title: And Then There Were None (TV series)

text: Reviewing the first episode, UK daily newspaper "The Guardian"s Sam Wollaston noted, "[...] it also manages to be loyal, not just in plot but in spirit as well. I think the queen of crime would approve. I certainly do. Mass murder rarely gets as fun as this." Reviewing the final episode for "The Daily Telegraph", Tim Martin gave it 4 out of 5 stars, calling it a "class act", and praising the adaptation for highlighting the darkness of Christie's novel, which he claimed no previous adaptation had attempted. The Russian adaption, ‘’Desyat Negrityat’’ from 1987, however, was the first visual adaption to include the novel’s original ending.


title: And Then There Were None (TV series)

text: "And Then There Were None" was the first in a series of Christie adaptations scripted by Sarah Phelps for the BBC. The further instalments consisted of: "The Witness for the Prosecution" (2016), "Ordeal by Innocence" (2018), "The ABC Murders" (2018) and "The Pale Horse" (2020).


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The "Allen M. Sumner" class was a group of 58 destroyers built by the United States during World War II. Another twelve ships were completed as destroyer minelayers. The class was named for Allen Melancthon Sumner, an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Often referred to as simply the "Sumner", this class was distinguished from the previous by their twin 5-inch/38 caliber gun mounts, dual rudders, additional anti-aircraft weapons, and many other advancements. The "Allen M. Sumner" design was extended amidships to become the , which was produced in larger numbers but did not see significant service in World War II.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: Completed in 1943–45, four Sumners were lost in the war and two were damaged so badly they were scrapped, but the surviving ships served in the US Navy into the 1970s. After being retired from the US fleet, 29 of them were sold to other navies, where they served many more years. One still exists as a museum ship in South Carolina.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The first ship was laid down in May 1943, while the last was launched in April 1945. In that time the United States produced 58 "Allen M. Sumner"-class destroyers. The "Allen M. Sumner" class was an improvement of the previous , which were built from 1941 until 1944. In addition to three twin 5-inch/38 caliber gun mounts replacing the "Fletcher"s' five single mounts, "Sumner"s had twin rudders, giving them better maneuverability for ASW work when compared to "Fletcher"s. The 5-inch guns were guided by a Mark 37 Gun Fire Control System with a Mark 25 fire control radar linked by a Mark 1A Fire Control Computer stabilized by a Mark 6 8,500 rpm gyro. This fire control system provided effective long-range anti-aircraft (AA) or anti-surface fire. The "Allen M. Sumner"s also had larger set of short-range anti-aircraft armament than the "Fletcher"s, with 12 40 mm guns and 11 20 mm guns compared with the 10 40 mm and 7 20 mm complement typical of a late-war standard "Fletcher". The initial design retained the "Fletcher"s' heavy torpedo armament of 10 tubes in two quintuple mounts, firing the Mark 15 torpedo. As the threat from "kamikaze" aircraft mounted in 1945, and with few remaining Japanese warships to use torpedoes on, most of the class had the aft quintuple 21-inch torpedo tube mount replaced by an additional 40 mm quadruple mount for 16 total 40 mm guns.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The "Allen M. Sumner"s achieved a 20% increase in 5-inch gun armament and almost a 50% increase in light AA armament on a hull the same length as a "Fletcher", only wider, and about 15 inches (38 cm) deeper in draft. The increase in standard displacement was only 150 tons, about 7.5%. Thus, the "Allen M. Sumner" class was a significant improvement in combat power at a small increase in cost.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: See also destroyer minelayer (DM), twelve of which were built on hulls originally intended as "Allen M. Sumner"s. s were of the same design, modified with a midship extension to carry more fuel to extend the ships' range.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The "Allen M. Sumner"s served on radar picket stations in the Battle of Okinawa, as well as other duties, and had several losses. "Cooper", "Meredith", "Mannert L. Abele", and "Drexler" were lost during the war, and "Hugh W. Hadley" was so badly damaged by a kamikaze attack that she was scrapped soon after the war ended. In addition, "Frank E. Evans" was split in half in a collision with the aircraft carrier HMAS "Melbourne", and never repaired. After the war most of the class (except some of the light minelayers) had their 40 mm and 20 mm guns replaced by up to six 3-inch/50 caliber guns (76 mm), and the pole mast was replaced by a tripod to carry a new, heavier radar. On most ships one depth charge rack was removed and two Hedgehog mounts added. One of the two quintuple torpedo tube mountings had already been removed on most to make way for a quadruple 40 mm gun mounting and additional radar for the radar picket mission. 33 ships were converted under the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization II (FRAM II) program 1960–65, but not as extensively as the "Gearing"s. Typically, FRAM "Allen M. Sumner"s retained all three 5-inch/38 twin mounts and received the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH), two triple Mark 32 torpedo tubes for the Mark 44 torpedo, and two new single 21-inch torpedo tubes for the Mark 37 torpedo, with all 3-inch and lighter guns, previous ASW armament, and 21-inch torpedo tubes being removed. Variable Depth Sonar (VDS) was also fitted; however, ASROC was not fitted. Ships that did not receive FRAM were typically upgraded with Mk 32 triple torpedo tubes in exchange for the K-guns, but retained Hedgehog and one depth charge rack.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: In Navy slang, the modified destroyers were called "FRAM cans", "can" being a contraction of "tin can", the slang term for a destroyer or destroyer escort.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: Many "Allen M. Sumner"s provided significant gunfire support in the Vietnam War. They also served as escorts for Carrier Battle Groups (Carrier Strike Groups from 2004) and Amphibious Ready Groups (Expeditionary Strike Groups from 2006). From 1965, some of the class were transferred to the Naval Reserve Force (NRF), with a partial active crew to train Naval reservists.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The ships served in the US Navy into the 1970s. DASH was withdrawn from anti-submarine warfare (ASW) service in 1969 due to poor reliability. Lacking ASROC, the "Allen M. Sumner"s were left without a standoff ASW capability, and were decommissioned 1970–73, with most being transferred to foreign navies. The FRAM Sumners were effectively replaced as ASW ships by the s (destroyer escorts prior to 1975), which were commissioned 1969–74 and carried a piloted helicopter, typically the Kaman SH-2 Seasprite, and ASROC. After the "Allen M. Sumner"s were retired from the US fleet, seven were sunk by the US in fleet training exercises and 13 were scrapped, while 29 were sold to other navies (two for spare parts), where they served for many more years. 12 were sold to the Republic of China Navy and 2 were sold to the Republic of Korea Navy. 2 were sold to the Iran and 1 was sold to Turkey. 1 was sold to Greece. 2 were sold to Venezuela, 2 to Colombia, 2 sold to Chile, 5 sold to Brazil and 4 to Argentina.


title: Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer

text: The Argentine Navy acquired four "Sumners" as a more capable adjunct to their previously acquired "Fletcher" class destroyers. While one was merely to provide spare parts to keep the rest of the fleet serviceable, the other three would go on and serve through the Falklands War, in which they would take a minor role. Soon after the conflict, they were stricken and disposed of.


title: Ufology

text: Ufology ( ) is the investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may be of extraordinary origins (most frequently of extraterrestrial alien visitors). While there are instances of government, private, and fringe science investigations of UFOs, ufology is generally regarded by skeptics and science educators as a canonical example of pseudoscience.


title: Ufology

text: Ufology is a neologism derived from "UFO" (a term apparently coined by Edward J. Ruppelt), and is derived from appending the acronym UFO with the suffix "-logy" (from the Ancient Greek "λογία" ("logiā")). Early uses of ufology include an article in "Fantastic Universe" (1957) and a 1958 presentation for the UFO "research organization" The Planetary Center.


title: Ufology

text: The roots of ufology include the "mystery airships" of the late 1890s, the "foo fighters" reported by Allied airmen during World War II, the "ghost fliers" of Europe and North America during the 1930s, the "ghost rockets" of Scandinavia (mostly Sweden) in 1946, and the Kenneth Arnold "flying saucer" sighting of 1947. Media attention to the Arnold sighting helped publicize the concept of flying saucers.


title: Ufology

text: Publicity of UFOs increased after World War II, coinciding with the escalation of the Cold War and strategic concerns related to the development and detection (e.g., the Ground Observer Corps) of advanced Soviet aircraft. Official, government-sponsored activities in the United States related to ufology ended in the late 1960s following the Condon Committee report and the termination of Project Blue Book. Government-sponsored, UFO-related activities in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Italy, and Sweden also ended. An exception to this trend is France, which maintains the GEIPAN program, formerly known as GEPAN (1977–1988) and SEPRA (1988–2004), operated by the French Space Agency CNES.


title: Ufology

text: Despite investigations sponsored by governments and private entities, ufology is not embraced by academia as a scientific field of study, and is instead generally considered a pseudoscience by skeptics and science educators, being often included on lists of topics characterized as pseudoscience as either a partial or total pseudoscience. "Pseudoscience" is a term that classifies arguments that are claimed to exemplify the methods and principles of science, but do not in fact adhere to an appropriate scientific method, lack supporting evidence, plausibility, falsifiability, or otherwise lack scientific status.


title: Ufology

text: Some writers have identified social factors that contribute to the status of ufology as a pseudoscience,<ref name="10.1177/0963662515617706"></ref> with one study suggesting that "any science doubt surrounding unidentified flying objects and aliens was not primarily due to the ignorance of ufologists about science, but rather a product of the respective research practices of and relations between ufology, the sciences, and government investigative bodies". One study suggests that "the rudimentary standard of science communication attending to the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) hypothesis for UFOs inhibits public understanding of science, dissuades academic inquiry within the physical and social sciences, and undermines progressive space policy initiatives".


