta in Rome, and the Vestals vanish from historical record soon after.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Priesthoods with similar functions to the Vestals of Rome had an ancient and deeply embedded religious role in various surrounding Latin communities. According to Livy, the Vestals had pre-Roman origins at Alba Longa; a virginal daughter of the king, forced by her usurper uncle to become a Vestal, miraculously gave birth to twin boys, Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars; they survived their uncle's attempts to kill them through exposure or drowning, and Romulus went on to found Rome. In the most widely accepted versions of Rome's beginnings the city's legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, built its first Temple of Vesta, appointed its first pair of Vestals and subsidised them as a collegiate priesthood. Rome's 6th King Servius Tullius, who was also said to have been miraculously fathered by the fire-god Vulcan or the household Lar on a captive Vestal, increased the number of Vestals to four. Ambrose claims the apointment of seven in his own day, but this is unlikely; in the Imperial era, six was usual.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vestals were a powerful and influential priesthood. Towards the end of the Republican era, when Sulla included the young Julius Caesar in his proscriptions, the Vestals interceded on Caesar's behalf and gained him pardon. Caesar's adopted heir, Augustus, promoted the Vestals' moral reputation and presence at public functions, and restored several of their customary privileges that had fallen into abeyance. They were held in awe, and attributed certain mysterious and supernatural powers and abilities. Pliny the Elder tacitly accepted these powers as fact:


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The 4th-century AD urban prefect Symmachus, who sought to maintain traditional Roman religion during the rise of Christianity, wrote:


