title: Arthur Eddington

text: But, second, not only can we not know that the objective world is nonmentalistic, we also cannot intelligibly suppose that it could be material. To conceive of a dualism entails attributing material properties to the objective world. However, this presupposes that we could observe that the objective world has material properties. But this is absurd, for whatever is observed must ultimately be the content of our own consciousness, and consequently, nonmaterial.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Ian Barbour, in his book "Issues in Science and Religion" (1966), p. 133, cites Eddington's "The Nature of the Physical World" (1928) for a text that argues the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles provides a scientific basis for "the defense of the idea of human freedom" and his "Science and the Unseen World" (1929) for support of philosophical idealism "the thesis that reality is basically mental".


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Charles De Koninck points out that Eddington believed in objective reality existing apart from our minds, but was using the phrase "mind-stuff" to highlight the inherent intelligibility of the world: that our minds and the physical world are made of the same "stuff" and that our minds are the inescapable connection to the world. As De Koninck quotes Eddington,


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Against Albert Einstein and others who advocated determinism, indeterminism—championed by Eddington—says that a physical object has an ontologically undetermined component that is not due to the epistemological limitations of physicists' understanding. The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, then, would not necessarily be due to hidden variables but to an indeterminism in nature itself.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington wrote a parody of "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", recounting his 1919 solar eclipse experiment. It contained the following quatrain:


title: Arthur Eddington

text: During the 1920s and 30s, Eddington gave numerous lectures, interviews, and radio broadcasts on relativity, in addition to his textbook "The Mathematical Theory of Relativity", and later, quantum mechanics. Many of these were gathered into books, including "The Nature of the Physical World" and "New Pathways in Science". His use of literary allusions and humour helped make these difficult subjects more accessible.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington's books and lectures were immensely popular with the public, not only because of his clear exposition, but also for his willingness to discuss the philosophical and religious implications of the new physics. He argued for a deeply rooted philosophical harmony between scientific investigation and religious mysticism, and also that the positivist nature of relativity and quantum physics provided new room for personal religious experience and free will. Unlike many other spiritual scientists, he rejected the idea that science could provide proof of religious propositions.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: He is sometimes misunderstood as having promoted the infinite monkey theorem in his 1928 book "The Nature of the Physical World", with the phrase "If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum". It is clear from the context that Eddington is not suggesting that the probability of this happening is worthy of serious consideration. On the contrary, it was a rhetorical illustration of the fact that below certain levels of probability, the term "improbable" is functionally equivalent to "impossible".


title: Arthur Eddington

text: Eddington died of cancer in the Evelyn Nursing Home, Cambridge, on 22 November 1944. He was unmarried. His body was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium (Cambridgeshire) on 27 November 1944; the cremated remains were buried in the grave of his mother in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.


title: Arthur Eddington

text: The actor Paul Eddington was a relative, mentioning in his autobiography (in light of his own weakness in mathematics) "what I then felt to be the misfortune" of being related to "one of the foremost physicists in the world".


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Council of Representatives (; , "Enjumen-e Nûnerên"), usually referred to simply as the Parliament is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Iraq. As of 2020, it comprises 329 seats and meets in Baghdad inside the Green Zone.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: An elected Iraqi parliament first formed following the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1925. The 1925 constitution called for a bicameral parliament whose lower house, the Chamber of Deputies of Iraq or Council of Representatives ("Majlis an-Nuwwab") would be elected based on universal manhood suffrage. The upper house, the Senate of Iraq ("Majlis al-A`yan") was appointed by the king. Sixteen elections took place between 1925 and the coup of 1958.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: On January 17, 1953 elections for the Chamber of Deputies (also known as the National Assembly) took place. Following controversy over the implementation of the so-called Baghdad Pact, Prime Minister Nuri Pasha as-Said called for elections the following year, in early 1954. As-Said dissolved the assembly shortly thereafter and began to rule by decree, but opposition forced him to hold a third election within three years. The second 1954 election was very corrupt, with as-Said's political enemies banned from running, and widespread voter coercion. The assembly was suspended yet again, and in 1958 a military coup deposed as-Said and the monarchy, and abolished the parliament.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The 1970 constitution created a republic with an elected National Assembly ("al-Majlis al-Watani"). However, elections for the Assembly did not take place until June 1980, under Iraq's new military president, Saddam Hussein. Several more elections took place between 1989 and 2003. Elections for its members were not considered free and fair by the international community. Only members of Hussein's own Baath Party were ever elected.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: In 2003, Saddam Hussein was forcibly removed from power by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and their allies during the Iraq War. In March 2003 a governing council set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority signed an interim constitution which called for the election of a transitional National Assembly after than the end of January 2005. This Assembly would draft a permanent constitution which would then be submitted to approval by the Iraqi people in a general referendum.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: Elections for this transitional National Assembly ("al-Jam`iyya al-Wataniyya") took place on January 30, 2005. The United Iraqi Alliance Party won the majority of seats with 48% of the popular vote resulting in 140 seats. Eighty-five members of the assembly were women.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: Talks between the UIA and other parties to form a coalition government began soon after the election. The assembly had its first meeting on March 16, 2005. After weeks of negotiations between the dominant political parties, on April 4, 2005, Sunni Arab Hajim al-Hassani was chosen as speaker; Shiite Hussain Shahristani and Kurd Aref Taifour were elected as his top deputies. The Assembly elected Jalal Talabani to head the Presidency Council on April 6, and approved the selection of Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his cabinet on April 28.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: Under the permanent constitution approved on October 15, 2005, legislative authority is vested in two bodies, the Council of Representatives and the Council of Union.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Council of Representatives consists of 325 members elected for four years, with two sessions in each annual term. The Council passes federal laws, oversees the executive, ratifies treaties, and approves nominations of specified officials. It elects the president of the republic, who selects a prime minister from the majority coalition in the Council. (During an initial period, a three-member Presidential Council elected by the Council of Representatives will carry out the duties of the president of the republic.)


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: Elections for the Council of Representatives were held on December 15, 2005. The Council first met on March 16, 2006, exactly one year after the first meeting of the transitional assembly.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Council of Representatives of Iraq has the same name in Arabic (مجلس النواب, "Majlis an-Nuwwab") as the lower legislative houses of Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, and Yemen, and as the unicameral legislatures of Lebanon and Tunisia. However, a number of different English terms are used to refer to these bodies.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Council of Union, or Federation Council ("Majlis al-Ittihad"), will consist of representatives from Iraq's regions and governorates. Its precise composition and responsibilities are not defined in the constitution and will be determined by the Council of Representatives. As of 2021, no concrete steps have been made towards establishing the proposed upper house.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: On, April 12, 2007, Mohammed Awad, a political party member of the Iraqi National Dialogue Council, was killed at the convention centre canteen of the parliament building, and 22 were wounded, in the 2007 Iraqi Parliament Bombing.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: A group of Sunni lawmakers boycotted parliament in a June 2007 protest of the removal of the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, after a series of controversial actions. They returned in July after the speaker was re-instated with the understanding that he would quietly resign after a few sessions. A group of Shiite members also returned in July after a boycott which gained them an investigation into the bombing of a Shiite mosque, along with reconstruction and improved security. The parliament was under pressure from the United States to pass legislation dealing with members of the Baath party, distribution of oil revenues, regional autonomy, and constitutional reform, by September 2007.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft elections law in September 2009. However, it took two months and ten delays for the law to pass in the Council of Representatives. The main areas of dispute concerned the "open list" electoral system and the voters roll in Kirkuk Governorate, which Arab and Turkmen parties alleged had been manipulated by the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: UNAMI advised the electoral system was changed to allow people to vote for individuals as well as party lists under the open list form of proportional representation. The last national elections had used a closed list system, but the Iraqi governorate elections of 2009 had used open lists. In the end, all parties except for the Kurdistani Alliance agreed to support open lists which was adopted. The law increased the size of the Council from 275 to 325 members—equal to one seat per 100,000 citizens, as specified in the Constitution of Iraq.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The parliament was stormed by protesters in April 2016; the protestors also attacked buildings within the parliamentary complex.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: The Council of Representatives voted on 11 February 2018, to add an extra seat for minorities, in the Wasit Governorate for Feyli Kurds, making the total number of parliamentarians equal to 329 prior to the 2018 parliamentary elections.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: As a result of the ongoing 2019 Iraqi protests, the Council of Representatives approved a new law on 24 December 2019 which aims to make it easier for independent politicians to win a seat in the Council of Representatives. The new law will see each of Iraq's governorates split into several electoral districts, with one legislator being elected per 100,000 people, thus replacing its proportional representation system for a district-based system. The new law will also prevent parties from running on unified lists.