title: Ufology

text: In 2021, astronomer Avi Loeb launched The Galileo Project which intends to collect and report scientific evidence of extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial technology on or near Earth via telescopic observations.


title: Ufology

text: In Germany, the University of Würzburg is developing intelligent sensors that can help detect and analyze aerial objects in hopes of applying such technology to UAP.


title: Ufology

text: According to reports, the partly-public 2022 United States Congress hearings on UFOs after the 2021 UFO report 'Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' by U.S. intelligence agencies (or the ODNI) and the 2021 Pentagon UFO videos may result in the UAP issue being studied. In 2022, NASA announced a nine-month study starting in fall to help establish a road map for investigating UAP – or for reconnaissance of the publicly available data it might use for such research.


title: Ufology

text: A 2021 Gallup poll found that belief among Americans in some UFOs being extraterrestrial spacecraft grew between 2019 and 2021 from 33% to 41%. Gallup cited increased coverage in mainstream news and scrutiny from government authorities as a factor in changing attitudes towards UFOs.


title: Ufology

text: Although some ufologists (e.g., Peter A. Sturrock) have proposed explicit methodological activities for investigation of UFOs, scientific UFO research is challenged by the facts that the phenomena are spatially and temporally unpredictable, are not reproducible, and lack tangible physicality. That most UFO sightings have mundane explanations limits interpretive power of "interesting," extraordinary UFO-related events, with the astronomer Carl Sagan writing: "The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable. Unfortunately there are no cases that are both reliable and interesting."


title: Ufology

text: The ufologists J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée have each developed descriptive systems for characterizing UFO sightings, and by extension for organizing ufology investigations.


title: Ufology

text: In addition to UFO sightings, certain supposedly related phenomena are of interest to some ufologists, including crop circles, cattle mutilations, anomalous materials,<ref name="10.1016/j.paerosci.2021.100788"></ref> alien abductions and implants.


title: Ufology

text: Some ufologists have also promoted UFO conspiracy theories, including the Roswell Incident of 1947, the Majestic 12 documents, and UFO disclosure advocates.


title: Ufology

text: Skeptic Robert Sheaffer has accused ufology of having a "credulity explosion," writing that, "the kind of stories generating excitement and attention in any given year would have been rejected by mainstream ufologists a few years earlier for being too outlandish." The physicist James E. McDonald also identified "cultism" and "extreme...subgroups" as negatively impacting ufology.


title: Ufology

text: During the Cold War, ufology was synthesized with the ideas of a Trotskyist movement in South America known as Posadism. Posadism's main theorist, Juan Posadas, believed the human race must "appeal to the beings on other planets...to intervene and collaborate with Earth’s inhabitants in suppressing poverty;" i.e., Posadas wished to collaborate with extraterrestrials in order to create a socialist system on Earth. The adoption of this belief among Posadists, who had previously been a significant political force in South America, has been noted as a contributing factor in their decline.


title: Ufology

text: Starting in the 1940s, investigations, studies, and conferences related to ufology were sponsored by governmental agencies and private groups. Typically motivated by visual UFO sightings, the goals of these studies included critical evaluation of the observational evidence, attempts to resolve and identify the observed events, and the development of policy recommendations. These studies include Project Sign, Project Magnet, Project Blue Book, the Robertson Panel, and the Condon Committee in the United States, the Flying Saucer Working Party and Project Condign in Britain, GEIPAN in France, and Project Hessdalen in Norway. Private studies of UFO phenomena include those produced by the RAND Corporation in 1968, Harvey Rutledge of the University of Missouri from 1973 to 1980, and the National Press Club's Disclosure Project in 2001. Additionally, the United Nations from 1977 to 1979 sponsored meetings and hearings concerning UFO sightings. In August 2020, the United States Department of Defense established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to detect, analyze and catalog unidentified aerial phenomena that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.


title: Ufology

text: A large number of private organizations dedicated to the study, discussion, and publicity of ufology and other UFO-related topics exist throughout the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Along with such "pro-UFO" groups are skeptic organizations that emphasize the pseudoscientific nature of ufology.


title: Ufology

text: During the annual World UFO Day (July 2), ufologists and associated organizations raise public awareness of ufology, in an effort to "tell the truth about earthly visits from outer space aliens." The day's events include group gatherings to search for and observe UFOs.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus Entertainment Inc. is a Canadian mass media company. Formed in 1999 as a spin-off from Shaw Communications, it has prominent holdings in the radio, publishing, and television industries. It is headquartered at Corus Quay in Toronto, Ontario.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus has a large presence in Canadian broadcasting as owner of the national Global network (15 conventional stations), 39 radio stations, and a portfolio of 33 specialty television services; the company's domestic specialty brands include Showcase, SériesPlus, Slice, Teletoon, Télétoon, W Network, and YTV. It also operates services under brand licensing agreements with A&E Networks (History and Lifetime), Paramount Global (CMT and Nickelodeon), Walt Disney Television (including its Disney Branded Television, Freeform, and National Geographic units), and Warner Bros. Discovery (Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and lifestyle brands).


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus owns the animation studio Nelvana, animation software vendor Toon Boom Animation, and as well as the children's publisher Kids Can Press. The second incarnation of Shaw's media division—formed from the properties of the bankrupt Canwest Global—was subsumed by Corus on April 1, 2016, giving it control of the over-the-air Global network and 19 additional specialty channels. In May 2019, Shaw announced that it would sell its shares in Corus for roughly $500 million.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In September 1998, JR Shaw and Shaw Media CEO John Cassaday announced plans for Shaw Communications to spin out its media properties, including radio stations and television specialty channels, into a company which would be known as Corus Entertainment. The spin-out would leave Shaw as a "pure play" telecommunications company. The decision to spin out the properties was meant to comply with current Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) recommendations, which discouraged vertical integration by cable companies that also owned media properties. Corus would be a separate, publicly traded company, first listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in September 1999, but it would still be primarily controlled by the Shaw family.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In September 1999, Corus acquired the broadcasting assets of the Power Corporation of Canada, which included four television stations and sixteen radio stations. One of these stations, CHAU-TV, was later re-sold to Télé Inter-Rives. In October 1999, it was announced that as part of the break-up of Western International Communications (WIC), Corus would acquire the company's 12 radio stations and most of its specialty channels, including stakes in Family Channel, SuperChannel and MovieMax!.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In September 2000, after negotiations and rumoured offers by other studios, Corus announced that it would acquire the Toronto-based animation studio Nelvana for $540 million; the deal was considered to be a complement to its children's television networks (which had often acquired programming from Nelvana), including YTV, Treehouse, and its stakes in Family Channel, Teletoon, and its French counterpart Télétoon. Corus also stated that it planned to use the purchase to help launch a preschool-oriented cable network in the United States.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In March 2001, in response to complaints by the CRTC over its near-monopoly on ownership of children's specialty channels in Canada, Corus sold its stake in Family Channel to Astral Media for $126.9 million, making it a sister channel to The Movie Network and giving them full ownership. Corus also sold its stake in the Western Canadian pay-per-view service Viewers Choice to Shaw Communications for $22.6 million, and acquired the Women's Television Network (WTN) from Shaw (which had bought its parent, Moffat Communications, for its cablesystem assets) for $132.6 million. In August 2002, Corus sold CKDO and CKGE-FM to Durham Radio.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In May 2002, Corus announced that it had acquired a 50% stake in Locomotion, a Latin American and Spanish channel focusing primarily of animated series targeting teens and young adults. Hearst Corporation owned the other half.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In March 2004, Corus and Astral announced that it would acquire and swap radio stations in Quebec; Corus acquired the Radiomédia network (including CKAC) and Quebec City's CFOM, while Astral acquired CFVM-FM Amqui, CJOI-FM and CIKI-FM Rimouski, CFZZ-FM Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, and CJDM-FM Drummondville. Corus also sold its Red Deer, Alberta stations CKGY-FM and CIZZ-FM to Newcap Radio.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In July 2007, Corus acquired CKBT-FM and CJZZ-FM from Canwest. In June 2008, CHRC was sold to the ownership group of the Quebec Remparts hockey team.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Also in August 2007, Corus Entertainment announced a partnership with Hearst Corporation to launch Cosmopolitan TV. In March 2008, CTVglobemedia sold Canadian Learning Television to Corus for $73 million