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Dissolution of the Vestal College would have followed soon after the emperor Gratian confiscated their revenues in 382 AD. The last epigraphically attested Vestal is Coelia Concordia, a who in 385 AD erected a statue to the deceased pontiff Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. The pagan historian Zosimos claims that when Theodosius I visited Rome in 394 AD, his niece Serena insulted an aged Vestal, said to be the last of her kind. it is not clear from Zosimos's narrative whether Vesta's cult was still functioning, maintained by that single Vestal, or moribund. Cameron is skeptical of the entire tale, noting that Theodosius did not visit Rome in 394.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vestals were committed to the priestesshood before puberty (when 6–10 years old) and sworn to celibacy for a period of 30 years. These 30 years were divided in turn into three decade-long periods during which Vestals were respectively students, servants, and teachers.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: After her 30-year term of service, each Vestal retired and was replaced by a new inductee. Once retired, a former Vestal was given a pension and allowed to marry. The , acting as the father of the bride, would typically arrange a marriage with a suitable Roman nobleman. A marriage to a former Vestal was highly honoured, and – more importantly in ancient Rome – thought to bring good luck, as well as a comfortable pension.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: To obtain entry into the order, a girl had to be free of physical, moral and mental defects, have two living parents and be a daughter of a free-born resident of Rome. From at least the mid-Republican era, the chose Vestals between their sixth and tenth year, by lot from a group of twenty high-born candidates at a gathering of their families and other Roman citizens.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Originally, the girl had to be of patrician birth, but membership was opened to plebeians as it became difficult to find patricians willing to commit their daughters to 30 years as a Vestal, and then ultimately even from the daughters of freedmen for the same reason. The earlier, stricter selection rules were determined by the Papian Law of the 3rd century BCE.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The choosing ceremony was known as a (capture). Once a girl was chosen to be a Vestal, the pointed to her and led her away from her parents with the words, "I take you, (beloved), to be a Vestal priestess, who will carry out sacred rites which it is the law for a Vestal priestess to perform on behalf of the Roman people, on the same terms as her who was a Vestal 'on the best terms' " (thus, with all the entitlements of a Vestal). As soon as she entered the atrium of Vesta's temple, she was under the goddess's service and protection.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: To replace a Vestal who had died before her term ended, candidates would be presented in the quarters of the chief Vestal for the selection of the most virtuous. Unlike normal inductees, these candidates did not have to be prepubescent, nor even virgin (they could be young widows or even divorcees, though that was frowned upon and thought unlucky). Tacitus recounts how Gaius Fonteius Agrippa and Domitius Pollio offered their daughters as Vestal candidates in 19 AD to fill such a vacant position. Equally matched, Pollio's daughter was chosen only because Agrippa had been recently divorced. The (Tiberius) "consoled" the failed candidate with a dowry of 1 million sesterces.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The chief Vestal ( or , "greatest of the Vestals") oversaw the work and morals of the Vestals, and was a member of the College of Pontiffs. The chief Vestal was probably the most influential and independent of Rome's high priestesses, having committment to the maintenance of several different cults, maintaining personal connections to her birth family and cultivating the society of her equals among the Roman elite. The Occia presided over the Vestals for 57 years, according to Tacitus. The and the also held unique responsibility for certain religious rites, but each held office by virtue of their standing as the spouse of a male priest.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Vestal tasks included the maintenance of their chastity, tending Vesta's sacred fire, guarding her sacred (store-room) and its contents; collecting ritually pure water from a sacred spring; preparing substances used in public rites and presiding at the Vestalia and perhaps other festivals. Vesta's temple was essentially the temple of all Rome and its citizens; it was open all day, by night it was closed but only to men. The Vestals regularly swept and cleansed Vesta's shrine, functioning as surrogate housekeepers, in a religious sense, for all of Rome, and maintaining and controlling the connections between Rome's public and private religion. So long as their bodies remained unpenetrated, the walls of Rome would remain intact. Their flesh belonged to Rome, and when they died, whatever the cause of their death, their bodies remained within the city's boundary.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vesals acknowledged one of their number as senior authority, the "Vestalis Maxima", but all were ultimately under the authority of the , head of his priestly college. His influence and status grew during the Republican era, and the religious post became an important, lifetime adjunct to the political power of the annually elected consulship. When Augustus became , and thus supervisor of all religion, he donated his house to the Vestals. Their sacred fire became his household fire, and his domestic gods (Lares and Penates) became their responsibility. This arrangement between Vestals and Emperor persisted throughout the Imperial era.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The Vestals guarded various sacred objects kept in Vesta's , including the Palladium – a statue of Pallas Athene which had supposedly been brought from Troy – and a large, presumably wooden phallus, used in fertility rites and at least one triumphal procession, perhaps slung beneath the triumphal general's chariot.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The chief festival of Vesta was the Vestalia, a festival of purification held in Vesta's temple and celebrated June 7 until June 15, attended by matrons and bakers. Three times a year, so Servius claims, the three youngest Vestals reaped unripened (spelt wheat, or possibly emmer wheat). The three senior Vestals parched it to make it edible, and mixed it with salt, to make the used by priests and priestesses to consecrate (dedicate to the gods) the animal victims offered in public sacrifices. Servius claims that this was done during the Vestalia, the Lupercalia and on September 13.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: For the Fordicidia, an essentialy rustic, agricultural festival, an unborn calf was drawn from a pregnant cow sacrificed to the Earth-goddess Tellus, and reduced to ashes by the senior Vestal. The ashes were mixed with various substances, most notably the dried blood of the previous year's sacrificial October horse, to make . This had only one use; on April 21st it was sprinkled on the Parilia bonfires, to purify shepherds and their flocks; a role that embraced both public and private religion in care of the dead. Parilia led up to Lemuralia, to placate the unquiet spirits of those who had died without rites or burial or before their time. On May 1st, Vestals officiated at Bona Dea's public-private, women-only rites at her Aventine temple; Vestals were present in some capacity at the Bona Dea's December festival, which was also women-only but was hosted by the wife of Rome's senior magistrate, who was supposed to stay elsewhere for the occasion. On May 15, Vestals and pontifs collected ritual straw figures called Argei from stations along Rome's city boundary and cast them into the Tiber, to purify the city.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The presence of Vestal Virgins was required for numerous public ceremonies, to which they were transported in a , an enclosed, two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage whose use was unique to the Vestals; some Roman sources point out its likeness to the chariots used by Roman generals in triumphs. Otherwise, Vestals were carried in a one-seat, curtained litter. Whether travelling by or litter, or on foot they were preceded by a lictor, and had the right-of-way; anyone who passed beneath the litter, or interfered with its passage, could be lawfully killed on the spot. In law, Vestals were – in effect, "sovereign over themselves" and answerable only to the . This might reflect his authority as over the life and death of Vestals as "daughters of Rome", though this is inconsistent with their legal independence from their birth-family's control. In their presence, the lictors of all other magistrates had to lower their , the symbols of the magistrate's powers and authority. The Vestals were deemed uncorrupted by sights forbidden to all other upperclass Roman women, and had reserved ring-side seating at public games and stage-side seats at theatrical performances, including gladiator contests. Unlike any other Roman women, they could make a will of their own volition, and dispose their property without sanction of a male guardian. They could give evidence in trials without first taking the customary oath, and held custody of important wills and state documents, which were presumably locked away in the . Their person was sacrosanct; anyone who assaulted a Vestal was, in effect, guilty of assaulting the gods, and could be killed with impunity.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Vestals also had the power to free condemned prisoners and slaves by touching them – if a person sentenced to death saw a Vestal on their way to their execution, they were automatically pardoned, as long as the encounter had not been pre-arranged.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: Allowing the sacred fire of Vesta to die out was a serious dereliction of duty. It suggested that the goddess had withdrawn her protection from Rome. The extinction of the fire might be a prodigy, a sign from the gods that the "pax deorum" ("peace of the gods") was disrupted by some impropriety or religious offence. Romans had a duty to report prodigies to the Senate, who consulted religious advisers and if neccesary, took appropriate action to restore the right relationship between mortals and gods. This usually involved the offering of a special sacrifice and the destruction of the object that had caused divine offence. If the inquiry confirmed that the extinguishing of the sacred fire was Vestal's fault, it was expiated by a scourging or beating, carried out "in the dark and through a curtain to preserve their modesty". However, loss of chastity was irreversible; no "piaculum" or expiation could restore it or compensate its loss.


title: Vestal Virgin

text: The chastity of Vestals was thought to have a direct bearing on the health of the Roman state. When they entered the , they left behind the authority of their natural fathers and became daughters of the state, members of Vesta's priestly community, with the "pontifex maximus" as symbolic "paterfamilias". Decisions to try, discharge or punish Vestal negligence or "incestum" were the collective responsibility of the and the Vestal college. By committing , a Vestal breached Rome's contract with the gods. An unchaste Vestal was a contradiction, a visible religious embarrasment. By ancient tradition, she must die, but she must seem to do so willingly, and her blood could not be spilled. The city could not seem responsible for her death, and burial of the dead was forbidden within the city's ritual boundary, so she was buried alive in the ("Evil Field") in an underground chamber near the Colline Gate, accompanied by a small quantity of food and drink, and a lamp – not to prolong her punishment, but so that the Vestal would not technically be interred, but instead descend into a "habitable room":