title: Council of Representatives of Iraq

text: Since the parliamentary election in October 2021, there has been a political crisis in Iraq, with members of the Council of Representatives of Iraq being unable to form a stable coalition government, or elect a new President. For 10 months the national political system has been in a political deadlock. On 3 August 2022, Muqtada al-Sadr called for snap elections.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: Rosie M. Vivas ( Ruiz; June 21, 1953 – July 8, 2019) was a Cuban-American fraudster who (among other schemes) was declared the winner in the female category for the 84th Boston Marathon in 1980, only to have her title stripped eight days after the race when it was discovered that she had not run the entire course. She is believed to have jumped onto the course about a half-mile before the finish.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: Ruiz was born in Havana, Cuba, and moved to Memphis, Florida with her family in 1962 when she was eight years old. After immigrating to the United States, Ruiz was separated from her mother and lived with aunts, uncles, and cousins in Hollywood, Florida. In 1972, she graduated from South Broward High School and then attended Wayne State College in Nebraska. She graduated with a degree in music in 1977.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: She moved to New York City in the 1970s, eventually finding work with Metal Traders, a commodities firm. In 1979, she qualified for the New York City Marathon and was credited with a time of 2:56:29, the 11th woman overall—enough for her to qualify for the Boston Marathon.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: Ruiz's application for the NYC marathon arrived after the cut-off date for the race, but she received special dispensation from the New York Road Runners due to her claim that she was dying of brain cancer.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: After the 1980 Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon officials investigated Ruiz's run and concluded that she did not run the entire course, so on April 25, 1980, she was retroactively disqualified from the race.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: On April 21, 1980, Ruiz appeared to win the Boston Marathon's female category with a time of 2:31:56. Her time would have been the fastest female time in Boston Marathon history as well as the third-fastest female time ever recorded in any marathon.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: However, suspicions mounted about Ruiz almost from the beginning. Men's winner Bill Rodgers, who had just won his third straight Boston Marathon, noticed that Ruiz could not recall many things that most runners know by heart, such as intervals and splits. Other observers noticed that Ruiz was not panting or coated in sweat, and her thighs were less lean and muscular than would be expected for a world-class runner. She later released stress-test results showing her resting heart rate as 76. Most female marathoners have a resting heart rate in the 50s or lower.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: In addition, her time of 2:31:56 was an unusual improvement, more than 25 minutes ahead of her reported time in the New York City Marathon six months earlier. When asked by a reporter why she did not seem fatigued after the grueling race, she said, "I got up with a lot of energy this morning." Some female competitors thought it was odd that, when asked what she had noticed about the suburb of Wellesley while running through it, she did not mention the students of Wellesley College, who traditionally cheer loudly for the first female runners as they pass the campus.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: Most seriously, no other runners could recall seeing her. Jacqueline Gareau was told that she was leading the race at the 18-mile mark, while Patti Lyons was told she was second at the 17-mile mark. Ruiz could not have passed either of them without being seen. Several spotters at checkpoints throughout the course also did not remember seeing her in the first group of women. In addition, she did not appear in any pictures or video footage.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: Two Harvard students, John Faulkner and Sola Mahoney, recalled seeing Ruiz burst out of a crowd of spectators on Commonwealth Avenue, half a mile from the finish. Not long after that, freelance photographer Susan Morrow reported meeting her on the subway during the New York City Marathon and accompanying her from the subway to the race. She lost touch with Ruiz after that, but came forward when the news of Ruiz's dubious Boston win broke. According to Morrow, she met Ruiz on the subway and together they walked a distance to the finishing area, where Ruiz identified herself as an injured runner. She was escorted to a first aid station and volunteers marked her down as having completed the marathon, thus qualifying her for the Boston Marathon.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: New York City Marathon officials launched an investigation and could not find any sign of Ruiz near the finish line. On April 25, based on this and other evidence, the games committee of the New York City Marathon retroactively disqualified Ruiz from the 1979 race, with marathon director Fred Lebow saying she could not possibly have run the entire course. Later that week, the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) disqualified Ruiz from the Boston Marathon. While New York's action seemed to have automatically disqualified Ruiz from Boston as well, Boston officials wanted to do their own investigation before taking action. Gareau was declared the female winner, with a time of 2:34:28—at the time, the fastest recorded for a woman in the Boston Marathon. Lyons was moved up to second; her time of 2:35:08 was the fastest ever recorded for an American woman in a marathon at that juncture.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: During a CTV interview in July 2019, Gareau said that she felt pity for Ruiz, but had no ill feelings toward her.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: In 1982, Ruiz was arrested for embezzling $60,000 () from a real estate company where she worked. She spent one week in jail and was sentenced to five years' probation. She then moved back to South Florida, where she was arrested in 1983 for her involvement in a cocaine deal. She was sentenced to three years' probation. In January 1984, Ruiz married Aicaro Vivas, divorcing in August 1986 but keeping the Vivas surname thereafter. In April 1993, she was working in West Palm Beach as a client representative for a medical laboratory company.


title: Rosie Ruiz

text: As of 2000, she still maintained that she ran the entire 1980 Boston Marathon. However, an acquaintance, Steve Marek, said that she admitted to him a few months after the race that she had cheated, recalling that "she jumped out of the crowd, not knowing that the first woman hadn't gone by yet. Believe me, she was as shocked as anyone when she came in first."


title: Altered Beast

text: Altered Beast is a 1988 beat 'em up arcade video game developed and manufactured by Sega. The game is set in Ancient Greece and follows a player character chosen by Zeus to rescue his daughter Athena from the demonic ruler of the underworld, Neff. Through the use of power-ups, the player character can assume the form of different magical beasts (wolf, dragon, bear, tiger, and golden wolf). It was ported to several home video game consoles and home computers. It was the pack-in game for the Sega Genesis when that system launched in 1988.


title: Altered Beast

text: The game was developed by Makoto Uchida, who developed the game as his first project as a lead developer. Uchida and his team used the System 16 arcade system board for its graphical capabilities with sprites. "Altered Beast" was ported numerous times in addition to its Genesis conversion, including for the Master System by Sega and to several computer systems and video game consoles by various third parties.


title: Altered Beast

text: "Altered Beast"s arcade release and its various ports have all received mixed reviews, mainly targeting the game's gameplay and graphics. The game has been re-released several times for various consoles and as part of video game compilations, and two sequels to the game have been developed.


title: Altered Beast

text: "Altered Beast" is a side scrolling beat 'em up game with light platform elements. It has five levels and can be played by up to two players simultaneously. Combat takes place across five levels set in Ancient Greece and populated by aggressive undead creatures and monsters resembling those from Greek mythology. The demonic god Neff waits at the end of each level. Between each level are small animations giving the player glimpses of Athena's peril. Players can punch, kick and jump.


title: Altered Beast

text: The game's premise is that Neff, ruler of the underworld, captures the goddess Athena. Angry, her father, the Olympian god Zeus, decides to choose a champion to save her. Respecting the bravery of Roman Centurions, Zeus resurrects one of them and empowers him as a champion. The game's player character is the resurrected Roman Centurion, given extra power by Zeus so they can battle Neff and his supernatural minions. In the original arcade game, the end credits include the revelation that the whole game actually depicted a staged film production.


title: Altered Beast

text: Whenever a player defeats a white two-headed wolf, a Spirit Ball power-up appears. Each obtained Spirit Ball increases the player character's strength and size. Collecting three Spirit Balls allows the player character to transform into a powerful beast form, increasing their combat abilities before having to face Neff at the end of the level. The player character's beast forms include a weredragon, a werebear, a weretiger, a werewolf, or a golden werewolf. Each beast form grants its own abilities. The dragon can unleash lightning bolts and an electric barrier, the bear has a petrifying breath that turns enemies into stone, the tiger can throw fireballs in a zig-zag pattern, the wolf can throw direct, but weak fireballs and has a powerful thrust attack, while the golden werewolf has the same abilities as the wolf form but stronger. In the Famicom version of the game, available beast forms also include a shark, lion, and phoenix form.


title: Altered Beast

text: "Altered Beast" was developed by Makoto Uchida. He took inspiration for the game from "The Howling" and the music video for the Michael Jackson song "Thriller", as well as movies by Ray Harryhausen, and chose the Greek setting for the powerful characters he had in mind. Uchida admitted that he struggled during production because it was his first game he developed, and so he leaned on his lead programmer to help create balance in the gameplay.


title: Altered Beast

text: One of Uchida's goals was to create flashy visuals that would surprise players, so he asked his lead artist to focus just on the player character's transformation sequences for one month. Additionally, he and his team used the System 16 arcade system board for its ability to add great detail to large character sprites, as well as the visual effects it could provide, such as limbs flying off characters during combat. Uchida was not impressed by the initial concept art, so he worked with an artist to sketch out his specific ideas on character design. While the results of this were positive, Uchida's lead designer quit the team over this situation. "Altered Beast" includes Easter eggs that are references to other System 16 titles "" and "Shinobi", as a nod to members on Uchida's team that had worked on those titles previously.


title: Altered Beast

text: There were planned features for the game that Uchida did not have the opportunity to implement, namely a pressure-sensitive button. Discussions took place but a deal could not be reached with the owner of the patent of the pressure-sensitive device over the small number to be ordered. The failure to secure the button meant that half of the planned character actions had to be removed. Uchida claims that the reduced complexity of the game caused by this caused players to tire of "Altered Beast" quickly. Despite this, Uchida was proud of the reactions he was getting from players during play testing.