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus launched a Canadian version of Nickelodeon on November 2, 2009, replacing the localized version of Discovery Kids. In 2010, Corus's sister company Shaw Communications re-entered the broadcasting industry through its acquisition of the media assets of the bankrupt Canwest, which re-formed the Shaw Media division.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On April 30, 2010, Corus announced that it would sell its Québec radio stations, with the exception of CKRS, to Cogeco for $80 million, pending CRTC approval. Corus cited their low profitability in comparison to their stations elsewhere as reasoning for the sale. On June 25, it was reported that Corus had agreed to sell CKRS to Radio Saguenay, a local business group. The sale of the Corus Québec stations was approved by the CRTC on December 17, 2010, on the condition that Cogeco-owned CJEC-FM and Corus-owned CFEL-FM and CKOY-FM be sold to another party by December 2011. On January 13, 2011, competing broadcaster Astral Media announced that they would seek legal action to stop the sale of these stations to Cogeco, citing the fact that it would own more stations than Astral in the Montreal market, making the competition unfair.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On November 9, 2010, Hasbro Studios signed an agreement with Corus to broadcast their productions on its networks.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In March 2012, Corus and Shaw launched ABC Spark, a localized version of U.S. cable network ABC Family, with Shaw owning 49%. In July 2012, the Teletoon Canada venture (50% with Astral Media) similarly launched a Canadian version of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In March 2013, as part of Bell Media's proposed acquisition of Astral Media, Corus reached a deal to acquire Astral's stakes in Historia, Séries+, and TELETOON Canada Inc., as well as the Ottawa radio stations CJOT-FM and CKQB-FM, for $400.6 million. This aspect of the deal, intended to quell concerns from the CRTC regarding Bell's total market share after the merger, was approved by the Competition Bureau on March 18, 2013. In an unrelated deal, Corus also announced that it would acquire Shaw Media's stakes in ABC Spark, Historia, and Séries+ in exchange for cash and its minority stake in Food Network Canada (quickly ended in April 2013). Corus indicated that these purchases were meant to help the company expand its television holdings in the competitive Quebec market. Corus also planned to open a new office in Montreal following the sale. On January 1, 2014, the acquisition was completed.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On September 1, 2013, Corus's television business was reorganized into five divisions; Corus Kids, Corus Women and Family, Corus Content Distribution and Pay TV, Corus Airtime Sales and Corus Média (for French-language assets). The Corus Kids division was subdivided into operations for their eight TV channels, Nelvana, and Kids Can Press.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On April 16, 2015, Corus Entertainment announced that it had reached an agreement with the Disney–ABC Television Group to acquire long-term, Canadian multi-platform rights to distribute Disney Channel's programming library and associated brands. As a result, Canadian versions of Disney Channel in English and French launched on September 1, 2015. Further re-alignment occurred the same day, with the discontinuation of the Teletoon Retro brand: the English version assumed the intellectual property of Cartoon Network (which widened its carriage), and the French version being replaced by the aforementioned Disney La Chaîne. New Corus-run Disney Junior and Disney XD services launched as well, on December 1, 2015. Before that, the existing versions owned by DHX Media were respectively rebranded to Family Jr. and Family CHRGD (the latter now WildBrainTV), spinoffs of Family, and they lost the rights to broadcast Disney content in Canada.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On November 20, 2015, Corus announced, as a result of a strategic review, it would shut down its premium Movie Central and Encore Avenue services on March 1, 2016 in order to focus more on its national specialty channels. Subscribers to the networks were migrated to Bell Media's The Movie Network and TMN Encore—ending the regional monopolies that TMN and Movie Central held in eastern and western Canada respectively. Bell Media made a payment of $211 million to Corus for assistance in coordinating this migration. Bell also announced that it would acquire Corus' stake in HBO Canada, giving them full ownership.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On January 13, 2016, Corus Entertainment announced that it would acquire Shaw Media for $1.85 billion, with Shaw Communications taking a 39% share of Corus stock. The division consisted primarily of the broadcasting assets of the former Canwest, including the over-the-air Global Television Network and 19 other specialty channels, such as Food Network, HGTV, Showcase, History, and Slice. The transaction was being used to fund Shaw Communications' purchase of wireless carrier Wind Mobile. Corus' CEO, Doug Murphy, described the transaction as being a "transformational acquisition that redefines Corus and Canada's media landscape".


title: Corus Entertainment

text: The transaction was officially structured as a reorganization of JR Shaw's assets. The CRTC considers the Shaw family's assets to be a single entity for regulatory purposes, which exempted the transaction from the CRTC's tangible benefits policy and scrutiny surrounding concentration of media ownership. The reorganization was approved on March 23, 2016, and completed on April 1, 2016. At the same time, multiple Shaw Media executives joined Corus (including its former CEO Barbara Williams, as its new executive VP and COO), and the company adopted a new logo.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On October 17, 2017, Bell Media announced its intent to acquire Historia and Séries+ from Corus for $200 million, which would have reunited them with the former Astral Media channels Canal D, Canal Vie, Vrak, and Z. Corus stated that the two channels were not part of its "strategic priorities" at this time. On May 28, 2018, the sale was blocked and rejected by the Competition Bureau, for violating conditions imposed on Bell that prohibits the company from regaining ownership of divested Astral properties for 10 years.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On June 13, 2018, "The Globe and Mail" reported that the Shaw family was exploring the sale of its shares in Corus, in order to fund future expansion of the Freedom Mobile business. In its third-quarter financial report, Corus reported a year-over-year loss of $91 million, in comparison to a profit of $133 million in 2017. Corus also made a $1.013 billion write-down on its broadcasting businesses, resulting in a quarterly loss of $935.9 million, and cut its dividend to 24 cents. Doug Murphy acknowledged changes to the market climate for television, and stated that the company would have a larger focus on automated and "microtargeted" advertising sales going forward (in particular, using artificial intelligence to analyze information from set-top boxes to determine the best advertising strategies).


title: Corus Entertainment

text: On March 4, 2019, it was announced that a full-time Canadian version of Adult Swim would be launched. The block was shut down on that same day, and relaunched as 24-hour channel on April 1, 2019, replacing the declining channel Action under its existing license.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In May 2019, Shaw announced it would sell its shares in Corus in a secondary offering, at a valuation of $548 million. The sale was expected to be completed by the end of the month.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In June 2019, Corus was announced as a launch partner for Amazon Prime Video Channels in Canada, offering a subscription-based bundle known as StackTV with access to live and on-demand programs from five Global TV stations and eleven Corus specialty services. At the same time, Corus would also launch a separate Nickelodeon SVOD channel known as Nick+.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In July 2019, multiple service providers began notifying their customers that two of Corus' declining specialty channels, IFC Canada and CosmoTV, would cease operations on September 30, 2019. In October 2019, FYI announced that it would shutter as well on December 31, 2019.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In March 2020, Corus replaced the individual mobile apps for most of its specialty channels with a new unified app under the Global brand, featuring content from Global, Global News, Food Network, HGTV, History, Showcase, Slice, and W Network on-launch. The app encompasses the TV Everywhere streaming of programming from the networks for their subscribers, as well as free ad-supported streaming of selected programs from the networks without a television subscription.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: In June and July 2020, Corus reached two content agreements with subsidiaries of Comcast, including Canadian rights to original series produced for its U.S. streaming service Peacock (NBCUniversal) on June 23, 2020, and Canadian rights to original productions from British subsidiary Sky Studios via NBCUniversal Global Distribution (the agreements exclude DreamWorks Animation's television subsidiary, which has a pre-existing output agreement with WildBrain).


title: Corus Entertainment

text: BBC Canada was shut down on December 31, 2020; Blue Ant Media would launch a "de facto" successor, BBC First, in March 2021.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus is an industry sponsor of the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus; Gary Maavara, Corus' Corporate Secretary, sits on the Waterloo campus' advisory board. The company also funds a couple of endowed chair positions, including chair in Women in Management at the Ivey Business School (London, Ontario, Canada) beginning in 2003, and a chair in Communications Strategy at the Rotman School of Management (Toronto) beginning in 2002.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Corus Entertainment was formed from the media assets that had been owned by Shaw Communications in the years before. Shaw and Corus are independent, publicly traded companies, but nonetheless, some reports indicate that the two companies continued to have a close relationship. For several years, Corus managed advertising operations (such as TV listings channels) for Shaw's cable systems, although this operation has since been discontinued. Executives have also occasionally moved between the two companies, with former Corus Television president Paul Robertson joining Shaw to head Shaw Media (the former Canwest broadcasting operations) in 2010.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: Following Shaw's 2010 acquisition of Canwest's TV assets, the two companies incidentally became partners in certain channels including Dusk (later replaced by ABC Spark) and the Canadian version of Food Network; these two partnerships were unwound in April 2013. Otherwise, there was no connection or common programming between Corus's conventional and specialty television operations and those of Shaw Media. For example, Corus owns three over-the-air TV stations which were longtime CBC affiliates, and which agreed in 2015 to switch to Bell Media's CTV network, despite Shaw owning the rival Global network at the time. Following the merger of the Shaw Media properties into Corus, the Corus-operated CTV affiliates began transitioning to Global programming in September 2016 (beginning with CTV News programming being phased out in favour of Global News), and eventually switching to Global full-time after their affiliation expired on August 27, 2018.


title: Corus Entertainment

text: As Corus Entertainment and Shaw Communications are both effectively controlled by JR Shaw, the CRTC considers them to be one entity regarding the "Diversity of Voices" policy and a vertical integration rule which requires television providers to carry three channels owned by unaffiliated parties for each co-owned channel they offer: due to the effective control, Corus networks that are carried by Shaw television services are subject to this rule.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Contact is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on the 1985 U.S. bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film "Contact" starring Jodie Foster.


title: Contact (novel)

text: As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father and role-model Theodore ("Ted") dies. A man named John Staughton becomes her stepfather and does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and concludes that her mother only remarried out of weakness.


title: Contact (novel)

text: After graduating from Harvard University, Ellie receives a doctorate from Caltech supervised by David Drumlin, a well-known radio astronomer. She eventually becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radiotelescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This puts her at odds with most of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who tries to have the funding to SETI cut off. To his surprise, the project discovers a signal containing a series of prime numbers coming from the Vega system 26 light years away. Further analysis reveals information in the polarization modulation of the signal: a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first television signal powerful enough to escape Earth's ionosphere.


title: Contact (novel)

text: The President of the United States meets with Ellie to discuss the implications of the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. With the help of her Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, Ellie is able to set up redundant monitoring of the signal so that a telescope remains pointed at Vega at all times. A third message is discovered describing plans for an advanced machine. With no way of decoding the 30,000 pages, SETI scientists surmise that there must be a primer that they have missed.


