title: Bradford Bishop

text: It has been reported that Bishop's career had caused some marital tension. He was unhappy at his desk job and interested in another foreign posting, but his wife Annette was reluctant. She had begun to study art at the University of Maryland despite Bishop's desire for her to remain a stay-at-home mom.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: Most sources agree that the Bishops were experiencing some financial issues, but there has been disagreement as to their severity. The "Post" reported in 1986 that the issues were "mild" and "familiar to most upwardly mobile families." FBI criminal profiler John E. Douglas described them as "nothing terribly unusual for people in their thirties living in that kind of neighborhood." In 2013, "Bethesda Magazine" reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had been auditing the family's taxes due to financial troubles. The existence of an audit has not been confirmed by the IRS or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).


title: Bradford Bishop

text: The FBI states that Bishop is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys camping and hiking, and reports that he has a pilot's license from when he was stationed in Africa. He also enjoys riding motorcycles and working out on a weekly basis. Bishop has a history of depression and insomnia, having been afflicted with both conditions and taking Serax (oxazepam) in the time leading up to the murders. He is fond of dogs. He also enjoys scotch whiskey, peanuts, and spicy foods. Bishop has a six-inch vertical scar on his lower back from surgery, a cleft chin and a facial mole on his left cheek. He may have had his father's Smith & Wesson M&P .38 Special revolver with the serial number "C981967" and his Yale class ring with him when he vanished. He is also believed to have taken his diplomatic passport with him, as his was the only one among the family's diplomatic passports that was missing.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: Bishop had approximately one week of advance time before the authorities began looking for him. It has been suggested that he could have traveled on his diplomatic passport. FBI Special Agent Steve Vogt stated in 2014 that neither Bishop's wallet nor passport have ever been found. It has also been speculated that Bishop may have had intelligence training in the 1960s which could have helped him evade detection in 1976.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: Since 1976, there have been numerous claimed sightings of Bishop in various European countries, including Italy, Belgium, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The three most credible sightings noted by the United States Marshals Service are:


title: Bradford Bishop

text: After the initial investigation, the Bishop case became the subject of articles in national publications like "Reader's Digest" and "Time" at milestone anniversaries. It was followed on an "ad hoc" basis by "The Washington Post", the "Washington Star", and "The Washington Times" as well as local Washington, D.C. television stations. The case was featured on television shows such as NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries", ABC's "Vanished" and Fox's "America's Most Wanted". Bishop was profiled on the "AMW" website thirty-three years to the day since his family's bodies were discovered, with a new age-enhanced bust of him with facial hair. A German TV show, "Aktenzeichen XY… ungelöst", also featured the case in its 250th episode on November 6, 1992, to find possible evidence of Bishop living abroad.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: In 2010 authorities believed Bishop was living in Switzerland, Italy or elsewhere in Europe, or possibly in California; he may have worked as a teacher or become involved in criminal activities. Authorities revealed in 2010 that before the murders, Bishop had been corresponding with federal prison inmate Albert Kenneth Bankston in the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, though it is unknown why or how. Bishop evidently had instructed Bankston to send letters to his State Department office address. "America's Most Wanted" posted the last letter on its web site, which Bankston mailed sixteen days after the murders without knowing that they had happened or that Bishop was a fugitive unable to receive mail at his office. Bankston died in 1983, ten years before law enforcement discovered his connection to Bishop.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: In 2014, the body of an unidentified man resembling Bishop, who had been killed by a car while walking along an Alabama highway in 1981, was exhumed by the FBI. A DNA test indicated the man was not Bishop. In 2011 the FBI used fingerprints to determine that reports that Bishop had died in Hong Kong or France were false.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: In 2014, authorities stated Bishop was probably living in plain sight in the U.S. and avoiding discovery by avoiding arrest. Being arrested would enable law enforcement to run his fingerprints and catch him. That same year, at the request of the FBI, forensic artist Karen Taylor created an age progression sculpture to suggest Bishop's projected appearance at about age 77. Using Taylor's sculpture, several alternative images were created by Lisa Sheppard to show the addition of facial hair and glasses.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: In early April 2014, WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. launched a webpage to display multiple investigative reports and extensive information on the Bishop case. This included samples of Bishop's handwriting, fingerprints, dental records and previously unseen Bishop family videos. On July 27, 2014, the search for Bishop was a featured story on "The Hunt with John Walsh" on CNN.


title: Bradford Bishop

text: In March 2021, a woman who had been adopted came forward claiming she found out through a DNA testing service that Bishop was her biological father. The FBI confirmed that she was indeed his biological daughter.


title: Ariel (angel)

text: Ariel () is an angel found primarily in Jewish and Christian mysticism and Apocrypha. The literal meaning is "lion of God". The word Ariel occurs in the Hebrew Bible at Isaiah 29:1, 29:2, What sorrow awaits Ariel, the city of David. Year after year you celebrate your feasts. Yet I will bring disaster upon you and there will be much weeping and sorrow. Ariel means an Altar covered with Blood. and 29:7, where it refers to Jerusalem. The word appears at II Samuel 23:20 and I Chronicles 11:22 as referring to "men of valor" of Moab. It appears at Ezekiel 43:16 as referring to an "altar hearth", and it appears at Ezra 8:16 as the name of a Jewish man. It is also said that Ariel is not a rebel angel.