title: Altered Beast

text: Released in June 1988, "Altered Beast" arcade version proved to be more popular overseas than it did in Japan. As a result of its popularity, it was selected to be ported and made the pack-in game for the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive in North America and Europe. Uchida was not involved directly with either the Genesis or the Master System port, though he did give some advice and noted he was not worried about the Genesis port because its hardware was based on the System 16 arcade system board he used. He had hoped to implement the pressure-sensitive button for the Genesis port, but could not due to tight development time and the lack of the button in Genesis hardware. Because "Altered Beast" was not the pack-in game in Japan, Uchida did not get to see his game included with the console. By the time he went to the US three years later, all of the available consoles instead included "Sonic the Hedgehog", which replaced "Altered Beast" in part over concerns the latter's themes of zombies and magic were not popular in the Bible Belt.


title: Altered Beast

text: In addition to the Genesis and Master System, "Altered Beast" was ported to several platforms, including for PC Engine, PC Engine-CD, Famicom, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Amiga. Several of the conversions for European systems were completed by Activision. Certain differences are seen between the several versions of the game. Some of them, like the Master System version, were missing levels. Others provided additional beasts to mutate into, such as a humanoid lion, shark, and phoenix forms seen in the Famicom version, ported by Asmik.


title: Altered Beast

text: The Genesis version is included in the compilations "Sega Smash Pack", "Sega Genesis Collection", and "Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection", with the latter two also including the arcade version as an unlockable game. The Wii's Virtual Console service, the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network all received a version of the game. In 2017, "Altered Beast" was rereleased on iOS and Android as a part of the Sega Forever collection. M2 released a 3D port for the Nintendo 3DS as a digital download on the Nintendo eShop. The game was also included as one of the pre-loaded games on the SEGA Genesis Mini. This game has also been released on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack on December 16, 2021.


title: Altered Beast

text: Upon its initial arcade release, "Altered Beast" received mixed reviews. "Commodore User" called it "a clever game, and well worth a few tens of anybody's money." "Computer and Video Games" criticized the game's plot as being unoriginal and the graphics as "large and clumsily drawn". "Your Sinclair" stated the game was "not recommended to those that are still living". By contrast, "Crash" called the graphics "nifty" and suggested that despite the repetitive plot, the gameplay is compelling. "The Games Machine" offered a positive review, stating that while the game is not highly visual like "Out Run" or "Space Harrier", the gameplay makes the game worth a play.


title: Altered Beast

text: The various ports of "Altered Beast" received more mixed reviews. "The Games Machine" gave the Mega Drive version a positive review on the faithful arcade conversion. In 1989, "ACE" praised the Mega Drive conversion as never having played better on any home system, and they rated it as the best Mega Drive game available at the time. "Sega Power", however, criticized the same version for jerky gameplay and bad scrolling. The PC Engine CD conversion was panned by "The Games Machine", which called the port "a disappointment" and suggested players who want to play the game try the Mega Drive version instead.


title: Altered Beast

text: Julian Rignall of "Computer and Video Games" criticized the Master System version, stating that while he is a fan of the arcade version, the reduced graphics, slow gameplay of the port, and fussy collision detection are significant issues. Contrary to their praise for the Mega Drive port, "The Games Machine" called the Master System version "a middling conversion of a nice coin-op". "Electronic Gaming Monthly" was more positive, claiming the game "does a good job of capturing most of the familiar play mechanics of its arcade cousin." "Sega Pro" called the Master System version "a shame, since the Mega Drive version was a great success." "S: The Sega Magazine" stated that there are better arcade conversions on the Master System and that "Altered Beast", while having a passable soundtrack, suffers from poor animation and control issues.


title: Altered Beast

text: "Mega" placed the game at #10 in their list of the 10 Worst Mega Drive Games of All Time. Its re-release for the Wii's Virtual Console was given a lukewarm reception by GameSpot and IGN, describing the game as merely decent with some nostalgic value. The Xbox Live Arcade re-release was even described by IGN as a "relic of the arcade heyday that just doesn't hold up today".


title: Altered Beast

text: Video game journalist Ken Horowitz stated that video gamers identify the "rise from your grave" opening from the game, whether they are fans of Sega's games or not. According to Horowitz, "Altered Beast" biggest attraction is its charm, which was reduced in the modifications to the game's Genesis port, and has called the game "one of the more memorable concepts Sega conceived." Uchida has expressed surprise over the sustained popularity around his arcade games, stating "When I occasionally visit videogame arcades in the US, I still see people playing my "Altered Beast" and "Golden Axe" games. It proves to me that, if the game is good, people will still pay good money to play it."


title: Altered Beast

text: "Altered Beast" has received two sequels. "Altered Beast: Guardian of the Realms", developed by 3d6 Games and published by THQ, is a 2002 sequel for Game Boy Advance in the style of the original arcade game. It adds new features like power-ups and beast forms, as well as 15 levels. While the graphics are improved compared to the original game, the scrolling mechanic remains the same. A PlayStation 2 title known as "Jūōki: Project Altered Beast" in Japan and "Altered Beast" in Europe was released by Sega in 2005. It was planned for a North American release as well, but was later cancelled. Rather than serving as a sequel to the original game, the newer title features a more modern setting that is unconnected to the original game, with a darker and more violent tone. Uchida advised on the project, and stated, "We really couldn't steer away from the violence aspect. The American marketing side was cheering us on, so we did it as best we could." The 2005 "Altered Beast" received mixed reviews for its camera system and poor graphics.


title: Altered Beast

text: In 2014, Sega announced a partnership with Evan Cholfin for film and TV projects based on their games. "Altered Beast" was announced as an animated project in 2016.


title: Altered Beast

text: "Altered Beast" has been referenced in other media. In 1993, Matthew Sweet named his album "Altered Beast" after the game. Sweet told "Spin" magazine that the title meant "whatever is inside you that someday might explode, and maybe you don't know it's there", which he found similar to the game, where "you have to find these little power-up things, and when you eat them you become the Altered Beast, this other creature that's really powerful and violent". The character Neff, in his Rhino form as the boss of the game's final level, appeared in the 2012 film "Wreck-It Ralph", along with "Sonic the Hedgehog" villain Doctor Eggman.


title: Altered Beast

text: Altered Beast is popular among competitive gamers. On October 31, 2019, ZeeGee_ of New York achieved the world record for fastest speedrun at 6m 10s on the Sega Genesis, while thu_ox placed second with 6 12s on the Nintendo Wii. Apostle Studios achieved the world record of highest score with 6,621,500 on the Sega Genesis, while Samuel Clemens of California placed second with 1,008,300 points on July 19, 2022, on the PlayStation 4. As of 2022, Guinness World Records does not recognize records of Altered Beast.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Saturn Sky is a roadster that was produced by Saturn, and was initially released in the first quarter of 2006 as a 2007 model. It uses the "Kappa" automobile platform shared with the Pontiac Solstice. The Sky concept was shown at the 2005 North American International Auto Show, with the production version following at the 2006 show. It was built at GM's Wilmington Assembly plant in Wilmington, Delaware, alongside the Solstice. The Sky featured 18-inch (457 mm) wheels and a 2.4 L Ecotec "LE5" I4 engine that produced , a new straight-4 2.0 L turbocharged direct injected engine that made as well as an optional dealer-installed turbo upgrade kit that made . Both five-speed manual and automatic transmissions were available.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The styling for the Sky, penned by Franz von Holzhausen, was based on the Vauxhall VX Lightning Concept's design. It was available in some European markets as the Opel GT. A rebadged version named the Daewoo G2X was unveiled as a concept vehicle for the South Korean market in 2006. The production version was released in September 2007.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Wilmington Assembly plant closed in July 2009, ending production as both the Pontiac and Saturn nameplates were retired.


title: Saturn Sky

text: A Red Line model of the Sky was introduced on April 11, 2006 at the New York Auto Show. It uses the same turbocharged Ecotec engine as the Pontiac Solstice, as well as the same standard 5-speed Aisin manual transmission. An automatic transmission is optional.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Red Line had a standard torque-sensing limited-slip differential, standard StabiliTrak stability control, and an enhanced sport suspension over the standard Sky (available as a dealer-add on for regular models). Other exterior enhancements included dual exhausts, 18-inch wheels, and a specific front fascia modeled for the Red Line. On the inside, the Red Line had a special leather-wrapped steering wheel with audio controls, special embroidery on the seats and floor mats, metallic door sill covers and stainless steel pedals, special tachometer and gauges, and a digital boost gauge in the Driver Information Center. The Red Line model started shipping in the third quarter of 2006, with a retail price starting at $29,795.