title: Contact (novel)

text: At the President's insistence, Ellie agrees to meet with two religious leaders, Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A lifelong religious skeptic, Ellie tries to convince Joss of her faith in science by standing near a heavy Foucault pendulum and trusting that its amplitude will not increase. Although dismissing Rankin's outbursts, Ellie is intrigued by Joss' worldview. Shortly after, Ellie travels to Paris to discuss the machine with a newly formed consortium. The participants reach a consensus that the machine is a dodecahedron-shaped vehicle with five seats. At the conference, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who left India to marry the man she loved, only to lose him to illness a year later. The final piece of the message is discovered when S. R. Hadden, a billionaire in multiple high-tech industries with an obsessive personal interest in the concept of immortality, suggests that Ellie check for phase modulation. This reveals the primer, thus allowing construction of the machine to begin.


title: Contact (novel)

text: The American and Soviet governments enter a race to construct identical copies of the machine. As errors in the Soviet project are discovered, the American machine becomes the only option. Ellie applies to be one of the five passengers, but her spot is given to David Drumlin instead. Despite heavy security, a group of extremists is able to get a bomb into one of the fabrication plants in Wyoming. During a visit by three astronomers, the bomb explodes, killing Drumlin and postponing completion of the machine indefinitely. Ellie's family also suffers when her mother has a stroke, which causes paralysis. John Staughton accuses Ellie of ignoring her own mother for years.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Ellie learns that S. R. Hadden has taken up residence aboard a private space station. While on board, he reveals that his company has been covertly building a third copy of the machine in Hokkaido, Japan. The activation date is set for December 31, 1999 and Ellie, Vaygay and Devi are given three of the seats. The other two are given to Abonnema Eda, a Nigerian physicist credited with discovering the theory of everything and Xi Qiaomu, a Chinese archaeologist and expert on the Qin dynasty. While in Japan, Ellie receives a medallion from Joss, which she carries aboard the Machine as it is activated.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Once activated, the dodecahedron transports the group through a series of wormholes to a massive station near the center of the Milky Way. The station contains a surreal Earth-like beach where the five are split up. Ellie meets an extraterrestrial in a form indistinguishable from Ted Arroway, who explains his people's reasons for making contact, and tells her of their ongoing project to alter the properties of the universe by accumulating enough mass in Cygnus A to counter the effects of entropy. He also tells her that the wormhole system was built by unknown precursors, and hints at the discovery of artificial messages in transcendental numbers like π. Ellie is reunited with the other four travellers who have also met simulations of their loved ones. She captures video evidence of the encounter before the dodecahedron takes them back to Earth.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Upon returning, the passengers discover that what seemed like many hours took no time at all from Earth's perspective. They also find that all of their video footage has been erased, presumably by magnetic fields in the wormholes. After seeing that Hadden is apparently dead and that the transmission has somehow been stopped without a 26-year delay, government officials accuse the travellers of an international conspiracy. They blackmail Ellie and her fellow travellers into silence until more evidence can be found. Palmer Joss becomes one of the few people willing to believe her story that she can only justify on faith.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Acting on the suggestion of "Ted", Ellie works on a program to compute the digits of π to heretofore-unprecedented lengths. Ellie's mother dies before this project delivers its first result. A final letter from her informs Ellie that John Staughton, not Ted Arroway, is Ellie's biological father. When Ellie looks at what the computer has found, she sees a circle rasterized from 0s and 1s that appear after 10 places in the base 11 representation of π. This not only provides evidence of her journey, but suggests that intelligence is behind the universe itself.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Reading science fiction and fantasy as a child inspired Carl Sagan to become an astronomer. As an adult he preferred realistic stories that helped readers understand real science and history, like Robert Heinlein's "—And He Built a Crooked House—" and L. Sprague de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall". In 1978 Sagan predicted that because of science fiction, "I know many young people who would, of course, be interested, but in no way astounded, were we to receive a message tomorrow from an extraterrestrial civilization". In 1981, Simon & Schuster gave Sagan a $2 million advance on the novel. At the time, "the advance was the largest ever made for a book that had not yet been written." The first printing was 265,000 copies. In the first two years it sold 1,700,000 copies. It was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month-Club.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Sagan's friend physicist Kip Thorne gave Sagan ideas on the nature of wormholes when Sagan was developing the outline of the novel.


title: Contact (novel)

text: Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet. The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher Jill Tarter.


title: The Goldbergs (season 9)

text: The ninth season of the American television comedy series "The Goldbergs" premiered on September 22, 2021.


title: The Goldbergs (season 9)

text: This is the first season without George Segal as Albert "Pops" Solomon, as Segal died in March 2021. The Pops character appears only in flashbacks in the season's first episode, which is dedicated to the actor.


title: The Goldbergs (season 9)

text: Season 9 is also the last with Jeff Garlin as Murray. On December 15, 2021, it was announced that Garlin was leaving the show effective immediately due to multiple misconduct allegations and HR investigations. The show was filming the fifteenth episode at the time so from that episode onward, Garlin's character continued to appear on the show portrayed via the use of outtakes, a stand-in, and CGI.


title: The Goldbergs (season 9)

text: In January 2022, the season's length was increased from 18 to 22 episodes. In May 2022, the series was renewed for a tenth season.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: "Nearer, My God, to Thee" is a 19th-century Christian hymn by Sarah Flower Adams, which retells the story of Jacob's dream. Genesis 28:11–12 can be translated as follows: "So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it..."


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: The hymn is well known, among other uses, as the alleged last song the band on RMS "Titanic" played before the ship sank and was sung by the crew and passengers of the as it sank off the Canadian coast in 1906.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: The verse was written by the English poet and Unitarian hymn writer Sarah Flower Adams at her home "Sunnybank", in Loughton, Essex, England, in 1841. It was first set to music by Adams's sister, the composer Eliza Flower, for William Johnson Fox's collection "Hymns and Anthems".


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: In the United Kingdom, the hymn is usually associated with the 1861 hymn tune "Horbury" by John Bacchus Dykes, named for a village near Wakefield, England, where Dykes had found "peace and comfort". In the rest of the world, the hymn is usually sung to the 1856 tune "Bethany" by Lowell Mason. British Methodists prefer the tune "Propior Deo" (Nearer to God), written by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) in 1872. Sullivan wrote a second setting of the hymn to a tune referred to as "St. Edmund". Mason's tune has also penetrated the British repertoire.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: The "Methodist Hymn Book" of 1933 includes Horbury and two other tunes, "Nearer To Thee" (American) and "Nearer, My God, To Thee" (T C Gregory, 1901–?), while its successor "Hymns and Psalms" of 1983 uses Horbury and "Wilmington" by Erik Routley. "Songs of Praise" includes Horbury, "Rothwell" (Geoffrey Shaw) and "Liverpool" (John Roberts/Ieuan Gwyllt, 1822–1877) Liverpool also features in the "BBC Hymn Book" of 1951 and the "Baptist Hymn Book" of 1962 (with Propior Deo) The original "English Hymnal" includes the hymn set to Horbury, while its replacement "New English Hymnal" drops the hymn. "Hymns Ancient and Modern" included Horbury and "Communion" (S S Wesley), although later versions, including "Common Praise", standardise on Horbury.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: Other 19th century settings include those by the Rev. N. S. Godfrey, W. H. Longhurst, Herbert Columbine, Frederic N. Löhr, Thomas Adams, Stephen Glover, Henry Tucker, John Rogers Thomas, and one composed jointly by William Sterndale Bennett and Otto Goldschmidt. In 1955, the English composer and musicologist Sir Jack Westrup composed a setting in the form of an anthem for four soloists with organ accompaniment.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: "Nearer, My God, to Thee" is associated with the sinking of the RMS "Titanic", as some survivors later reported that the ship's string ensemble played the hymn as the vessel sank. For example, Violet Jessop said in her 1934 account of the disaster that she had heard the hymn being played; Archibald Gracie IV, however, emphatically denied it in his own account, written soon after the sinking, and wireless operator Harold Bride said that he had heard "Autumn", by which he may have meant Archibald Joyce's then-popular waltz "Songe d'Automne" (Autumn Dream). Feature films based on the "Titanic" disaster depict the band playing various versions of the hymn or other music. The 1929 film "Atlantic", and the 1943, 1953, and 1997 films titled "Titanic" all used the "Bethany" version. The 1996 miniseries "Titanic" also features the hymn. The 1979 miniseries "S. O. S. Titanic" featured "Autumn" instead. The 1958 film "A Night to Remember" used the "Horbury" version.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: Wallace Hartley, the ship's band leader, who died when the ship sank (as did all other musicians on board), liked the hymn and had wished to have it performed at his funeral. As a Methodist Briton, he was familiar with both the "Horbury" and "Propior Deo" versions but would not likely have used "Bethany". His father, a Methodist choirmaster, used the "Propior Deo" version at church. His family were certain that he would have used the "Propior Deo" version, and it is this tune's opening notes that appear on Hartley's memorial and that were played at his funeral. However, a record slip for a 1913 Edison cylinder recording of "Nearer, My God, to Thee", featuring the "Bethany" version, states that "When the great steamship 'Titanic' sank in mid-ocean in April 1912, it was being played by the band and sung by the doomed passengers, even as the boat took her final plunge." George Orrell, the bandmaster of the rescue ship, , who spoke with survivors, related: "The ship's band in any emergency is expected to play to calm the passengers. After the "Titanic" struck the iceberg the band began to play bright music, dance music, comic songs – anything that would prevent the passengers from becoming panic-stricken... various awe-stricken passengers began to think of the death that faced them and asked the bandmaster to play hymns. The one which appealed to all was 'Nearer My God to Thee'." Eva Hart also claimed "Nearer, My God, to Thee" was the last tune the band played. She said: "The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church."