title: Ariel (angel)

text: Harris Fletcher (1930) found the name Ariel in a copy of the Syncellus fragments of the Book of Enoch. Fletcher suggested that the text was known to John Milton and may be the source for Milton's use of the name for a minor angel in "Paradise Lost". However, the presence of the name in the Syncellus fragments has not been verified (1938), and, reviewing for example the Dead Sea Scrolls, earlier versions of the Book of Enoch are now known to not contain the name Ariel. In "Paradise Lost," Ariel is a rebel angel, overcome by the seraph Abdiel in the first day of the War of Heaven.


title: Ariel (angel)

text: In the Coptic "Pistis Sophia" (British Library, Add MS 5114), Jesus bids the apostles preach that they "be delivered from the rivers of smoke of Ariel." Because of the association of Jerusalem with the name "Ariel", it is likely that this is an allusion to the fires of Gehenna (or Gehinnom), a valley near Jerusalem deemed cursed because of its association with early pagan religions (Ba'als and Canaanite gods, including Moloch) where children were sacrificed by immolation. In later Jewish, Christian and Islamic scripture, Gehenna is a destination of the wicked and often translated in English biblical versions as "Hell". According to tradition, fires located in this valley were kept burning perpetually to consume the filth and cadavers thrown into it.


title: Ariel (angel)

text: According to the German occultist Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535): "Ariel is the name of an angel, sometimes also of a demon, and of a city, whence called Ariopolis, where the idol is worshipped."


title: Ariel (angel)

text: "Ariel" has been called an ancient name for the leontomorphic Gnostic Demiurge (Creator God). Historically, the entity Ariel was often pictured in mysticism as a lion-headed deity with power over the Earth, giving a strong foundation for Ariel's association with the Demiurge. It is possible that the name itself was even adopted from the Demiurge's Zoroastrian counterpart Ahriman (who is likely the predecessor of the Mithraic "Arimanius").


title: Ariel (angel)

text: "Ariel" is sometimes associated with the better known Judeo-Christian Archangel Uriel, as for example some sources claim that the Elizabethan court astrologer John Dee called "Ariel" a "conglomerate of Anael and Uriel," though this is not mentioned where the name Anael appears in the only conversation of Dee with Barnabas Saul.


title: Ariel (angel)

text: In Thomas Heywood, "Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels" (1635) Ariel is called both a prince who rules the waters and "Earth's great Lord." In several occult writings, Ariel is mentioned with other elemental titles such as the "3rd archon of the winds," "spirit of air," "angel of the waters of the Earth" and "wielder of fire." In mysticism, especially modern, Ariel is usually depicted as a governing angel with dominion over the Earth, creative forces, the North, elemental spirits, and beasts. Other entries in angelologies to Ariel are found in Jacques Collin de Plancy, "Dictionnaire Infernal" (1863) and Moïse Schwab "Vocabulaire de l'Angélologie" (1897).


title: Ariel (angel)

text: In one of the earliest poems based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest", Percy Bysshe Shelley identified Shakespeare's sprite Ariel with the poet, and the sprite's songs with poetry.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Elizabeth Tracy Mae "Bethe" Wettlaufer (née Parker; born June 10, 1967) is a convicted Canadian serial killer and former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight senior citizens and attempting to murder six others in southwestern Ontario between 2007 and 2016. With a total of 14 victims either killed or injured by her actions, she is described as one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Elizabeth Wettlaufer was born and raised in Zorra Township, a rural community near Woodstock, Ontario. Growing up in a staunchly Baptist household, she went on to earn a bachelor's degree in religious education counseling from London Baptist Bible College after graduating from Huron Park Secondary School in the mid-1980s. Wettlaufer then studied nursing at Conestoga College.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: In 2007, Wettlaufer was hired onto the staff at Caressant Care, a long-term care home in Woodstock. She was initially regarded by co-workers as caring and professional. However, throughout her tenure, Wettlaufer struggled with substance abuse and alcoholism. She faced accusations of showing up to work drunk, and at one point was found passed out in the facility's basement during the night shift. Wettlaufer was suspended four times for "medication-related errors", then was finally fired in March 2014 over a "serious" incident in which she gave the wrong medication to a patient.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: After leaving Caressant Care, Wettlaufer had difficulty holding down a job. She was hired by the Meadow Park Care Center in London, but lost this job after checking herself into a drug rehab facility in Niagara. She took various temp jobs at other care homes. Wettlaufer admitted to a neighbour that she was fired from one of these jobs for stealing medication, and was fired from another job for making a medication error while high that nearly resulted in the death of a patient. She also wrote poetry about her desire to kill.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: While she was a nurse at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer began injecting some of the patients she cared for with insulin. In some cases, the amount was not enough to kill the patient; she was charged with, and confessed to, aggravated assault or attempted murder for those cases. Wettlaufer's first assaults occurred sometime between June 25 and December 31, 2007. She confessed that she injected sisters Clotilde Adriano (age 87) and Albina Demedeiros (88) with insulin. While they later died, their deaths were not attributed to Wettlaufer. She confessed to two counts of aggravated assault.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: The first case in which Wettlaufer injected a patient with enough insulin to directly cause death was on August 11, 2007, when she murdered James Silcox (84), a World War II veteran and father of six. Through March 2014, Wettlaufer also murdered the following patients at Caressant Care:


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: While at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer also injected Michael Priddle (63) and Wayne Hedges (57) "with intent to murder". She confessed to two counts of attempted murder in these cases. She left employment at Caressant Care in 2014, but in part-time work at other facilities and at patients' homes, she injected three more people with insulin:


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Wettlaufer entered an inpatient drug rehabilitation program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a psychiatric hospital in Toronto, on September 16, 2016. There, she confessed to CAMH staff about killing or attempting to kill her patients, leading to CAMH notifying the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) and the Toronto Police Service. She then emailed CNO to resign as a registered nurse because she had "deliberately harmed patients in [her] care and [was] now being investigated by the police for same", personally called an investigator from CNO, and had CAMH staff fax a four-page handwritten confession. Wettlaufer had confessed to killing patients several times prior to her confession at CAMH, including to a lawyer who advised her to keep it a secret, and was not reported to police. After providing police with a two-hour-long confession, she was formally charged with the eight murders on October 25. After further investigation, she was also charged with four counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault on January 13, 2017. Wettlaufer waived her right to a preliminary hearing and confessed to all charges in court on June 1. On June 26, she was sentenced to eight concurrent life terms in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: In her confession, Wettlaufer admitted that she "knew the difference between right and wrong" but she was visited by "surges" she could not control. She said, "God or the devil or whatever, wanted me to do it." After one murder, she felt "the surging ... And then [heard her own] laughter afterwards, which was really, it was like a cackling from the pit of hell." Wettlaufer told police she had tried to stop killing and she had told friends, a former partner and her pastor what she had done, but no one took her seriously. During the police interview she described the "laughter" not as audible laughter, but as a feeling within her chest (visually using her hands), while the feeling prompting her to overdose and subsequently kill as coming from her stomach region. Wettlaufer never claimed to derive pleasure from the killings, stating that she felt horrible after murdering each victim.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Wettlaufer was held at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario. In March 2018, she was transferred from Grand Valley to an unspecified secure facility in Montreal to receive medical treatment.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Yasir Naqvi, the Attorney General of Ontario, and Eric Hoskins, the province's Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, jointly announced on the day of Wettlaufer's sentencing that the provincial government would commission a public inquiry into her case. The full details of the inquiry were not given in the announcement, as the government had yet to determine the scope or an individual to lead the inquiry, with Naqvi and Hoskins instead saying that the inquiry would "get the answers we need to help ensure a tragedy such as this does not happen again." The delay in establishing the inquiry was criticized by members of the opposition Progressive Conservative and New Democratic parties toward the end of July 2017, as no progress had seemingly been made since the announcement and the Legislative Assembly had risen for its summer recess.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: The Public Inquiry into the Safety and Security of Residents in the Long-Term Care Homes System was formally established by the provincial government on August 1, 2017. Justice Eileen Gillese of the Court of Appeal for Ontario was appointed commissioner of the inquiry. The inquiry will include interviews with victims' families and public consultations in the community as it investigates the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Wettlaufer's victims and gaps in legislative or policy frameworks that allowed her to continue working as a nurse. The inquiry's lead counsel stated that "anyone from Wettlaufer to Premier Kathleen Wynne" may be called to testify before the inquiry based on the evidence that is uncovered.


title: Elizabeth Wettlaufer

text: Wettlaufer was charged with professional misconduct by a disciplinary panel convened by CNO on July 25, 2017. Even though she had already been found guilty in a criminal trial and voluntarily surrendered her nursing license, the formal hearing was required by CNO to officially bar her from the profession. Wettlaufer declined to participate in the hearing and was found guilty based on court documents from her criminal trial as well as her previous confession. Her conduct was deemed "disgraceful and dishonourable" by the disciplinary panel and her nursing registration was formally revoked indefinitely, barring her from ever practising nursing in Ontario again. The chair of the five-person disciplinary panel that heard Wettlaufer's case said it was "the most egregious and disgraceful conduct this panel has ever considered".


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro is an overground and underground light rail rapid transit system serving Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, and the City of Sunderland (together forming Tyne and Wear). The network opened in stages from August 1980 and now serves a total of 60 stations, with two lines covering of track. The Metro can be accessed from a mixture of under ground and above ground stations. It has been described as the "first modern light rail system in the United Kingdom". The system is currently owned and operated by the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive (branded as Nexus), thus is fully under public ownership and operation.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In 2018–19, an estimated 36.4million passenger journeys were made on the Metro, making it the third-most used light rail network in the United Kingdom after London's Docklands Light Railway (121.8million passenger journeys) and Manchester Metrolink (43.7million passenger journeys).


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The initial Tyne and Wear Metro network opened between August 1980 and March 1984, mostly using converted former railway lines linked with new tunnel infrastructure. Further extensions to the original network were opened in November 1991 (from Bank Foot to Airport) and March 2002 (from Pelaw to Sunderland and South Hylton).