title: Saturn Sky

text: For the 2008 model year, GM offered the Carbon Flash Special Edition Saturn Sky. Unlike the two Limited Edition models launched later in 2009, its production was slightly higher at 550 units. The Carbon Flash Special Edition featured a unique metallic Carbon Flash paint color, removable silver racing stripe standard, and Monsoon premium audio standard. The largest differentiator, however, is Carbon Flash Edition's silver inserts in the interior seating and steering wheel that provide a black-on-silver appearance.


title: Saturn Sky

text: For the 2009 model year, GM launched two limited-edition Saturn Sky roadsters jointly; Ruby Red Special Edition and Hydro Blue Limited Edition. Both are VIN-coded and some blue books track it as a limited-edition vehicle. All limited editions featured Monsoon premium stereos.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Ruby Red Edition featured the Ruby Red color and a unique, removable carbon racing stripe that was exclusive to the 500 Sky units produced in this trim.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Hydro Blue Edition featured a Hydro Blue color, as well as matching blue-colored stitching in the seats and gear shifter. Also, the word Sky stitched into the seats is changed to matching-blue color as well. All Hydro Blue Edition Saturn Sky units were sold with the removable silver racing stripe.


title: Saturn Sky

text: GM had planned to make 500 Hydro Blue units to match the 500 Ruby Red Special Edition Sky build count. However, Hydro Blue units were being built as GM was declaring bankruptcy, resulting in the immediate termination of the Kappa platform. As such, only 89 Hydro Blue Edition Saturn Sky roadsters were built.


title: Saturn Sky

text: The Hydro Blue paint color (and seat/shifter blue stitching) was offered on the Pontiac Solstice. However, it is not VIN coded as a unique/limited edition, racing stripes were not standard, and seats do not have blue-colored lettering. Hydro Blue is the rarest color in all three vehicles; Sky Roadster, Solstice Roadster, and Solstice Coupe.


title: Saturn Sky

text: In April and May 2009 the Wilmington, DE. plant built thirty 2010 model year VIN-coded cars on the Kappa platform. Of those, 8 were Saturn Skys. The other remaining included 12 Pontiac Solstice Coupes, eight Pontiac Solstice roadsters, and two Opel GTs. They were then used as GM company vehicles to be evaluated and also as special event display vehicles. These vehicles were built to the 2010 model year specs with 2010 model year changes and had legal 2010 VIN numbers. All 8 2010 SKYs were purchased by the same dealer in Minnesota and subsequently sold as used vehicles. Among changes to the SKY for the 2010 model year was the addition of remote start on automatic-equipped cars, option package changes and additions, and three new colors. Those colors were Kinetic Blue, Opus Green, and Dark Labyrinth Metallic.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Workingman's Dead is the fourth studio album by American rock band Grateful Dead. It was recorded in February 1970 and originally released on June 14, 1970. The album and its studio follow-up, "American Beauty", were recorded back-to-back using a similar style, eschewing the psychedelic experimentation of previous albums in favor of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Americana-styled songcraft.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: In 2003, the album was ranked number 262 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 264 in a 2012 revised list, and 409 in the 2020 list. It was voted number 371 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums".


title: Workingman's Dead

text: The band again recorded at Pacific High Recording Studio in San Francisco, spending just nine days there. After the protracted sessions required for the previous two studio albums, Garcia suggested "Let's do it all in three weeks and get it the hell out of the way". Besides trying to avoid the debt that had accumulated while recording "Aoxomoxoa", the band was dealing with the stress of a recent drug bust in New Orleanswhich could have resulted in jail time. Additionally, they returned from a tour to find their soon-to-be-fired manager, Lenny Hart (father of drummer Mickey Hart), refusing to show the books to anyone else in the organization. "In midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening ... [recording the album] was definitely an upper," said Garcia in an interview.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Lyricist Robert Hunter had joined the band on the road for the first time, resulting in a period of faster song development. Unlike the psychedelic, electrified music for which the band had become known, the new songs took a new direction, reviving their folk-band roots. Bassist Phil Lesh stated "The song lyrics reflected an 'old, weird' America that perhaps never was ... The almost miraculous appearance of these new songs would also generate a massive paradigm shift in our group mind: from the mind-munching frenzy of a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon to the warmth and serenity of a choir of chanting cherubim. Even the album cover reflects this new direction: The cover for "Aoxomoxoa" is colorful and psychedelic, and that of "Workingman’s Dead" is monochromatic and sepia." In recent years, a search revealed that the photograph was taken at 1199 Evans Avenue in San Francisco.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty", the companion album that followed months later, were, according to drummer Bill Kreutzmann, both influenced by the Bakersfield sound. He explained "We tried to be like a Bakersfield bandbut one that still sounded like we were from 300 miles north of that town ... we held to our psychedelic roots. "Workingman's Dead" was all about discovering "the song" ... "American Beauty" became all about having the harmonies to do that".


title: Workingman's Dead

text: While on tour in Boulder, Colorado, the previous year, Garcia had purchased a steel guitar and was now keen to use it on the new batch of songs. Lesh explained, "Just as with any other instrument he picked up, he made it sing. The main impetus for this development was the nature of the new songs Hunter and Jerry had been writing; many of them had a decidedly country flavor ('Dire Wolf,' 'Friend of the Devil,' 'High Time,' 'Casey Jones,' 'Ripple'), and Jerry began using the new axe on these as they were slotted into the set lists. Bobby [Weir] also began bringing in covers of his favorite country tunes and some originals in that vein, so we were starting to see a trend developing. Personally, I was thrilled that the band could make such a complete musical about-face while still maintaining the flat-out weirdness that I’d come to know and love."


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Songs such as "Uncle John's Band", "High Time", and "Cumberland Blues" were brought to life with soaring harmonies and layered vocal textures that had not previously been a part of the band's sound. According to the 1992 Dead oral history, "Aces Back to Back", in the summer of 1968, Stephen Stills vacationed at Mickey Hart's ranch in Novato. "Stills lived with me for three months around the time of CSN's first record," recalls Hart, "and he and David Crosby really turned Jerry and Bobby onto the voice as the holy instrument. You know, 'Hey, is this what a voice can do?' That turned us away from pure improvisation and more toward songs."


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Garcia commented that much of the sound of the album comes both from his pairing with Hunter, as well as the band's friendship with Crosby, Stills and Nash: "Hearing those guys sing and how nice they sounded together, we thought, 'We can try that. Let's work on it a little'."


title: Workingman's Dead

text: The album title came about when Jerry Garcia commented to lyricist Robert Hunter that the album was "turning into the 'workingman's Dead' version of the band". Having both worked on all of the album's songs and gone out on the road with the band, Hunter appears as a seventh member on the front cover photograph.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Warner Bros. released "Uncle John's Band" (backed with "New Speedway Boogie") as a single to promote the album. It received limited airplay, even though it was edited to a radio-friendly three-minute length and the lyric "goddamn" removed.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: Readers of "Rolling Stone" voted "Workingman's Dead" the best album of 1970, followed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Déjà Vu" and Van Morrison's "Moondance".


title: Workingman's Dead

text: The album was remastered and expanded in 2001 as part of "The Golden Road (1965–1973)" 12-CD box set. This version, given separate release in 2003, includes eight bonus tracks. A DVD-Audio version was also released in 2001, without the bonus material. In 2014 it was issued as a two-LP set, mastered at 45 rpm by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab.


title: Workingman's Dead

text: On July 10, 2020 Rhino Records released the "50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition" of Workingman's Dead. Disc one contains a newly remastered mix of the album. Disc two and three contain a previously unreleased complete concert from the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, recorded on February 21, 1971.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The Serbian Radical Party (, SRS) is an ultranationalist political party in Serbia. It was founded in 1991, and its founder and current leader is Vojislav Šešelj.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The SRS was founded in 1991 as a merger of two minor right-wing parties whose leaders were Vojislav Šešelj and Tomislav Nikolić. They later became the President and Deputy President of the party respectively. During the first half of the 1990s, the SRS supported the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia regime, which had contributed greatly to the rise of SRS through the use of media. The party had strong support until the 2000 election, when they suffered a major defeat, but they would soon quickly rise up again to become one of the major parties. Šešelj led the party from its foundation in 1991 until his indictment in 2003, when he voluntarily surrendered to the ICTY to defend himself against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity that he was alleged to have committed during the Croatian War of Independence and the Bosnian War. His deputy president Tomislav Nikolić assumed "de facto" leadership of the party until its split in 2008.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: During the years of Nikolić's leadership, SRS became a moderate nationalist party, but because of disagreements with Šešelj, Nikolić took many of the high-ranking members of the party to form the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which would become the ruling party in 2012. After the split, Dragan Todorović assumed "de facto" leadership, and the party went into a major decline, only pulling 4% of the vote in 2012 and 2% in 2014, the first time that SRS was not represented in the parliament. Shortly after Šešelj's return to Serbia in 2014, the party gained back some of its popularity, officially returning to its far-right roots. The SRS placed third with 8% of the vote in the 2016 election. In late 2019, the party went into decline again, and in the 2020 election it ended up only with 2% of the vote and gaining no seats in the parliament again.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The SRS is positioned on the far-right on the political spectrum, supporting the creation of a Greater Serbia. It is Eurosceptic and Russophilic, was formerly considered anti-Western, and was described as "neofascist" in the 1990s due to its vocal support of ultranationalism. Regarding social issues, SRS is traditionalist, and has been described as right-wing populist. It also holds local branches in some of the neighboring states.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The party's core ideology is based on Serbian nationalism and the goal of creating a Greater Serbia. The party is also strongly opposed to European integration (euroscepticism) and globalization, advocating closer ties with Russia instead. The SRS is extremely critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Šešelj was incarcerated from 2003 to 2014. The party regards former general Ratko Mladić and former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadžić as "Serbian heroes".