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: "Nearer, My God, to Thee" was sung by the doomed crew and passengers of the as it sank off the Canadian coast in 1906, which may be the source of the "Titanic" legend.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: A dramatic paraphrase of the hymn tune was written for wind band by the Danish composer, Carl Nielsen. His version includes a musical rendition of the collision between boat and iceberg. The composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert, moved by the "Titanic" tragedy, wrote six works based on the "Bethany" setting, including an organ fantasia. "Bethany" is also quoted in Charles Ives's Symphony No. 4. The French organist Joseph Bonnet wrote "In Memoriam – Titanic", the first of his "Douze Pièces, Op. 10", based on the tune Horbury. It was published the year after the "Titanic" sank.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: The hymn even made its way briefly onto the operatic stage. The singer Emma Abbott, prompted by "her uncompromising and grotesque puritanism" rewrote "La traviata" so that Violetta expired singing not Verdi's "Addio del passato", but "Nearer My God to Thee".


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: Another tale, surrounding the death of President William McKinley in September 1901, quotes his dying words as being the first few lines of the hymn. At 3:30 pm, in the afternoon of 14 September 1901, after five minutes of silence across the nation, numerous bands across the United States played the hymn, McKinley's favorite, in his memory. It was also played by the Marine Band on Pennsylvania Avenue during the funeral procession through Washington and at the end of the funeral service itself, and at a memorial service for him in Westminster Abbey, London. The hymn was also played as the body of assassinated American President James Garfield was interred at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the funerals of former U.S. Presidents Warren G. Harding and Gerald R. Ford, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: The Confederate army band played this song as the survivors of the disastrous Pickett's Charge (in the Battle of Gettysburg) returned from their failed infantry assault. The Rough Riders sang the hymn at the burial of their slain comrades after the Battle of Las Guasimas. A film called "Nearer My God to Thee" was made in 1917 in the UK. "Nearer, My God, to Thee" is sung at the end of the 1936 movie "San Francisco". In the Max Ophüls 1952 film, "Le Plaisir", the French version of the hymn, 'Plus près de toi, mon Dieu,' is sung to the Bethany tune at a first communion service in a country church, causing a group of prostitutes in the congregation to collapse in tears over their lost innocence. The title of the hymn is also the title of a painting by physician Jack Kevorkian. William F. Buckley mentions in the introduction to his 1998 book, "Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith", that the title was inspired by "Nearer My God to Thee".


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: CNN co-founder Ted Turner, at the launch of the channel in 1980, promised: "We won't be signing off until the world ends. ... We'll be ... covering it live. ... [And] when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer My God to Thee' before we sign off." Turner commissioned a video recording of the hymn for this purpose, played by a military marching band, which he sometimes played for reporters. In 2015, the video, tagged in CNN's database as "[Hold for release] till end of world confirmed", was leaked on the Internet.


title: Nearer, My God, to Thee

text: Among other recordings, Doris Day included the song on her 1962 album "You'll Never Walk Alone". A season 3 episode of "" is entitled "". The song is also played in episodes of the TV series "Orphan Black" and sung in the TV miniseries "Midnight Mass" during the final scene of Episode 7, along with a piano arrangement heard throughout the series.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: Black Noir, or simply Noir, is the name of three superhero characters from the comic book series "The Boys", created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, and the television series and franchise of the same name, developed by Eric Kripke. In both the comic and TV series, Noir is a member of the hedonistic and reckless Vought-American superhero group the Seven and is depicted as a "silent ninja" type parody of Batman, Snake Eyes and Deathstroke.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the comic series, Noir is revealed to be a clone of Homelander, created to replace him if he ever went rogue. Driven insane by a lack of purpose, Noir resolved to frame Homelander for various atrocities as part of a plan to gradually drive him insane and replace him. However, he is ultimately killed by Homelander and Billy Butcher. In the TV series adaption, Noir, portrayed by Nathan Mitchell and Fritzy-Klevans Destine, is instead depicted as a brain-damaged black Supe named Earving, who is loyal to Vought CEO Stan Edgar. In "", Noir is depicted guiding Homelander in his early career. Following Earving's death in the third season finale of the main series, Kripke confirmed in July 2022 that Mitchell would portray a replacement Noir in the upcoming fourth season of the series.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the comic series, Black Noir is depicted as a member of the superhero team, The Seven, and the only superhuman created by Vought-American who can beat Homelander in arm-wrestling. Until the events of the series' climax, it is implied that Homelander had raped Billy Butcher's wife, Becky, who then died giving birth to a superhuman baby Butcher had then killed. In Issue #40, the Boys receive a series of incriminating photos seemingly showing Homelander engaging in grisly acts of murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia against men, women, and children. The series eventually reveals that Homelander cannot remember either these incidents or the rape of Butcher's wife, and suggests that Homelander has dissociative identity disorder and may have sent the photographs to Butcher himself. In private, Homelander shows signs of suffering a mental breakdown, talking to his own reflection in a mirror, and having bouts of nausea over the images, genuinely confused and horrified by their contents, events which a secretly watching Frenchie decides to keep from Butcher. Deciding he is "damned" for the acts depicted in the photos, Homelander decides to give in to any intrusive thoughts that cross his mind.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: Following "Herogasm", in which Black Noir randomly "thumbs up" Wee Hughie's posterior while the latter was infiltrating an orgy, Homelander resolves to free himself and the superhero community from Vought-American's control, leading the other superheroes in a "coup d'etat" against the United States, launching an attack on the White House and killing everyone inside, including the Vought-controlled Vice President, under the guise of doing so for Vought. During the subsequent confrontation between Homelander and Butcher, surmising why Butcher must hate him, Black Noir arrives in the Oval Office and reveals himself to be a clone of Homelander created solely to kill and replace him if he ever went rogue. Gradually being driven insane due to not being allowed to kill Homelander, Noir reveals that he committed the atrocities documented in the photos and had raped Becky to set Butcher and Homelander against one another so that he would be given authorization to fulfill his purpose. Outraged, Homelander attacks Noir, who proceeds to tear Homelander apart. Before dying, Homelander manages to seriously injure his former teammate, allowing Butcher to later finish him off with a crowbar, before embarking on his own genocidal plan to kill all superheroes and those "Supes" with the genetic potential to become them.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: One year later, the Guy from Vought (James Stillwell) turns down a pitch from his marketing department for a new rebranded all-white-clad Noir (and other Supes) — White Blanche — as a part of "True", consisting of regular Supes and various Supes brought back from death with a limited mental capacity by Compound V. Realizing that Compound V and Supes in general comprise "bad product", Stillwell begins to suffer a mental breakdown.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the live-action television adaptation, Black Noir is portrayed by Nathan Mitchell while Fritzey-Klevans Destine portrays Noir in flashbacks. Largely silent, he primarily communicates in a series of silent gestures and intimidating body language, and possesses a healing factor coupled with a penchant for artistic exploits, standing toe-to-toe with the Female and effortlessly playing classical music on a piano in the first season. In the second season, Noir is revealed to be the loyal enforcer of Vought CEO Stanford "Stan" Edgar, who directs his every action in combat, including killing the super-terrorist Naqib and tracking down Billy Butcher and the Boys. However, Noir also displays simple, friendly character traits of his own outside of combat, such as giving Naqib's son a teddy bear, befriending a Vought programmer while looking for Butcher, and breaking down in tears upon learning his powers originated from Compound V injections given to him by Vought with his parents' consent as a child. Later, while attempting to apprehend the then-rogue Starlight, Noir is put into a coma by Queen Maeve after she exploits his tree nut allergy by forcing him to consume an Almond Joy and kicking his Epi-pen out of reach, during which he is revealed to be black. In flashbacks to the Cold War depicted in the third season, Noir is revealed to be a man named Earving who had begun his superhero career and joined Payback, but was subjected to career sabotage and physical abuse by team leader Soldier Boy. In 1984, amidst a joint operation with the CIA to stop a communist government in Nicaragua, Edgar secretly assigned him to trade Soldier Boy to the Russian government so Vought can eventually replace him with Homelander. Throughout, Noir complained about having to wear a helmet that covers his face as he wanted to be the "Eddie Murphy" of superheroes, though Edgar told him Vought believed a publicly black superhero was neither profitable nor acceptable at the time. Amidst an attack on their camp by Nicaraguan and Russian soldiers, Noir was left permanently disfigured, mute, and brain damaged after being beaten by Soldier Boy while trying to subdue him with Payback's help. In the present, upon coming out of his coma and learning of Soldier Boy's return to America, Noir cuts his tracking chip out of his arm and hides out in an abandoned Buster Beaver's Pizza Restaurant, where its mascots and his imaginary friends reenact the abuse he suffered from Soldier Boy and convince Noir to face him instead of running. Upon returning to Vought however, Homelander kills Noir for withholding his knowledge of Soldier Boy being Homelander's biological father.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the 2021–2022 promotional web series "Seven on 7 with Cameron Coleman", which bridges the events of the second and third seasons of the live-action adaptation, Noir is revealed to have awoken from his coma and been charged by Vought with tracking down numerous Supes that had escaped from a psychiatric hospital as well as filming promos for Vought's streaming service, Vought+, on which his film "Black Noir: Insurrection" is to be released.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the 2020 Amazon Prime Video-sponsored "The Boys" promotional episodes of "Death Battle!", Black Noir gives up his place in participating in the Seven's battle royale to Billy Butcher, in favour of serving as one of the event's hosts alongside Wiz and Boomstick, with whom he communicates via a series of head and hand gestures. Noir subsequently reappears in "Death Battle!" as a recurring character and background comic relief.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In "" prequel episode "One Plus One Equals Two", Black Noir is revealed to have been the "Homelander before Homelander", who Madelyn Stillwell sought to supplant, describing Noir as being built to destroy Homelander. After coming across a then-18-year-old Homelander after he accidentally killed several hostages and eco-terrorists on his first mission as a superhero, Black Noir evades Homelander's attempts to kill him before tricking him into destroying the compound they were in and mercy killing the last eco-terrorist in its aftermath to prevent Homelander from killing them both. Successfully gaining Homelander's trust, Black Noir writes him an excusatory speech to provide to the press outside, claiming the eco-terrorists had a bomb.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: Following Noir's death in the third season finale of the main series, Eric Kripke confirmed in July 2022 that Noir's actor Nathan Mitchell would portray a replacement Black Noir in the upcoming fourth season of the series; describing the character as a "whole new" and "really interesting and hilarious character".