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The present system uses much former railway infrastructure, mostly constructed between 1834 and 1882, one of the oldest parts being the Newcastle and North Shields Railway, which opened in 1839. In 1904, in response to tramway competition which was taking away passengers, the North Eastern Railway started electrifying parts of their local railway network north of the River Tyne with a 600V DC third-rail system, forming one of the earliest suburban electric networks, known as the "Tyneside Electrics". In 1938, the line south of the River Tyne between Newcastle and was also electrified.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Under British Rail in the 1960s, the decision was made to de-electrify the "Tyneside Electrics" network and convert it to diesel operation, owing to falling passenger numbers and the cost of renewing end-of-life electrical infrastructure and rolling stock. The Newcastle to South Shields line was de-electrified in 1963, followed by the North Tyneside routes, in 1967. This was widely viewed as a backward step, as the diesel trains were slower than the electric trains they replaced.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In the early 1970s, the poor local transport system was identified as one of the main factors holding back the region's economy, and in 1971 a study was commissioned by the recently created Tyneside Passenger Transport Authority (now known as "Nexus") into how the transport system could be improved.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: This study recommended reviving the badly run-down former Tyneside Electrics network by converting it into an electrified rapid transit system, which would include a new underground section to better serve the busy central areas of Newcastle and Gateshead, as it was felt that the existing rail network didn't serve these areas adequately. This new system was intended to be the core of a new integrated transport network, with buses acting as feeders to purpose-built transport interchanges. The plans were approved by the Tyneside Metropolitan Railway Bill, which was passed by Parliament in July 1973. Around 70% of the funding for the scheme came from a central Government grant, with the remainder coming from local sources.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Three railway lines, totalling were to be converted into Metro lines as part of the initial system – these being the North Tyneside Loop and Newcastle to South Shields branch (both of which were formerly part of the "Tyneside Electrics" network), and a short stretch of the freight-only Ponteland Railway between and Bank Foot, which had not seen any passenger traffic since 1929.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The converted railway lines were to be connected by around of new infrastructure, which was built both to separate the Metro from the existing rail network, and also to create the new underground routes under Newcastle and Gateshead. Around of the new infrastructure was in tunnels, whilst the remainder was either at ground level or elevated. The elevated sections included the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, a new bridge carrying the Metro across the River Tyne, and the Byker Viaduct across the Ouseburn Valley, between and .


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Construction work began in October 1974. This involved the construction of the new infrastructure, re-electrifying the routes with overhead line equipment, the upgrading or relocation of existing stations, and the construction of several new stations, some of which were underground. By 1984, the final cost of the project was £265million (equivalent to £million in 2022). The Tyne and Wear Metro was the first railway in the United Kingdom to operate using the metric system, with all speeds and distances stated in metric units only. It was also the first transport system in the United Kingdom to be designed to be fully accessible to passengers with disabilities, with step-free access available at all stations across the network.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Originally, the Tyne and Wear Metro was intended to be opened in stages between 1979 and 1981. The first stages of the original network (between Haymarket and Tynemouth) opened in August 1980, with the final stage (between Heworth and South Shields) opening in March 1984. Extensions to Newcastle Airport and Sunderland opened in 1991 and 2002 respectively. The opening dates of services and stations are as follows:


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: When the Tyne and Wear Metro first opened, it was intended to form part of an integrated public transport system, with the local bus network reconfigured to act as 'feeder' services for the Metro. The Metro was intended to cover trunk journeys, while buses were re-designed towards shorter, local trips, to bring passengers to and from Metro stations, using unified ticketing, and with their timetable integrated with the Metro schedule. Several purpose-built transport interchanges, such as , Heworth and were built for this purpose. Integration was short-lived, and lasted until the deregulation of bus services, in 1986. It is, however, still possible to purchase Transfare tickets, to combine a journey made using multiple modes of transport in Tyne and Wear.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In November 1991, the Tyne and Wear Metro was extended to Newcastle Airport – at a cost of £12million. The new section of track, covering a distance of around , continued along the alignment of the former Ponteland Railway, with two stations constructed at Callerton Parkway and Airport.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In March 2002, a £100million extension, covering , was opened from to Sunderland and . The extension used part of the existing Durham Coast Line, with the line being adapted to allow a shared service between Metro and rail services – therefore becoming the first system in the United Kingdom to implement a form of the Karlsruhe model. Between Pelaw and Sunderland, intermediate stations at Brockley Whins, East Boldon and Seaburn were re-built, with a further three being purpose-built for the network, at Fellgate, Stadium of Light and St. Peter's. Between Sunderland and , around of the former Penshaw-Sunderland line, which closed to passenger traffic in May 1964, was used as the alignment of the route. Five purpose-built stations at Park Lane, University, Millfield, Pallion and South Hylton were constructed for the network.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In 2002, Nexus unveiled an ambitious 15-year plan for transport in Tyne and Wear, named "Project Orpheus". The project, valued at £1.5billion, aimed to extend the existing Metro network, including links to Cramlington, Doxford Park, Killingworth, Metrocentre, Seaham, Team Valley and Washington. In addition to this, plans would see the introduction of street-running trams, river buses across the Tyne, and cable cars, linking 29 key corridors. The project has since been abandoned, with plans reworked and developed into the "Metro: All Change" programme.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The first phase of Metro's "All Change" programme saw the start of a £25million project to install new ticket machines at all 60 stations across the network. Unlike the former ticket machines, which only accepted payment with coins, the new machines are able to accept payment with credit and debit card (with an upgrade to accept contactless payment in 2013), notes and coins. Automated ticket barriers (at 13 stations), and smart card validators at all stations across the network were also introduced, as part of the first phase of the "All Change" programme.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The first phase of the programme also saw the completion of a new station at Simonside, in March 2008, as well as the refurbishment and modernisation of Haymarket, in 2009. An upgrade of platforms at Sunderland, and the refurbishment and modernisation of several other stations was also undertaken during this phase. Lifts and escalators were replaced at several stations, between 2009 and 2016. Phase 1 of the programme also involved the overhaul of infrastructure, including communications, track and overhead power lines, structures and embankments.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Phase 2 of the "All Change" programme saw the £20million refurbishment of 86 Tyne & Wear Metrocars (originally all 90 Metrocars were due to be refurbished). Each Metrocar was stripped down to its frame and built back up again, with the addition of improved disabled access, new door control systems, and renewed interiors, seating and lighting. A new cadmium yellow and black livery was also adopted. Work commenced in June 2010, at Wabtec at Doncaster Works, and was completed five months ahead of schedule, in August 2015. The first Metrocar to receive refurbishment was 4041, the unit being named after former Gateshead Councillor and MP, Harry Cowans, in honour of his work in the 1970s, to help to secure the construction of the network.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The second phase of the programme also saw the modernisation of a further 45 stations, including the re-building of the station at North Shields, which was completed in September 2012, as well as the installation of new communications system, and the overhaul and maintenance of structures such as bridges, tunnels, track and overhead power lines.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The third phase of Metro's "All Change" programme began in 2019, with the procurement of a new fleet of 46 (originally 42) units, designed by Swiss manufacturer, Stadler. Delivery of the new rolling stock will commence in 2022, with all units introduced into passenger service by 2024 – replacing the current fleet of Metrocars. It will also see the introduction of a new signalling system, overhaul and maintenance of structures, track and overhead lines, and further station improvements.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In July 2018, Nexus announced the beginning of work to construct the new Maintenance and Renewals Skills Centre, at Mile End Road in South Shields. Construction began in August 2018 and was opened in November 2020. The £8.4million project saw the construction of a three-storey training centre, with classrooms, a mock control room, driver training simulator, covered tracks and inspection pits, and a mock Metro station, as well as a stretch of dual track, to be used to carry out infrastructure training, including track, points, signalling and overhead line. The site is also used to stable and maintain a small number of vehicles.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In March 2020, the Government announced a £103million scheme, known as "Metro Flow", during the 2020 Budget. The project aims to increase frequency from 5 to 6 trains per hour, reduce journey times and improve service reliability. From September 2022, the project will see three sections of single line between Pelaw and Bede converted to dual use, with an existing freight-only line electrified, and re-designed to operate using a similar system to the shared line between Pelaw and Sunderland. As part of the project, four additional Stadler units have been funded, bringing the total number of units on order from 42 to 46.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Services commence between 05:00 and 06:00 (between 06:00 and 07:00 on Sunday), with frequent trains running until around midnight. Each line runs up to every 12 minutes during the day (Monday to Saturday), and up to every 15 minutes during the evening and on Sunday. This allows for a combined frequency of up to every six minutes (Monday to Saturday), and up to every seven to eight minutes during the evening and on Sunday, between Pelaw and South Gosforth. Additional trains run during morning and evening peak hours (Monday to Friday) between Pelaw and Regent Centre or Monkseaton. This provides a Metro up to every three minutes between Pelaw and South Gosforth, at peak times. Originally, there was also a Red Line between Heworth (later Pelaw) and Benton and a Blue Line between St James and North Shields. Additional trains ran on these lines during peak hours to increase the frequency at the busier stations.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Metro Control Centre is based at Gosforth, in a building alongside the station at South Gosforth. It is responsible for operating the network's signalling and electrical supply, as well as being used to communicate with train drivers and other staff using two-way radio equipment. The original equipment at the control centre was replaced in 2007, with a new computerised signalling control system installed in August 2018 at a cost of £12million.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro is currently operated from a single depot, also based in Gosforth. The depot was opened in 1923 by the London and North Eastern Railway and was used to house the former "Tyneside Electrics" stock. The depot was inherited by Metro, prior to the system's opening in August 1980. The depot is located at the centre of the triangular fork between the branch to Airport and the northern leg of the North Tyneside Loop. It is situated between stations at Longbenton, South Gosforth and Regent Centre; it is used for stabling, cleaning, maintenance and repair of the fleet. It can be accessed by trains from either east or west and there is also a depot-avoiding line running from east to west, which is not used in public service.