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: Due to Tomislav Nikolić's support for the accession of Serbia to the European Union conflicting with the party's original hardline policy, Nikolić was expelled in 2008. With his supporters breaking apart from the SRS, he founded the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) which succeeded the SRS as the country's leading party.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The Serbian Radical Party (SRS) was formed on 23 February 1991 by the merger of Vojislav Šešelj's Serbian Chetnik Movement (SČP) and the National Radical Party (NRS). The SČP had been formed in 1990, although it was denied official registration due to its overt identification with the historical Chetniks. Formation of the new party followed Šešelj's breakaway from the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) due to internal quarrels with Vuk Drašković; the SPO having been founded by the merger of Šešelj's former Serbian Freedom Movement and Drašković's faction from the Serbian National Renewal. Šešelj was chosen as the first president of the SRS while Tomislav Nikolić, a member of the NRS, became deputy president.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: Led by Milošević, the Socialist Party (SPS) contributed greatly to the rise of the SRS through its use of the media. With the SRS allowed to promulgate its ultranationalist views on state television, the SPS could present itself as a comparatively moderate, yet still patriotic party. Šešelj promoted popular notions of an "international conspiracy against the Serbs," the foremost of which involved Germany, the Vatican, the CIA, Italy, Turkey, as well as the centrist Serbian political parties. Such conspiracy theories were also promoted by Milošević-controlled media. In 1991, Šešelj became a Member of Parliament as an independent candidate, and created a belligerent image by engaging in physical fights with opponents of the government.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The 22.6% of the vote won by the SRS in the 1992 parliamentary election confirmed the party's rapid rise and made it the second largest parliamentary party. Šešelj campaigned for the election on issues such as driving Albanians out of Kosovo to Albania, expelling Muslims from Sandžak, and forcing the Croats out of Vojvodina. Having helped engineer the party's election to parliament, the SPS formed an informal coalition with the SRS, and collaborated on ousting moderate politicians from public office.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: By late 1993 the parties had turned against each other. Milošević saw it necessary to change his policies and distance himself from the SRS in order for his new peacemaking orientation to be taken seriously by the West, as well as to counter the effects of United Nations sanctions against the country. Many socialists also feared competition from the party based on its strong growth record. As discord erupted among the opposition including the SRS, Milošević called new elections in 1993. These cut SRS support almost in half, while the SPS increased its share of the vote from 28% to 38%. Although most people had grown tired of the wars, UN sanctions and the catastrophic economic situation, the SRS had also been subjected to powerful state propaganda and exclusion by the media. Following Milošević's agreement to the Dayton accords in 1995 to bring peace to Bosnia, Šešelj denounced Milošević as "the worst traitor in Serbian history", and likened the event to Serbia's greatest defeat since the Battle of Kosovo fought against the Ottoman Empire in 1389.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: In 1995, Šešelj and the SRS joined in a technical coalition with the centrist Democratic Party (DS) and the conservative Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS). This gave Šešelj a degree of democratic legitimacy, although the coalition withered away by the end of the same year.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: When Šešelj beat the SPS candidate for the 1997 presidential election, despite the contest being declared invalid due to low turnout, he was again brought into the Serbian government. In 1998 the SRS and SPO entered the so-called "war" government, and as Deputy Prime Minister, Šešelj passed new information laws and helped launch propaganda offensives against Kosovo Albanians. U.S. officials in turn branded him a "fascist", while the U.S. Department of State declared that they would never deal with him. Following the 1999 NATO occupation of Kosovo, Šešelj resigned from government until his party was enticed to re-enter the administration by the SPS. As the party had held posts under Milošević's regime, it was excluded from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), and suffered a major defeat in the 2000 parliamentary election when Milošević was ousted.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: During the Yugoslav Wars some SRS supporters including Šešelj were active in paramilitary units loyal to the federal government, serving as his "iron fist" during military campaigns. Milošević's regime at times supported Šešelj and provided him with arms, whilst at others it accused him of war crimes. The SRS was also provided with resources to establish paramilitary volunteer forces such as the White Eagles. As the SRS protested against Milošević's extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2001, Milošević urged his supporters to vote for the SRS rather than his own SPS. The ICTY also indicted Šešelj, who has been on trial since 2007 following his surrender in 2003. Deputy President Nikolić became the new "de facto" SRS leader and presented a more moderate face, with a new approach to international cooperation and a vision of Serbia acting as a "link between the West and the East."


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: During the 2003 parliamentary election, the SRS condemned cooperation with the war crimes tribunal, corruption scandals in government, poor living standards, and slightly moderated its formerly aggressive rhetoric. While it won a clear plurality with 28% of the vote and 82 seats, the party was still viewed as a pariah by its democratic rivals and was thus left in opposition. In the 2007 parliamentary election it won 29% of the vote and 81 seats. The SRS caucus in parliament elected Nikolić as its president and Aleksandar Vučić vice-president. Nikolić was later chosen as parliamentary speaker, supported by the DSS amidst a deadlock in coalition talks. He stepped down just five days later, as the DS and DSS agreed to form a coalition government.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: At the National Assembly's first session on 14 February 2007, politicians voted overwhelmingly to reject the proposal by UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari on the preliminary resolution of the status of Kosovo. New elections were called in 2008 as the DS-DSS coalition collapsed due to EU recognition of Kosovo's declaration of independence. In the 2008 parliamentary election the SRS again won 29% of the vote, and 78 seats, leading to the formation of a DS-SPS-led government coalition. The party also won 17 seats in the Kosovska Mitrovica-based Community Assembly of Kosovo and Metohija consisting of Kosovan Serb municipalities who defied Kosovo's declaration of independence.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: After disagreements with Šešelj, on 8 September 2008, Nikolić formed the new parliamentary group "Napred Srbijo!" ("Forward Serbia!") along with a number of other SRS members. Šešelj responded with a letter on 11 September addressed to SRS members, in which he condemned the Nikolić group as "traitors" and "Western puppets", while calling on SRS members to remain loyal to the ideologies of "Serbian nationalism, anti-globalism, and Russophilia." Nikolić and his group were officially expelled from the SRS the next day, in response to which Nikolić announced that he would form his own party. On 14 September, SRS general secretary Aleksandar Vučić also resigned from the SRS. Nikolić and Vučić then launched the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) on 21 October of the same year.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: Following their departure, Dragan Todorović took over as the party's acting leader from Nikolić; however the office of deputy chairman was officially abolished. By April 2011 the SRS had about 7% of support in opinion polls, while the SNS and its coalition partners held about 40%. In the 2012 parliamentary election the Radical Party received only 4.63% of the popular vote, thus failing to cross the 5% threshold to enter parliament for the first time in the party's history.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: With their leader back in Serbia in 2014, the party campaigned for the parliamentary election of 2016 aiming to restore its presence prior to 2008.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The Serbian Radical Party maintains ties with the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and had ties with the French National Front party in the 1990s. The SRS also has minimal ties with the far-right Golden Dawn party in Greece, focusing on religious similarities, and the Forza Nuova party in Italy.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: The party counted Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party as one of its political and financial backers until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as the parties found common cause in defiance of the United States. Similar sentiment led the party to back Libya's Muammar Gaddafi following the 2011 military intervention in Libya by NATO. Serbia and Libya had maintained good relations since Gaddafi vocally opposed NATO intervention in Serbia in the 1990s, while he also backed Serbia's opposition to Kosovo's independence. The SRS has also expressed support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad following the Syrian Civil War. Šešelj advocates for a neutral position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, balancing Serbia's strong relations with both countries.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: On 9 March 2016 Šešelj and Zmago Jelinčič, president of the Slovenian National Party, signed an agreement with the intention of bringing their parties closer in terms of partnership and political alliance.