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In October 2020, following news of the development of several spin-off series of "The Boys", Black Noir actor Nathan Mitchell expressed interest in a potential ""Mr. Bean"-style comedy" solo series focused on the character, tentatively entitled "The Secret Life of Black Noir".


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the comics, Black Noir is a long-time member of the Seven, almost always shown in silhouette with his face obscured. His powers include super strength and supposed skills as a pilot. He is stronger than even Homelander; Mother's Milk states he can "[...] bench a dozen Mack trucks". While initially an enigma, it is revealed at the climax of the series that Black Noir is actually a clone of the Homelander, developed by Vought-American as a contingency, in case the leader of the Seven became a liability, and as such, has all of his powers, including heat vision, super strength, durability, flight, and enhanced vocal cords.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In the television series, Black Noir is depicted as a normal man imbued with Compound V. As a result, he gained superhuman strength, a regenerative healing factor and "silent ninja" aesthetic, with his only weakness being his tree nut allergy, in reference to both Superman's weakness to kryptonite and his actor Nathan Mitchell's real-life tree nut allergy.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: In September 2020, "The Boys" television adaptation's producer and showrunner Eric Kripke confirmed that despite the apparent foreshadowing of Homelander often comparing Black Noir to himself, that the plot twist of Noir being Homelander's clone, capable of killing him, would not be used, choosing instead to portray Black Noir as his own character and amalgamating the comics character's psychopathic traits with Homelander. Noir's role as a "failsafe" against Homelander was similarly supplanted by that of Homelander's son Ryan Butcher (primarily portrayed by Cameron Crovetti), a loose adaptation of the Supe baby killed by Butcher in the comic series after it killed his wife while she was giving birth to it, with Kripke saying:[W]hat makes Noir 'Noir' is he's just this complete cipher; like, you just don't know anything about him and he's just completely mysterious. But then he has these strange reactions, like he'll make the teddy bear dance, or he'll cry, and he'll reveal some vulnerabilities, emotional vulnerabilities. Then he'll just return to just being this completely still, horrifying Terminator of a character, and that's kind of what I like about him, I have to say. Every so often, it comes up like, 'We should really learn who he is.' And I'm like, 'But should we know? Isn't it more interesting that we just never really quite understand how he got that way?' So I think Noir definitely remains as mysterious as always.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: On the third season reveal of the first Noir being a black Supe named Earving (portrayed by Fritzy-Klevans Destine) who had been "tasked by Stan Edgar to do away with Soldier Boy on Payback's Nicaragua mission [in 1984], which result[ed] in Soldier Boy searing Noir's face, after which he goes silent" from the resulting brain damage to become Edgar's unquestioning assassin by the present-day, who sees his imaginary friends as a result, Kripke stated that:"Young Noir grew up going to this pizza chain called Buster Beavers. It's like a Chuck E. Cheese. He sees the animated characters. They come to life and they have a lot of interaction with him. Like everything on the show, it's sort of this organic road to hell, I guess, We wanted to see Noir sort of "Dark Night of the Soul". It's hard to do that because he doesn't communicate. We knew we had to go inside his head and someone pitched, like, he goes to a cabin. And I said, 'He should go to a cabin, but all these "Snow White" animated creatures should be flying around all over him' and that we strongly implied they've always been there. And then someone said, 'Well, it might be a little corny. What about like a Chuck E. Cheese?' So it just evolves." On the use of animation for Noir's imagination, inspired by his development of "", Kripke further revealed that "[w]e worked with this amazing [animation] company called 6 Point Harness, which did create all the animation for us [right at the level of real Disney hand-drawn animation]. But what I love about it most of all is it's definitely implied that for the entire run of the series, these characters just hang out with Noir. If you were to cut [back] into Noir's point of view [during the first two seasons], he'd have these animated characters that he's interacting with. And that just brings me no end of pleasure."


title: Black Noir (character)

text: To promote the third season of "The Boys", Amazon Prime Video licensed a line of Black Noir MAFEX action figures from NECA and the Japanese company MediCom Toy Incorporated.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: Inspired by Batman, the character and Mitchell's portrayal in the series (considered a breakout character) have received critical acclaim.


title: Black Noir (character)