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Prior to the arrival of new rolling stock towards the end of 2021, a new depot was constructed near Howdon, in North Tyneside. The site is used as a temporary stabling and maintenance facility for up to 10 Metrocars, whilst the current depot at South Gosforth is being reconfigured. The temporary depot at Howdon opened in August 2020. A further vehicle stabling and maintenance facility is also scheduled to open in South Tyneside, as part of the Maintenance and Renewals Skills Centre at South Shields.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Since the Tyne and Wear Metro opened in 1980, it has operated using the same rolling stock. The fleet comprises a total of 87 (formerly 90, until March 2017) articulated units, known as Metrocars, which are numbered 4001–4090. When in service, Metrocars are normally coupled together in pairs and have a maximum speed of . The first units to be built were two prototypes, numbered 4001 and 4002, which were delivered for testing in 1975. These were followed by 88 production units, which were built between 1978 and 1981. The design of the Metrocar was based on the Stadtbahnwagen B, a German light rail vehicle developed in the early 1970s. The units were built by Metro-Cammell, Washwood Heath.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The fleet has been refurbished several times and several liveries have been used. The original livery used at opening was cadmium yellow and white, in accordance with the colours used by the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive at the time. A mid-life refurbishment of the fleet, carried out in-house, took place between 1995 and 2000; a new livery was adopted consisting of red, green or blue bodies, with yellow front and rear ends, and triangles containing the "Metro" logo on the doors.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: A £20million refurbishment of 86 Metrocars (originally all 90 were due to be refurbished) began in June 2010, with the goal of the refurbishment programme being to extend the service life of until 2025 prior to the delivery of new rolling stock. Each Metrocar was stripped down to its frame and built back up again, with the addition of improved disabled access and new door control systems, with renewed interiors, seating and lighting. A new black, grey and yellow livery was also adopted. Refurbishment work was completed five months ahead of schedule in August 2015.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In 2016, Nexus unveiled plans to secure funding of £550million for a replacement fleet, with a target for them to be in service by the early 2020s. In November 2017, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, announced that the Government would contribute £337million towards the new fleet. The proposed new fleet was planned to have dual-voltage capability, able to operate on the Metro's existing 1.5kV DC electrification system as well as the 25kV AC used on the Network Rail network, to allow for expansion of Metro service. Battery technology was considered.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In September 2018, Bombardier, CAF, a Downer Rail/CRRC joint venture, Hitachi and Stadler Rail were short-listed to build the new fleet.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Stadler was awarded a contract to build and maintain 42 five-carriage light rail vehicles in January 2020, with deliveries to commence in late 2021 and all trains to be in passenger service by 2024. The new trains will feature next stop audio-visual information displays, Tube-style linear seating to increase capacity, wider doors and aisles, air conditioning, WiFi and charging points. Following the announcement of the £103million "Metro Flow" project, in March 2020, four additional Stadler units have been funded, bringing the total number of units on order from 42 to 46.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In September 2020, the Metro Futures website was launched, allowing the public to give their view on several elements of the new Metro fleet.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In December 2021, Nexus revealed that the Metro fleet had entered the final assembly phase at Stadler's factory in Switzerland and that the manufacturer is in the process of fitting the main interior components of the first of the new trains. The works include the installation of wheels, seats, equipment cases, piping, wiring, flooring, windows and other internal furnishings. In September 2022, Nexus released a video taken at Stadler's test track in Erlen of a unit moving under its own power for the first time, prior to beginning full trials.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In addition to passenger trains, the Tyne and Wear Metro also operates three battery-electric locomotives (numbered BL1–BL3), which were manufactured by Hunslet in 1988. The company also operates a Plasser and Theurer ballast tamper and 15 wagons, which are used for maintenance and repair work.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro is publicly owned, receiving funding from council tax payers and government. Nexus, which owns and manages the Metro, contracted out operations and train maintenance as part of a deal with the Government, to secure modernisation investment and operating subsidy for the system between 2010 and 2021. Nexus continued to set fares, frequency of services and operating hours. Opponents would suggest that this was privatisation by the back door, though some services had already been contracted out, such as cleaning of stations and ticket inspections.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In November 2008, Nexus invited potential bidders to declare an interest in a contract to run the operations side of the business on its behalf. The successful bidder was to obtain a seven-year contract commencing on 1 April 2010, with up to an additional two years depending on performance. In February 2009, four bids were shortlisted: DB Regio, MTR Corporation, Serco-Abellio, and an in-house bid from Nexus. By October 2009, the shortlist had been reduced to bids from DB Regio and Nexus.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In December 2009, DB Regio was named as the preferred bidder, with the contract for operating the system signed in February 2010, and the handover of the service taking place in April 2010. One of DB Regio's first initiatives was the "Metro Dig It" programme, and involved the re-painting of stations and deep-cleaning of stations and trains. In February 2010, the Government confirmed it would award Nexus up to £580million to modernise and operate the Tyne and Wear Metro, with up to £350million to be spent on the "Metro: All Change" programme, over the course of the following eleven years. A further £230 million would support running and maintenance costs, over the following nine years.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In March 2016, Nexus announced that they did not intend to renew the contract with DB Regio, following the contract ending in 2017, after stating that they were dissatisfied with the operator due to missed performance targets.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: In April 2017, Nexus took over direct operation of the system for a planned period of two years, with the intention to re-tender the contract. The RMT trade union, however, has argued that the direct operation should be made permanent, and operation of the system should remain in public ownership. As of March 2021, the Tyne and Wear Metro network is still under public ownership, with services operated by Nexus.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The 60 stations on the Tyne and Wear Metro network vary widely in character. Some are former British Rail stations, whilst others were purpose-built for the Metro. Most of the stations are above ground, but several in central Newcastle and Gateshead are underground, namely Central, , , , , St. James and Gateshead. In Sunderland, Park Lane and stations also have underground platforms. Four of the stations on the network, Central, Heworth, Manors and Sunderland, allow for interchange with National Rail services. is only one of two stations in the United Kingdom where light and heavy rail services use the same platforms; the other is Rotherham Central, which since 2018 has served both Northern and TransPennine Express, and the Sheffield Supertram network.