title: Serbian Radical Party

text: Šešelj was incarcerated at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 2003 to 2014.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Gwen Amber Rose Araujo (February 24, 1985 – October 4, 2002) was an American trans teenager who was murdered in Newark, California at the age of 17. She was murdered by four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering that she was transgender. Two of the defendants were convicted of second-degree murder, but not the requested hate-crime enhancements to the charges. The other two defendants pleaded guilty or no-contest to voluntary manslaughter. In at least one of the trials, a "trans panic defense"—an extension of the gay panic defense—was employed. In some contemporary news reports and during the first trial of the perpetrators, Gwen Araujo was misgendered and referred to by her deadname.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Merél and Magidson were sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 15 years. Merél was granted early parole in 2016, after reportedly showing extensive remorse to Araujo's mother, who supported the decision. Magidson, however, has reportedly never shown remorse and has been denied parole twice since his sentencing.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Gwen Araujo was born on February 24, 1985, in Brawley, California, to Edward Araujo and Sylvia Guerrero. Her parents divorced when she was 10 months old.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Araujo came out as transgender in 1999 at the age of 14, and began using the name "Gwen" after her favorite musician, Gwen Stefani, but also went by "Wendy" and "Lida". She began to grow her hair long and planned to undergo hormone treatment and surgery. Her older sister said that she was bullied in junior high school because of her voice and bearing. She transferred to an alternative high school, but did not return for the 2002–03 academic year.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Araujo first met Michael Magidson, José Merél, Jaron Nabors, and Jason Cazares in late August or early September 2002. The night they met Araujo, she flirted with all four men and they smoked marijuana together. After she left, Nabors asked the other three "Could this be a dude?" but none of the four men took the thought seriously. Later, she engaged in oral sex with Magidson and anal sex with Merél. She claimed to be menstruating and during sex would push her partners' hands away from her genitalia to prevent them from discovering that she had a penis.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Nicole Brown, who was dating Paul Merél (José's older brother) and was acquainted with Araujo, said that she and Araujo had engaged in a physical fight after Brown challenged Araujo to strip for the men. Araujo surprised her with a strong blow during the fight, and Brown said the men "were tripping, because she was smaller than me and just as strong. She fought like a guy." The four men debated in late September whether Araujo was female, concluding that "something bad could happen" to her if she was not.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: On the night of October 3, 2002, Araujo attended a party at a house rented by José and Paul Merél, attended by them, their younger brother Emmanuel Merél, Michael Magidson, Jaron Nabors, Jason Cazares, and Nicole Brown. Nabors later testified that José Merél said that night, "I swear, if it's a f— man, I'm gonna kill him. If it's a man, she ain't gonna leave." According to Nabors, Magidson added "I don't know what I'm going to do", and Nabors replied, "Whatever you do, make sure you don't make a mess." Brown said the four men were out at a club together and did not return to the house until after midnight.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: In the early morning hours of October 4, Magidson asked Araujo to reveal her sex or allow him to touch her genitals, which she refused. Brown suggested that one of them should inspect Araujo, and Magidson took Araujo to the bathroom. After half an hour, during which José Merél later confessed he had sex with Araujo, Brown went to the bathroom, where she discovered Araujo had male genitalia during a forced inspection. Brown was surprised and blurted out, "It's a f— man!", and the men with whom she had had sexual relations became enraged and violent. Brown testified that she warned Araujo that the men were "very angry", but upon exiting through the front door, Araujo was confronted and forced back inside the house by Magidson, Nabors, and Cazares. Emmanuel Merél testified that he also tried to escort Araujo away from the house, but was prevented by Magidson and Nabors.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: José Merél vomited upon learning Araujo was anatomically male, then began to cry in disbelief, saying "I can't be f— gay." Brown testified that she tried to comfort Merél after the discovery, saying "It's not your fault. I went to high school with you, and you were on the football team. Any woman that knows you after this, it's not going to matter. Just let her go."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: After Araujo was brought back into the house, Magidson grabbed at her skirt and underwear in an attempt to expose her genitals. He then proceeded to punch her in the face, knocking her to the ground, and put her in a chokehold, but he was pulled off by others. Araujo begged the men to stop, saying "No, please don't. I have a family." José Merél became angry and struck her in the head with a can of food, denting the can and opening a cut on her head, and then he struck her again with a frying pan. The last words Merél heard Araujo speak were "I told you I was sorry."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: At some point after that, Brown woke Paul Merél, and they left the house with Emmanuel Merél. Emmanuel Merél later testified he walked to a convenience store to buy gum, then went to a friend's house to spend the night.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Nabors and Cazares left in Magidson's truck to retrieve shovels and a pickaxe from Cazares's house, saying as they left the Merél house that the other men were going to "kill that b—". Brown recalled that after she had left with Paul Merél, they drove around the block and returned to the house to see Nabors and Cazares leaving in Magidson's truck.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: When Nabors and Cazares returned, Araujo was still conscious, bleeding from her head wound and sitting on the couch. José Merél became concerned that Araujo was bleeding on the couch and ordered her off it. At some point, the assault resumed. Nabors and Cazares urged the others to "knock the b— out", according to Nabors's testimony. Magidson hit her head against the living room wall with his knee, rendering her unconscious. Nabors testified that Magidson's assault was so severe it left a dent in the wall and cracked the plaster. Cazares kicked her. Merél was concerned with cleaning Araujo's blood off the couch and carpet before retreating to his room so the others would not see him crying.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: After Araujo was knocked unconscious, Magidson bound her wrists and ankles, then she was wrapped in a comforter to minimize the amount of blood staining the carpet, before being carried to the garage of the home. After this, the defendants' testimonies diverge.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Nabors testified that Magidson strangled her with a rope and that Cazares struck her with a shovel, but Nabors was returning from the garage and did not actually witness the act of strangulation. Referring to Araujo as "Lida"—the name she had used with them—Nabors testified that he saw Magidson raising the rope to her neck before he left the garage and that Magidson later told the others "that he had wrapped the rope around Lida's neck and twisted it." According to Nabors, Magidson "wasn't sure if Lida had died from twisting the rope, but once Jason hit her twice with the shovel, he knew she was dead".


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Magidson testified that it was instead Nabors who strangled her and struck her with the shovel, and Cazares testified that he never struck her and did not see her die. José Merél testified he was cleaning Araujo's blood out of the carpets and couch as Magidson was binding her ankles, prior to her being taken to the garage. Merél also said he thought she was still alive until he saw her body in the bed of Magidson's truck. It is not clear at what point during this sequence of events she died. However, the autopsy showed that she died from strangulation associated with blunt force trauma to the head. According to Merél, Magidson said he was not sure she was dead until they struck her with a shovel.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: She was then placed in the bed of a pick-up truck, and the four men drove her body four hours away, burying her near the Sierra Nevada mountains in a shallow grave in the El Dorado National Forest near Silver Fork Road in El Dorado County. On their way home, they purchased breakfast at a McDonald's drive-through window. Later that morning, during a phone conversation, Brown asked José Merél what happened, to which he replied "Let's just say she had a long walk home."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The party-goers did not report the crime and the assailants said nothing to anyone about the murder. Araujo usually checked in with her mother, so when she did not come home the day after the party, her mother called the police on October 5 to report her missing. Police did not initially take the missing persons case seriously partly because she was transgender, and she was known to stay away from home overnight. Rumors reached her family that a girl who had been outed as transgender at a party had been killed and buried in Tahoe, and her aunt called the police on October 9 to pass on the story. Police began to interview the party-goers, and one of them led the police to the Meréls' house.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Two days after Araujo was reported missing, a friend of Jaron Nabors described him as appearing distraught. Nabors had confessed to a friend what the four had done shortly after returning from the grave site. That friend tipped off the police, and agreed to wear a microphone during a subsequent conversation with Nabors about the murder. Confronted with the recording, Nabors agreed to lead authorities to the body on October 15.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The Alameda County Sheriff's Office dispatched four crime scene investigators and two detectives to recover Araujo's body from the grave site. The four who were initially arrested and accused of the murder were Magidson (age 22); Nabors (19), José Merél (22), and Paul Merél.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Paul Merél was released after Brown and Emmanuel Merél told the police that he had left the scene with them. Magidson, Nabors, and José Merél were charged with murder on October 17 and held without bail. On October 24, Nabors pleaded not guilty, Magidson was still looking for an attorney, and José Merél was still reviewing the evidence against him. In an interview with the "Los Angeles Times", Merél was confident that charges would be dropped.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: After he was arrested, Nabors wrote a letter to a girlfriend in which he stated the defendants had discussed a "Soprano-type plan" to "kill the b— and get rid of her body". The letter was intercepted by sheriff's officials and led to the arrest of Cazares on November 19. Cazares had been identified as a potential witness on October 22. At the first trial, defense attorney Tony Serra accused Nabors of writing the letter knowing it would be intercepted and implicate Cazares.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Nabors pleaded guilty on February 24, 2003, to a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, which carried an 11-year prison sentence, along with a promise to testify against the other three defendants. During the formal entry of his plea, Judge Kenneth Burr warned Nabors that he could still be charged with murder if prosecutors found he was not "living up to your end of the bargain".


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: During the February 2003 indictment proceedings, Nabors gave a detailed account of the murder and burial. As they were burying her, the men continued to disparage her. Nabors testified that he stated he "couldn't believe that someone would ever do that, would be that deceitful" and that José Merél added "he was so mad he could still kick her a couple more times".