text: The character has been compared to slasher film villains such as Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, and to the Marvel Comics antihero Deadpool.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Matteo Renzi (; born 11 January 1975) is an Italian politician who served as prime minister of Italy from 2014 to 2016. He has been a senator for Florence since 2018. Renzi has served as the leader of Italia Viva (IV) since 2019, having been the secretary of the Democratic Party (PD) from 2013 to 2018, with a brief interruption in 2017.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: After serving as the president of the province of Florence from 2004 to 2009 and the mayor of Florence from 2009 to 2014, Renzi was elected secretary of the PD in 2013, becoming Prime Minister the following year. At the age of 39 years, Renzi, who was at the time the youngest leader in the G7 and also the first-serving mayor to become Prime Minister, became the youngest person to have served as Prime Minister. While in power, Renzi's government implemented numerous reforms, including changes to the Italian electoral law, a relaxation of labour and employment laws with the intention of boosting economic growth, a thorough reformation of the public administration, the simplification of civil trials, the introduction of same-sex civil unions, and the abolition of many small taxes.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: After the rejection of his constitutional reform in the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, Renzi formally resigned as Prime Minister on 12 December; his Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni was appointed his replacement. He resigned as secretary of the PD following defeat in the 2018 Italian general election. In September 2019, he left the PD and founded the IV party. In January 2021, Renzi revoked IV's support to the Conte II Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, which brought down the government and resulted in the 2021 Italian government crisis. In February 2021, Renzi's IV supported Prime Minister Mario Draghi's national unity government. Renzi has been described as a centrist and as a liberal by political observers.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Renzi was born on 11 January 1975 in Florence, the second of four children. His father Tiziano Renzi was a small business owner and Christian Democracy (DC) municipal councillor in Rignano sull'Arno. Renzi grew up in an observant Catholic family in Rignano sull'Arno. He studied in Florence at the classical lyceum ("liceo classico") Dante Alighieri, where he passed his final exam with the grade of 60/60 but was nearly expelled because, as the students' representative, he refused to withdraw a school newspaper in which there was criticism of a maths teacher. During this time, he was a Scout in the Association of Catholic Guides and Scouts of Italy.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In 1999, Renzi graduated in law from the University of Florence with a thesis on Giorgio La Pira, the former DC mayor of Florence. He then went on to work for CHIL Srl, a marketing company focusing on leafleting owned by his family, co-ordinating the sales service of "La Nazione". During this time, Renzi was also an association football referee at amateur level and a futsal player. In 1994, he participated as a competitor for five consecutive episodes in the television program "La Ruota Della Fortuna" (a localised version of the United States game show "Wheel of Fortune") hosted by Mike Bongiorno, winning Lit.48 million.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Renzi's interest in politics began in high school. He was one of the founders of the committee in support of Romano Prodi's candidature as Prime Minister of Italy in the 1996 Italian general election; that same year, Renzi joined the centrist Italian People's Party (PPI), and became its provincial secretary in 1999. He also married Agnese Landini, with whom he later had three children. In 2001, Renzi joined Francesco Rutelli's Daisy party, composed by members of the disbanded PPI.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 13 June 2004, Renzi was elected president of the province of Florence with 59% of the vote, as the candidate of the centre-left coalition. He was the youngest person to become president of an Italian province. In the years as president of Florence province, Renzi expressed his ideas against "the political caste" and during his mandate reduced taxes and decreased the number of the province's employees and managers.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: After five years as the president of Florence province, Renzi announced that he would seek election as the mayor of Florence. On 9 June 2009, Renzi, by now a member of the Democratic Party (PD), won the election on a second round vote with 60% of the votes, compared to 40% for his opponent Giovanni Galli. As the mayor, he halved the number of city councillors, installed 500 free WiFi access points across the city, reduced kindergarten waiting lists by 90%, and increased spending on social welfare programs and schools.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: One year after being sworn in as mayor and with his popularity in national opinion polls increasing, Renzi organised a public meeting with another young party administrator Debora Serracchiani at Leopolda Station in Florence to discuss Italian politics, after stating that a complete change was also necessary in his party. Other prominent PD members who aligned themselves with Renzi's programme were Matteo Richetti, president of the Regional Council of Emilia-Romagna, Davide Faraone, a regional councillor from the Sicilian Regional Assembly, and Giuseppe Civati, a prominent member of the PD in Lombardy and a member of the Regional Council of Lombardy.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Following this public meeting in August 2010, the Italian media gave Renzi the nickname "il rottamatore" ("The Scrapper" or "The Wrecker"). In October 2011, Renzi organised a second public meeting, also in Florence, where he wrote down one hundred topics of discussion. During this time, he began to be strongly criticised by other members of his party closer to then-PD secretary Pier Luigi Bersani, after his suggestion that Italian politicians of the same generation as then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi should retire. In September 2012, Renzi announced that he would seek to lead the centre-left coalition in the 2013 Italian general election; the other four candidates for that position were Pier Luigi Bersani, the PD secretary, Nichi Vendola, leader of Left Ecology Freedom, Laura Puppato, a PD deputy from Veneto and Bruno Tabacci, leader of the Democratic Centre. His candidacy was criticised by some prominent PD members and to the party's left, among them Rosy Bindi, Massimo D'Alema, Stefano Fassina, and Vendola.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: After the first round of the 2012 Italian centre-left primary election, Renzi gained 35.5% of the vote, finishing second behind Bersani and qualifying for the second ballot. Renzi eventually gained a total of 39% of the vote, against Bersani's 61%. During the 2013 general election campaign, Renzi backed Bersani by organising large public rallies in his support in Florence. In the election, the PD only gained 25.5% of the vote, despite opinion polls placing the party at almost 30%. In the 2013 Italian presidential election, Renzi caused a minor controversy by openly criticising the candidacies of both Franco Marini and Anna Finocchiaro, two long-standing PD members.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Following the resignation of Pier Luigi Bersani in April 2013, Renzi announced that he would stand for the position of secretary of the Democratic Party (PD), causing his rivals to scrutinize him. The PD's loss of seats led to party members' doubts concerning Bersani's leadership abilities. Renzi's impressive resume at such a young age, in combination with his reputation as a political outsider thanks to his "Scrapper" moniker, made him very electable in comparison. He was supported by a number of his former political opponents, such as former party secretaries Walter Veltroni and Dario Franceschini, deputy Marina Sereni, member of the European Parliament David Sassoli, and Turin mayor Piero Fassino. Other supporters of his included deputies like Gianni Pietro Dal Moro, Francesco Sanna, Francesco Boccia, Lorenzo Basso, and Enrico Borghi, all of whom were considered close to the newly-elected Prime Minister Enrico Letta.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: The other two candidates for party secretary were Gianni Cuperlo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and former secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, and Giuseppe Civati, a left-wing-oriented deputy from Lombardy and a former supporter of Renzi. In the 2013 PD leadership election, Renzi was elected with 68% of the popular vote, compared to 18% for Cuperlo and 14% for Civati. He became the new PD secretary and the centre-left coalition's prospective candidate for Prime Minister of Italy. When comparing it with the 2012 centre-left primary election, Renzi moved to the left and his electorate was not much different from that of the party's average primary.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Renzi's victory was welcomed by Prime Minister Letta, who had been the vice-secretary of the party under Bersani's leadership. Throughout January and February 2014, there were multiple reports of persistent leadership tensions between Renzi and Prime Minister Letta. Many said that Renzi was pressuring Letta to resign in his favour, arguing that he should be given the right to become Prime Minister, as he was the PD's leader. On 12 February, Letta acknowledged these rumours for the first time, publicly demanded that Renzi make his position clear. Renzi subsequently called a meeting of the PD leadership for the following evening. Just before the meeting took place, Renzi publicly called on Letta to resign and allow him to form a new government. Letta initially resisted the demand; following a vote in favour of Renzi's proposal during the meeting, which Letta did not attend, he announced that he would tender his resignation as Prime Minister on 14 February.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Under Renzi's leadership, the PD officially joined the Party of European Socialists (PES) as a full-time member on 28 February 2014.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 17 January 2014, while on air at "Le invasioni barbariche" on La7 TV channel, interviewed about the tensions between him and the Prime Minister Enrico Letta, Renzi tweeted #enricostaisereno ("Enrico don't worry") to reassure his party colleague that he was not plotting anything against him. At a meeting on 13 February, the PD leadership voted heavily in favour of Renzi's call for "a new government, a new phase and a radical programme of reform". Minutes after the party backed the Renzi proposal by 136 votes to 16, with two abstentions, Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of the Prime Minister, announced that Letta would travel to the Quirinale the following day to tender his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano. On 17 February, in his last act as the mayor of Florence, Renzi appointed Dario Nardella as Deputy Mayor Regent of Florence with the task of leading the city until the mayoral elections in May that same year.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In an earlier speech, Renzi had paid tribute to Letta, saying that he was not intended to put him "on trial". Without directly proposing himself as the next Prime Minister, he said the eurozone's third-largest economy urgently needed "a new phase" and "radical programme" to push through badly-needed reforms. The motion he put forward made clear "the necessity and urgency of opening a new phase with a new executive". Speaking privately to party leaders, Renzi said that Italy was "at a crossroads" and faced either holding fresh elections or a new government without a return to the polls. On 14 February, President Napolitano accepted Letta's resignation from the office of Prime Minister.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Following Letta's resignation, Renzi formally received the task of forming a new government from President Napolitano on 17 February. Renzi held several days of talks with party leaders, all of which he broadcast live on the internet, before unveiling the Renzi Cabinet on 21 February, which contained members of the PD, the New Centre-Right, the Union of the Centre, and the Civic Choice (SC). His cabinet became Italy's youngest government to date, with an average age of 47. It was also the first in which the number of female ministers was equal to the number of male ministers, excluding the Prime Minister.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 22 February, Renzi was formally sworn in as Prime Minister, becoming the fourth Prime Minister in four years and the youngest Prime Minister in the history of Italy. His rise to become the PD's secretary and eventual Prime Minister was seen as a sign of much-needed generational change; at the time he took office, Renzi enjoyed by far the highest approval rating of any politician in the country. On 25 February, Renzi won a vote of confidence in the Italian Parliament, with 169 votes in the Senate of the Republic and 378 in the Chamber of Deputies.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 7 February 2015, after just under a year in power, five senators and two deputies from the SC defected to the PD, citing the leadership of Renzi as Prime Minister as the primary reason for their decision to change parties. On 20 March, Prime Minister Renzi briefly became "ad interim" Minister of Infrastructure and Transport following the resignation of Maurizio Lupi due to a corruption scandal, involving public works on infrastructure, in which his name had been cited several times. Renzi held the office on an unofficial basis until 2 April, when Graziano Delrio was appointed as the new minister.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 4 December 2016, after the failure of the referendum he proposed, Renzi announced his resignation. On 7 December, he officially handed over the resignation to the President Sergio Mattarella.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Upon becoming Prime Minister, Renzi said that labour market reform, which was thought to be "long overdue", and was opposed by major trade unions and organised labour, to introduce labour market flexibility, would be at the top of his agenda to improve the state of the Italian economy. On 12 March 2014, the Renzi Cabinet issued a law-decree on fixed-term contracts, called the Poletti Decree, from the name of the Labour Minister Giuliano Poletti, as well as a bill proposing major reforms to the Italian labour market called the Jobs Act. A reduction in the tax burden of about €80 was announced for those earning less than €1,500 per month. On 30 April, Renzi and Marianna Madia, the Minister for the Public Administration, presented the guidelines for the reform of the public administration, which was approved by the Renzi Cabinet on 13 June, before becoming law on 7 August.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In September 2014, the government sought approval for the Jobs Act, which provided for, among other things, the abolition of Article 18 of the Workers' Statute, which protected workers from unjustified dismissal. The proposal was criticised by organised labour, especially the largest trade union, the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), and its leaders Susanna Camusso and Maurizio Landini. Moreover, the left wing of the Democratic Party (PD), by then led by Renzi's rival and former PD secretary Pier Luigi Bersani, criticised the government for the reform, threatening to vote against it.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 29 September, the National Committee of the PD voted to support the Jobs Act, despite the disagreements within the party, with 130 votes in favour, 20 against, and 11 abstaining. On 9 October, the Senate voted to approve the Jobs Act, and the landmark reform passed with 165 votes in favour to 111 against, marking the first step for the most ambitious economic legislation of the eight-month-old government. Before the vote, Labour Minister Poletti was forced to cut his speech short due to the loud protests of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and Lega Nord (Lega) oppositions, some of whom threw coins and papers. German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was visiting Milan and had been among the most vocal politicians regarding Italy's need for speedy economic reforms, said the labour law marked an "important step" to reduce "employment barriers" in the eurozone's third-largest economy.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 25 October, almost one million people took part in a mass protest in Rome, organised by the CGIL in opposition to the labour reforms of the government. Some high-profile members of the left-wing faction of the PD, including Gianni Cuperlo, Stefano Fassina, and Giuseppe Civati, also participated in the protest. On 8 November, more than 100,000 public employees protested in Rome in a demonstration organised by the three largest trade unions in the country, the CGIL, the CISL, and the UIL. On 25 November, the Chamber of Deputies approved the Jobs Act with 316 votes; the M5S, Lega, and almost forty members of the PD abstained from the vote to protest against the reform. On 3 December, the Senate gave the final approval it needed to become law.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In January 2017, the Jobs Act was taken to the Constitutional Court of Italy; Renzi and his supporters said that the law was necessary for job creation and attract investors, while its critics responded that it diminished workers' rights without generating new jobs. The court rejected a petition, which received 3.3. million signatures, for a referendum to be held about the Job Acts. In September 2018, the Jobs Acts was partially repealed after the same court declared the compensation rules for claims of unlawful dismissal to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that these rules were not in line with the principles of "reasonableness and equality" and conflicted with the concept of "protection of work" as granted by Articles 4 and 35. In July 2020, the court accepted the questions raised from the tribunals of Bari and Rome about the same matter, ruling the compensation rules to be in violation of the constitutional principles of equality, reasonableness, and job protection; it was the first time that a ruling was signed by three women.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In March 2014, the Renzi Cabinet approved the auctioning of a large number of luxury cars that were used to transport heads of state, including nine Maseratis, two Jaguar Cars, and various other cars such as BMWs and Alfa Romeos. Out of the 1,500 cars put up for sale, 170 sold immediately over eBay. In April, as part of his wider industrial reforms, Renzi forced the chief executives of Italy's biggest state-owned companies, including Eni, Terna, Finmeccanica, Enel, and Poste italiane, to resign, citing a lack of public confidence in their leadership. He subsequently appointed women to the majority of new positions, making it the first time any woman had served as a chief executive of a state-owned company in Italy. In April 2014, Renzi's cabinet introduced the so-called "Renzi bonus", a monthly allowance of €80, recognised to holders of a total annual income not exceeding €24,600. The bonus, whose aim was to relaunch expenditures, was heavily criticised by the opposition, which labeled it as an "electoral baksheesh" for the 2014 European Parliament election.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 1 August, Renzi launched a law-decree called Unblock Italy, which was intended to facilitate the implementation of major projects, civil works, and infrastructure that were suspended at the time, and achieve further administrative simplification. The centre of this was the "Millegiorni", or the Thousand Days Programme. On 1 September, Renzi launched the website "passodopopasso.italia.it", which allowed citizens to monitor the progress of the "Millegiorni". On 9 October, Renzi presented his first Finance Bill ("Legge di Stabilità"), which was approved by the European Commission on 28 October. A €36 billion bill, it included the largest tax cuts in a year (€18 billion), as well as tax evasion fight, plus the €80 bonus; it was criticised by trade unions like the CGIL, the CISL, and FIOM, while the UIL was more positive and Confindustria supported it.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In February 2015, with the economy continuing to stagnate, the government announced a plan to abolish rules that limit cooperative lenders' shareholders to one vote each at shareholder meetings regardless of the size of their holdings. The European Commission subsequently forecast that the Italian economy would begin to grow by the spring. The government also announced the abolition of IRAP, a regional tax on production activities; discussing the 2016 Finance Bill, Renzi further promised to cancel IRPEF, IMU, and TASI, respectively taxes on individuals, public services, and residence, which was a flagship policy of the centre-right former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and its tax-cutting 2016 budget was passed on 22 December despite concerns from the European Commission. Additionally, Renzi raised the threshold for cash payments three times with the intention to boost the economy, promising that it would not help tax evasion, and described it as "a simple, fair, and liberal measure" that "simplifies" and "encourages consumption". In 2018, Minister of Economy and Finance Pier Carlo Padoan admitted that it was a mistake. A 2021 study by Bankitalia/Palazzo Koch concluded that the decision "increased the share of the illegal economy by 0.5 percentage points" and "a 1% increase in the use of cash leads to growth between 0.8% and 1.8%" of the black economy.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In May 2015, the economy recorded growth of 0.3%, finally ending the Italian triple-dip recession. In January 2016, Renzi highlighted an additional 500,000 jobs that he said had been created through his policies. In October 2016, the Renzi government's proposed 2017 Finance Bill, an expansionary budget including deficit raising to cope with the earthquake and migrants emergencies, was seen as an increased anti-Brussels rhetoric, having warned of disaster if it was rejected. In an interview to "la Repubblica" on 23 October, Padoan said: "Europe must choose which side to take. They can accept the fact that our deficit goes up from 2% to 2.3% (of gross domestic product) to tackle the earthquake and the migrant emergencies. Or they can choose the Hungarian way, which puts up walls against the migrants and must be rejected. That would be the beginning of the end." On 24 October, defending the budget law, Renzi said: "We want to address the needs of Italian citizens, not Brussels technocracy."