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Nabors received an 11-year sentence on August 25, 2006. With credit for time served, he was expected to spend approximately five years in jail from that point on.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Before the first trial, the prosecuting attorney, Alameda County deputy district attorney Chris Lamiero argued that simply being transgender should not have been a death sentence:


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Jury selection for the trial of Magidson, José Merél, and Cazares began on March 15, 2004. Prospective jurors were asked if they knew any lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people; whether they knew any recently married same-sex couples; whether they had met any transgender people; or whether they had seen a "movie or theatrical performance depicting the activities of a transgender person". One of the defense attorneys explained the last question had specifically asked if prospective jurors had watched the film "Boys Don't Cry" or the play "The Laramie Project", but was changed over defense concerns that by being so specific, those who had not would be prompted to watch them.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The first trial began on April 14, 2004. Prosecuting attorney Lamiero used male pronouns and her birth name to refer to Araujo, saying the defendants had decided "that the wages of [Gwen] Araujo's sin of deception were death". In his opening statement, the defense attorney for Magidson argued that he should not be charged with murder, rather manslaughter at worst, under California law. Magidson's attorney said that his client was not biased but had been shocked "beyond reason" to learn he had unwittingly had sex with a "man": a variant of the gay panic defense. During his testimony, Nabors said he felt his friends had been raped, since Araujo (whom he referred to as male) "did not come clean with being what he really was. I feel like he forced them into homosexual sex, and my definition of rape was being forced into sex." When asked how she forced them, Nabors answered, "Through deception."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The first trial ended in a mistrial on June 22 following nine days of deliberations, when the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous decision for the three men. While the jury agreed that Araujo had been murdered, they could not agree whether it was premeditated. The final votes were 10–2 in favor of acquitting Merél and Cazares of first-degree murder, and 7–5 in favor of convicting Magidson of first-degree murder. Although they were given the option of convicting the men of second-degree murder or manslaughter, they were unable to proceed past the first-degree murder deliberations.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: One of the jurors wrote a newspaper article after the mistrial; in it, he credited Cazares's defense attorney, Tony Serra, with introducing enough reasonable doubt about the veracity of the prosecution's witnesses, including both Brown (who had admitted to consuming more than a dozen beers that night) and Nabors (who was characterized as a liar and "chameleon", prone to exaggeration and eager to please in every social situation).


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The second trial began on May 31, 2005. Publicity by transgender activists was credited with informing the public about the tactics the defense lawyers had adopted to blame Araujo for her own death, changing the approach to the case. The day after the first trial ended in a mistrial, a court granted Araujo's mother's petition for a posthumous name change, requiring the defense lawyers to refer to the victim with female pronouns. Magidson, Merél, and Cazares were charged with first-degree murder with hate-crime enhancements.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: The three defendants testified in this trial—and blamed each other as well as Nabors. Nabors, testifying for the prosecution, stated that Magidson admitted to strangling Araujo. Merél testified that Nabors was responsible for the major head injuries to Araujo, but supported the assertion that Magidson had strangled her. Magidson testified that Nabors admitted he had strangled Araujo. During Magidson's testimony, a tape of his initial interview with the police was shown, in which an investigator was recorded coaching him to use the trans panic defense: "You'd be surprised. Moms—especially moms—if they knew the facts—you'd be surprised."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: During the closing statements of the second trial, Cazares' defense lawyer Tony Serra argued that the three defendants were "ordinary human beings" who were guilty, at most, of manslaughter for their role in the death in a "classic state of heat and passion". Serra also argued that Cazares took no active role in killing her. To avoid a second mistrial, prosecuting attorney Chris Lamiero argued for a first-degree murder conviction, but gave jurors the option of a second-degree murder conviction for the three, or even manslaughter for Merél. He asked the jury to return first-degree murder convictions of Magidson and Cazares, fingering Magidson as the main culprit who had strangled Araujo and calling him "a poor excuse for a man" with a "stupid and moronic" list of excuses for murdering her.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: On September 8, the jury announced that it had reached verdicts on two of the three defendants. As Judge Harry Sheppard instructed, the verdicts were kept secret.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: On September 12, after a week of deliberation, the jury announced its verdicts. It had deadlocked on Cazares, voting 9–3 in favor of convicting him for murder. Magidson and Merél were each convicted on the charge of second-degree murder, but not convicted of the hate-crime enhancement allegations. After the trial, one of the jurors stated in an interview with the "San Francisco Chronicle" that the murder conviction was because "The community standard is not and cannot be that killing is something a reasonable person would have done that night" but not hate crimes since the murder was believed to have been committed not because Araujo was transgender, but to "cover up a situation that had gotten out of control".


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Lamiero had undermined criminal intent by commenting, "Gwen being transgender was not a provocative act. It's who she was. However, I would not further ignore the reality that Gwen made some decisions in her relation with these defendants that were impossible to defend ... I don't think most jurors are going to think it's OK to engage someone in sexual activity knowing they assume you have one sexual anatomy when you don't."


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Michael Magidson and José Merél were sentenced in January to 15 years to life in prison, for second-degree murder. While Merél expressed deep sorrow and regret to Araujo's family, Magidson was angry about his verdict and expressed "no remorse" for his role in murdering Araujo, according to presiding Judge Harry Sheppard.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: To avoid a third trial, Cazares pleaded no contest to manslaughter on December 16, 2005, and was sentenced to six years in prison, with credit for time already served. Attorney Gloria Allred represented Araujo's family. Cazares asked to begin serving his sentence after the birth of his third child, scheduled for March or April 2006, which was granted, although Lamiero noted "it's difficult for me to entertain a request like that when Gwen Araujo is dead". According to Lamiero, Cazares was willing to plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact, but that deal was rejected because the sentence was just three years and admitted no culpability in the murder.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Gwen Araujo was mourned in a public funeral at St. Edwards Catholic Church in Newark on October 25, 2002. Fred Phelps and the members of Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church promised to picket the funeral, but did not.,there were people there that picket with signs but friends wore angel wings to block casket from signs. She was cremated, and her mother Sylvia Guerrero retained the urn with her ashes.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: TransVision, a comprehensive health and social services program for transgender people in Alameda County, was founded in 2002 and operated by Tri-City Health Center after the murder of Gwen Araujo.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: At the request of Guerrero, a judge posthumously changed the victim's legal name to "Gwen Amber Rose Araujo" on June 23, 2004. "Amber Rose" was the name Guerrero had chosen before her child was born, in the event it was a girl.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: On the first anniversary of the murder, Horizons Foundation created the "Gwen Araujo Memorial Fund for Transgender Education". The fund's purpose was to support school-based programs in the nine-county Bay Area that promote understanding of transgender people and issues through annual grants. Through this fund, Sylvia Guerrero and her family spoke in middle and high schools about transgender awareness and understanding. By 2005, Guerrero had spoken to more than 20 schools. The fund was closed sometime before September 2020.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Sylvia Guerrero, Araujo's mother, worked as a legal assistant at a San Jose law firm, but as of 2016 was homeless due to PTSD from the incident. Guerrero has been unable to return to work and now shuffles her belongings from relatives' houses using a borrowed car from her friend.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: In September 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the "Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act" (AB 1160) into law. The law limited the use by criminal defendants of the "gay/trans panic defense" by allowing parties to instruct jurors not to let bias influence their decisions, including "bias against the victim" based on his or her "gender identity, or sexual orientation". The law put California on record as declaring it contrary to public policy for defendants to be acquitted or convicted of a lesser included offense on the basis of appeals to "societal bias".


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: In September 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill No. 2501 into law. The law further restricted the use of the gay/trans panic defense by amending California's manslaughter statute to prohibit defendants from claiming that they were provoked to murder by discovering a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity. AB 2501 was introduced by Assemblywoman Susan A. Bonilla in partnership with Equality California. In announcing the bill's introduction they cited the murder of Araujo and the 2008 murder of gay California teen Larry King.