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Upon becoming Prime Minister, Renzi stated that one of his most important tasks was to achieve constitutional reforms; by April 2014, the Renzi's government presented a constitutional bill of government initiative. The Italian institutional framework had remained essentially unchanged since 1 January 1948, when the Constitution of Italy first came into force after being enacted by the Constituent Assembly of Italy on 22 December 1947, and Renzi argued changes were necessary to make governments more stable; the system was created as a result of the Italian Fascist regime and to avoid such a repeat. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) pushed for unicameralism under proportional representation, being wary of unicameralism under majoritarian representation to avoid a tyranny of the majority and like part of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) seeing the Senate as synonym of privilege and prospering in the Fascist regime's shadows, while the Christian Democracy (DC) party advocated bicameralism through a division of powers to avoid one-party hegemony. The Action Party, the DC, the Italian Republican Party, and part of socialists won out over the PCI and dissident socialists, especially about the Senate. The actually-existing system was not the intended result of the assembly, which came about through later political choices and conditions.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: The first stage of Renzi's reform package aimed to abolish the so-called "perfect bicameralism", which gave identical powers to the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic; the reforms would substantially decrease the membership and power of the Senate. Constitutional reforms were in the air since April 2013, when then-President Giorgio Napolitano instituted a committee for reform to avoid the repeat of inconclusive legislative elections, as it had happened two months earlier. Under the reforms, the Senate's power to force the resignation of the government by refusing to grant a vote of confidence would be removed; only a few types of bills, including the constitutional bills, constitutional amendments, laws regarding local interests, referendums, and the protection of linguistic minorities, would need to be passed by the Senate. In addition, the Senate could only propose amendments to bills in some cases, with the Chamber of Deputies always having the final word, and the membership of the Senate would be changed, with regional representatives appointed in a manner virtually identical to the Bundesrat of Germany. On 11 March 2014, the Chamber of Deputies approved both the plans to overhaul the Senate and the second stage of Renzi's constitutional reforms, a flagship electoral reform law that would see Italy's voting system overhauled. On 26 March, despite objections raised by several parties in the coalition, it won a vote in the Senate on the bill reforming the provinces, with 160 voting in favour and 133 against.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 6 May, the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Senate approved the government's bill on the Senate's reform. Due to the ambitious reforms that provided for the Senate abolition, which would have led to, in the words of Valentino Larcinese, "a shift towards a "de facto" quasi-presidential system embedded in "de jure" parliamentary institutions", and an increase in the powers of the Prime Minister, plus a new electoral law, Renzi was accused by constitutionalists and politicians, among them Stefano Rodotà and Fausto Bertinotti, of being an authoritarian and anti-democratic leader. Critics like the centre-left populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and its founder Beppe Grillo argued that the reforms would give too much power to the Prime Minister; the former centre-right prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has been controversial, argued the changes would "lead us straight toward a non-democracy." "The Economist" argued that the reforms would result in corrupted politicians being appointed in the Senate. Renzi and his government argued that the constitutional reform was long sought by the PCI and the political left; political scientist Nadia Urbinati commented that this was an oversimplification and that it was the political right that has attacked bicameralism, arguing that the reform had more in common with that of Lega Nord's Francesco Speroni in 1994.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In April 2014, Renzi proposed that Italy adopt what he called "Italicum", a proportional representation voting system, with a majority bonus for the party which obtained over 40% of the vote in order to provide for stable and long-term government. To approve the new electoral law, which was opposed by the M5S and a minority of the PD, Renzi gained the support of Berlusconi, who was still the leader of Forza Italia (FI), despite having been expelled from the Senate due to his sentence for tax evasion. The alliance between Renzi and Berlusconi was named the Nazareno Pact, from the name of the street in Rome where the headquarters of the PD are located, where the two leaders met for the first time to discuss the reform. The alliance, which included a secret clause stating that Berlusconi's rival and long-time centre-left leader Romano Prodi, a founder of the PD, would not become the president of the Italian Republic, fell apart and was called off by FI, in part due to the election of PD-backed, centre-left candidate Sergio Mattarella in the 2015 Italian presidential election.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: Renzi was criticised by many within the PD's left-wing minority for the deal with Berlusconi, as well as by the M5S of Grillo, who said the Nazareno Pact was the proof that there are no differences between the Italian centre-left and centre-right. Despite concern from some within the PD, "Italicum" was given final approval by the Senate on 27 January 2015 thanks to support from FI senators.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: On 28 April, concerned that the reform may not pass, Renzi announced he would hold a confidence vote to approve the electoral reform changes. The M5S, FI, and some left-wing PD members opposed this decision, with some seeking to draw comparisons between Renzi and Benito Mussolini. It would be only the third time that an electoral law was twinned with a confidence vote after Mussolini's Acerbo law and the DC prime minister Alcide De Gasperi's "scam law". On 4 May, the Chamber of Deputies approved Renzi's flagship electoral changes with 334 votes for and 61 votes against, the latter including a faction of the PD. The reform took full effect in July 2016; however, it was found to be partially unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Italy in January 2017, and was then repealed and replaced by the Italian electoral law of 2017 ("Rosatellum").


title: Matteo Renzi

text: In a September 2015 interview in New York, Renzi said he did not need Berlusconi's votes for the reform, which he described as "a revolution", to pass. Having passed the Chamber of Deputies on 11 March 2015, the reforms to the Senate that would see its power diminished and membership changed were passed by the Senate on 13 October. The vote was won by 176 votes to 16, with a large number of senators abstaining from the vote in protest at having to vote on abolishing many of their own powers. The last vote was held on 12 April 2016, when the Chamber of Deputies approved the reform with 361 votes, while the opposition abandoned the house. On 4 December, the reform was rejected in the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum and Renzi resigned as a result.


title: Matteo Renzi

text: As a result of the Libyan and Syrian Civil Wars, a major problem faced by Renzi upon becoming Prime Minister was the high levels of illegal immigration to Italy. 2014 saw an increase in the number of migrants rescued at sea being brought to southern Italian ports, with the increase in the number of migrants prompting criticism of Renzi by the anti-immigration Lega Nord, the Five Star Movement, and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. On 8 August, the Renzi Cabinet approved a law-decree providing for the international protection of migrants. In November 2014, Renzi ordered the Italian-run rescue option Operation Mare Nostrum to be replaced by Frontex's Operation Triton due to the refusal of several EU governments to fund it. In 2014, 170,100 migrants arrived in Italy by sea, a 296% increase compared to 2013. 141,484 of the travellers ferried over from Libya. Most of the migrants had come from Syria, Eritrea, and various countries in West Africa.