title: Murder of Gwen Araujo

text: Michael Magidson said he was not ready for release at his parole board hearing in 2016, and his request for parole was also opposed by Guerrero. Magidson was denied parole again in September 2019.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln often expressed moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated in a now-famous quote. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: As early as the 1850s, Lincoln was attacked as an abolitionist. But in 1860, he was attacked as not abolitionist enough: Wendell Phillips charged that, if elected, Lincoln would waste four years trying to decide whether to end slavery in the District of Columbia. Many abolitionists emphasized the sinfulness of slave owners, but Lincoln did not. Lincoln tended not to be judgmental. In his 1854 Peoria, Illinois, speech, he said, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up." In 1865, in his second inaugural address, he said, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged," and he urged "malice toward none" and "charity for all." Nonetheless, Lincoln suggested, God had judged the nation — "both North and South" — for the "offence" of slavery.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Lincoln focused on what he saw as a more politically practical goal: preventing the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories, which, if it occurred, could lead to new slave states, and if it was prevented would eventually lead to slavery's demise. He supported excluding slavery from territories with the failed Wilmot Proviso in the 1840s. His 1850s activism was in reaction to the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, designed by his great rival, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The Act was a radical departure from the previous law of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery from all new states north of the 36°30′ parallel (except for Missouri). Lincoln suggested that if slavery were allowed to spread it would block free labor from settling in the new states and, as a result, the entire nation would soon become ever more dominated by slave owners.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: When Lincoln became president, the departure of the Southern members of Congress at the beginning of the Civil War made it finally possible to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 provided partial compensation to slave owners, paid out of federal funds. Lincoln hoped to persuade the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri to do the same, because that would eliminate their incentive to secede from the Union to join the Confederacy. Their secession might result both in the North losing the Civil War and in the continued existence of slavery.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: On September 22, 1862, having waited until the North won a significant victory in the battle at Antietam, Lincoln used the power granted to the president under Article II, section 2, of the U.S. Constitution as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It provided that, on January 1, 1863, in the states still in rebellion, the enslaved people would be freed. On January 1, 1863, as promised, he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, which declared "that all persons held as slaves" in "States and parts of States ... in rebellion against the United States" on that day "are, and henceforward shall be free." The proclamation immediately freed on paper millions of the enslaved, but it had little practical effect until the Union Army was present. Week by week, as the army advanced, more slaves were liberated. The last were freed in Texas on a day they called "Juneteenth" (June 19, 1865), which became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Although Lincoln stated in the Emancipation Proclamation that he "sincerely believed [it] to be an act of justice," he issued it as a "military necessity," because he believed that the U.S. Constitution would not permit it on any other basis. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war tactic, because by freeing enslaved people it deprived the South of labor, and it allowed African American people to "be received into the armed service of the United States." Lincoln worried about the consequences of his action, fearing an endemic racial divide in the nation. Nonetheless, during his second presidential campaign, he ran on a platform to forever abolish slavery by constitutional amendment.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: According to Michael Lind, Lincoln was for most of his life a moderate Northern mainstream white supremacist and proponent of black colonization abroad in Panama, Haiti, and Liberia. An ardent follower of Henry Clay, he envisioned an all-white United States without slavery. Leading Lincoln scholars, however, do not see Lincoln as a white supremacist and view his support for colonization as intended at least in part to make emancipation more palatable to racist white people. Until late in his life, Lincoln wanted human rights — the rights listed in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) and the natural right to eat the bread they earn with their own hands — for black people, but civil rights, such as the vote, "only on their own soil", that is in their own lands abroad, to which they moved pursuant to voluntary colonization. Nonetheless, in 1864, writing to the governor of Louisiana, and in 1865, in his last public speech, which led directly to his assassination, Lincoln supported voting rights in the United States for some African Americans. He was the first U.S. President to do so.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. His family attended a Separate Baptists church, which had strict moral standards and opposed alcohol, dancing, and slavery. The family moved north across the Ohio River to Indiana, where slavery was not allowed, and made a new start in then Perry, now Spencer County, Indiana. Lincoln later noted that this move was "partly on account of slavery" but mainly due to land title difficulties.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: As a young man, he moved west to the free state of Illinois. On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, and in the address he spoke about slavery. Seven weeks earlier, a mob in Alton, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, Missouri, killed Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and editor of a newspaper with strong anti-slavery views. "The mood of Illinois when an angry mob killed Lovejoy was pro-slavery, but not only in Illinois. The state legislatures of Connecticut and New York in the mid-1830s passed resolutions stating that slavery was accepted in the U. S. Constitution and that no state had a right to interfere." Lincoln himself had been one of only six in the Illinois House of Representatives to vote against a resolution saying "That we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies ... That the right of property in slaves, is sacred ... That the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of the citizens of said District..." Six weeks later, he and Representative Dan Stone filed a protest to the passage of the resolution—a rarely used device to register strong disagreement."


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois. She was the daughter of a slaveholder in Kentucky, but she never owned slaves herself and came to oppose slavery as an adult.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Lincoln, the leader most associated with the end of slavery in the United States, came to national prominence in the 1850s, following the advent of the Republican Party, whose official position was that freedom was "natural," the natural condition of all areas under the direct sovereignty of the Constitution, whereas slavery was "exceptional" and sectional. Earlier, as a member of the Whig Party in the Illinois General Assembly, Lincoln issued a written protest of the Assembly's passage of a resolution stating that slavery should not be abolished in the District of Columbia. In 1841, he won a court case ("Bailey v. Cromwell"), representing a black woman, Nance Legins-Costley, and her children who claimed she had already been freed and could not be sold as a slave.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: One of the earliest examples of Lincoln's written views on slavery comes from an 1845 letter Lincoln wrote to his friend Williamson Durley, concerning the annexation of Texas. In it, Lincoln said he took no position on annexation, but he added, "It is possibly true, to some extent, that with annexation, some slaves may be sent to Texas and continued in slavery, that otherwise might have been liberated. To whatever extent this may be true, I think annexation an evil." He then explained, "I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old." This view, that slavery would be most efficiently curtailed by preventing its expansion rather than by directing abolishing it, would be consistent for Lincoln throughout his political career leading up to his election as president in 1860.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: In 1845, he successfully defended Marvin Pond ("People v. Pond") for harboring the fugitive slave John Hauley. In 1847, he lost a case ("Matson v. Ashmore et al. for the use of Bryant") representing a slave owner (Robert Matson) seeking to recover fugitive slaves. Michael Burlingame writes, "Lincoln's agreement to represent Matson has been called ... the 'most profound mystery ever to confound Lincoln specialists'..." Burlingame speculates that, "despite his antislavery convictions, Lincoln accepted the Matson case in keeping with what became known in England as the 'cab-rank' rule—stipulating that lawyers must accept the first client who hails them—and with the prevailing Whig view that lawyers should try to settle disputes in an orderly fashion through the courts, trusting in the law and the judges to assure that justice was done."


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: While a congressman from Illinois in 1846 to 1848, Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso, which, if it had been adopted, would have banned slavery in any U.S. territory won from Mexico. Lincoln, in collaboration with abolitionist Congressman Joshua R. Giddings, wrote a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation for the owners, enforcement to capture fugitive slaves, and a popular vote on the matter. (Slavery in the District of Columbia was not ended until 1862, when Lincoln was president and there were no Southern senators.)


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: After leaving Congress in 1849 Lincoln largely ignored politics to concentrate on his law practice. He was drawn back by the firestorm over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which reversed a longstanding compromise and allowed territories to decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery. Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery and politically opposed to any expansion of it. At issue was its extension into the western territories. On October 16, 1854, in his Peoria speech, Lincoln declared his opposition to slavery, which he repeated as he sought the presidency. Speaking in his Kentucky accent, with a very powerful voice, he said that the Kansas-Nebraska Act's ""declared" indifference, but as I must think, covert "real" zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world."


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: In 1857, the United States Supreme Court decision in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" appalled Lincoln. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the decision wrote that blacks were not citizens and derived no rights from the Constitution. While its author hoped that "Dred Scott" would end all disputes over slavery in the favour of southern slaveholders, the decision sparked further outrage in the North. Lincoln denounced it as the product of a conspiracy to support the Slave Power and believed that the "Dred Scott" decision, in combination with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, could potentially enable slavery to spread into the free states. He argued the decision was at variance with the Declaration of Independence; he said that while the founding fathers did not believe all men equal in every respect, they believed all men were equal "in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Impressed by the strength of anti-black racism, especially in his home states of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, Lincoln concluded that, because whites would never allow blacks to live in America as equals, they would be better off migrating voluntarily to a colony outside the United States, ideally in Central America or the Caribbean. He had little faith in the program of the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to colonize American blacks in Liberia, on the West African coast. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (transcribed after the fact by Lincoln himself),


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Lincoln pointed out the immense difficulties of such a task as an obstacle to finding an easy way to quickly end slavery.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: According to historian Paul Escott, Lincoln favored a system of gradual emancipation that would allow for controlled management of free Negroes. Nonetheless, Lincoln was instrumental in forging a fusion of antislavery voters into a potent political movement.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Many of Lincoln's "public" anti-slavery sentiments were presented in the seven Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 against his opponent, Stephen Douglas, during Lincoln's unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate (which was decided by the Illinois legislature). Douglas advocated "popular sovereignty" and self-government, which would give the citizens of a territory the right to decide if slavery would be legal there. Douglas criticized Lincoln as being inconsistent, saying he altered his message and position on slavery and on the political rights of freed blacks in order to appeal to the audience before him, as northern Illinois was more hostile to slavery than southern Illinois.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: Lincoln stated that Negroes had the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the first of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, saying: Publicly, Lincoln said he was not advocating Negro suffrage in speeches both in Columbus, Ohio, on September 16, 1859, and in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, stating on the latter date:


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: This might have been a strategy speech used to gain voters, as Douglas had accused Lincoln of favoring negroes too much as well.


title: Abraham Lincoln and slavery

text: A fragment from Lincoln dated October 1, 1858, refuting theological arguments by Frederick Augustus Ross in favor of slavery, reads in part, "As a good thing, slavery is strikingly perculiar [sic], in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it is good for the lambs!!!"