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Most Metro stations are not routinely staffed. However, the busiest stations in central Newcastle and Sunderland (Haymarket, Monument, Central, Sunderland and Park Lane) are all staffed until late in the evening, and St James, St Peters and Stadium of Light are also staffed on match days. All stations are equipped with ticket machines, shelters and seating, next train information displays, and emergency help points. Ticket machines are able to accept payment with credit and debit card (including contactless payment), notes and coins. Automated ticket barriers (at 13 stations), and smart card validators at all stations, were also installed during the first phase of Metro's "All Change" programme. Despite the majority of stations being open to access, the Tyne and Wear Metro has the third-highest level of passenger income per year (£45.2million in 2013/2014) of the eight light rail networks in England. Regular checks are made by patrols of inspectors, both at stations and on board trains. Passengers caught travelling on the Metro without a ticket are subject to a £20 penalty fare.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Most stations on the network have cycle racks, with smart cycle lockers located at 21 stations across the network (as of March 2020). Following a trial period in 2016, non-folding bicycles are permitted to travel on Metro between 10:00 and 15:00 and after 19:00 on weekdays, and all day at weekends, between Callerton Parkway and Jesmond, between Manors and Jesmond (via Whitley Bay), and between Gateshead Stadium and South Shields or South Hylton. Non-folding bicycles are not permitted to travel between Callerton Parkway and Airport, or between Jesmond and Gateshead Stadium at any time. Folding bicycles are permitted to travel without restriction, across the entire Metro network.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Under Newcastle, two routes run underground at right angles to each other, and intersect at Monument, which has four platforms on two levels. The first route, shared by both the Green Line (from South Hylton to Airport) and Yellow Line (from South Shields to St. James), runs from north to south. It heads underground at Jesmond, and runs south through , Monument and Central, before rising above ground to cross the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge over the River Tyne. It then enters another tunnel, running underneath Gateshead, serving Gateshead, before rising above ground again before the station at Gateshead Stadium.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The second underground route, part of the Yellow Line (from South Shields to St. James), runs from east to west, heading underground after running east alongside the East Coast Main Line, before serving Manors and Monument, then terminating at St. James. Yellow Line trains pass through Monument twice, once eastbound through the east–west platforms, and then, after running around the North Tyneside Loop, southbound through the north–south platforms before running to South Shields.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro is one of the few rapid transit systems in the world with a "pretzel" configuration, in which a line crosses over itself and trains pass through the same station twice at different platforms. This arrangement also exists at Voorweg on the Randstadrail network in The Hague, and at Serdika, on the Sofia Metro in Bulgaria.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: A short spur line, running partly in a tunnel, runs from Manors to Jesmond. The line is used for empty stock movements only, and has no passenger service. Before the Metro tunnels were created, it was part of the main rail route to Newcastle, and connected to the main line at Manors.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The tunnels were constructed in the late 1970s, using mining techniques, and were constructed as single-track tubes with a diameter of . The tunnels under Newcastle were mechanically bored through boulder clay, and lined with cast iron or concrete segments. The tunnel under Gateshead was bored through sandstone and excavated coal seams. Old coal mine workings, some of which dated from the Middle Ages, had to be filled in before the tunnelling began.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: There are six level crossings on the Metro network, five of which are operated by Nexus and do not have barriers as the frequency of Metro services would make them impractical. The sixth crossing is situated near East Boldon on track shared with Network Rail, and has barriers due to the freight trains and National Rail services which use it.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Distances on the system are measured from a datum point at South Gosforth. The system is metric, with distances in kilometres, and rounded to the nearest metre. Lines are designated "In" and "Out". The "In" line runs from St. James to South Shields via the "inside" of the North Tyneside Loop (via Wallsend then Whitley Bay), with the "Out" line running in the opposite direction. By extension, the "In" line runs from Airport to South Gosforth, and from Pelaw to South Hylton.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: Distance plates are mounted on all overhead line structures. Different distances are normally quoted for stations, depending on whether the direction of travel is "In" or "Out". Distances increase from the datum in all directions. The part of line between Pelaw and South Hylton owned by Network Rail is dual-marked in both metric units, as well as miles and chains. The boundary between the two systems is located at Pelaw Junction. The closest adjacent stations by distance on the network are St. Peter's and Sunderland, with the furthest apart being Pelaw and Fellgate.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro is electrified with overhead lines at 1,500V DC, and is now the only rail network in the United Kingdom to use this system. Nexus have stated that their long-term ambition is to convert the electrification of the line between Pelaw and Sunderland, which is shared with heavy rail, to the Network Rail standard of 25kV AC. However, in doing this, a new fleet of dual-voltage trains would be required.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: During the 198586 financial year, the Tyne and Wear Metro carried a total of 59.1million passengers – the highest figure it has ever achieved. By 198788, this had declined to 44.9million. The decline was attributed to the loss of integration with bus services, following deregulation in 1986, as well as the general decline in public transport use in the area. Usage continued to decline during the 1990s, reaching a low of 32.5million during 200001. From the turn of the century, passenger usage rose and stabilised, fluctuating in a range of 3540million passengers annually. Prior to 201617, the Tyne and Wear Metro consistently ranked as the second-most used tram and light rail network in the United Kingdom, after London's Docklands Light Railway. Ridership significantly fell during the COVID-19 pandemic to an all-time low of 9.4million in 202021. The Metro is the third-most used tram and light rail network in the United Kingdom, after the Docklands Light Railway, closely following the Manchester Metrolink.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The Tyne and Wear Metro has a distinctive design and corporate identity, initially developed to distinguish itself from the antiquated rail system it replaced in the 1980s, as well as to match the livery of the buses operated by the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive, prior to deregulation in 1986. The "Calvert" typeface was designed specifically for Metro by Margaret Calvert, and is used extensively throughout the system, including on the distinctive black "M" logo on a yellow background. The logo is used to denote the Metro, and is featured on cube signs at station entrances, as well as on board trains, and on station signage.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: After the branding identity of the Metro became inconsistent and confused in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nexus employed a local design agency, Gardiner Richardson, to help the organisation to revive the brand. In 2009, as part of the "Metro: All Change" programme, re-branding began to take place. Re-branding saw an emphasis placed on the "Calvert" typeface on lettering, signage and maps. It also saw the introduction of a simplified colour scheme of black, white, grey and yellow, to be used on refurbished stations, signage and trains. In 2009, Haymarket was the first station to be refurbished, using the new corporate branding and colour scheme.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: There are more than 30 pieces of permanent art across the transport network in Tyne and Wear. A number of Metro stations feature commissioned works by various artists, including:


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: There have been a number of proposals looking in to the possibility of re-opening the former Leamside line to Washington, including a 2009 report from the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), and a 2016 proposal from the North East Combined Authority (NECA), as well as the abandoned "Project Orpheus" programme, from the early 2000s. As of 2019-20, proposals are being put forward to link the current network at Pelaw and South Hylton, with the International Advanced Manufacturing Park in Washington, using part of the alignment of the former Leamside line.


title: Tyne and Wear Metro

text: The first stages of a business case were published in November 2022. It will be evaluated by the North East Joint Transport Committee with the ambition to secure funding from the Government to cover the cost of the scheme, expected to be £745 million.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a 1972 concert documentary film directed by Adrian Maben and featuring the English rock group Pink Floyd performing at the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy. Although the band perform a typical live set from the era, there is no audience beyond the basic film crew. The main footage in and around the amphitheatre was filmed over four days in October 1971, using the band's regular touring equipment, including a mobile 8-track recorder from Paris (before being bumped up to 16-track in post-production). Additional footage filmed in a Paris television studio the following December was added for the original 1972 release. The film was then re-released in 1974 with additional studio material of the band working on "The Dark Side of the Moon", and interviews at Abbey Road Studios.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The film has subsequently been released on video numerous times, and in 2002, a Director's cut DVD appeared which combined the original footage from 1971 with more contemporary shots of space and the area around Pompeii, assembled by Maben. A number of bands have taken inspiration from the film in creating their own videos, or filming concerts without an audience.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Film-maker Adrian Maben, interested in combining art with Pink Floyd's music, contacted David Gilmour and the band's manager, Steve O'Rourke, in 1971 to discuss the possibilities of making a film in which the band's music was played over images of paintings by René Magritte, Jean Tinguely, and others. Pink Floyd had experience of filming outside the context of a standard rock concert, including an hour-long performance in KQED TV studios in April 1970; but Maben's idea was rejected. Maben went on holiday to Naples in the early summer. During a visit to Pompeii he lost his passport, and went back to the Amphitheatre, which he had visited earlier in the day, in order to find it. Walking around the deserted ruins, he thought the silence and natural ambient sounds present would make a good backdrop for the music. He also felt that filming the band without an audience would be a good reaction to earlier films such as "Woodstock" and "Gimme Shelter", where the films paid equal attention to performers and spectators. One of Maben's contacts at the University of Naples, Professor Carputi, who was a Pink Floyd fan, managed to persuade the local authorities to close the amphitheatre for six days that October for filming. Access was secured after payment of a "fairly steep" entrance fee.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The performances of "Echoes", "A Saucerful of Secrets", and "One of These Days" were filmed from 4 to 7 October 1971. O'Rourke delivered a demo to Maben in order for him to prepare for the various shots required, which he finally managed to do the night before filming started. The choice of material was primarily the band's, but while Maben realised it was important to include material from the band's new album "Meddle", he was also keen to include "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" and "A Saucerful of Secrets", as he felt they would be good numbers to film.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The band insisted on playing live, and brought their regular touring gear with them. Their roadie, Peter Watts, suggested that the 8-track recorder would produce a sound comparable to a studio recording. In addition, the natural echo of the amphitheatre provided good acoustics for the recording. The equipment was carried by truck from London and took three days to reach Pompeii. When it arrived, it was discovered there was insufficient power to drive it correctly. This problem plagued filming for several days, and was finally resolved by running a lengthy cable from the local town hall.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The first section of footage to be filmed were montage shots of the band walking around Boscoreale, mixed with shots of volcanic mud, which can be seen at various points in "Echoes" and "Careful with That Axe, Eugene". For the live performances, the band recorded portions of the songs in sections, which were later spliced together. After each take, they listened to the playback on headphones. Maben closed all the entrances to the amphitheatre, but a few children managed to sneak in and were allowed to watch the filming quietly from a distance.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The remaining songs were filmed in Studio Europasonor, Paris, from 13–20 December and can be distinguished by the absence of Richard Wright's beard. To fit in with the theme of the earlier work in Pompeii, the filming around Boscoreale, along with stock footage of waterfalls and lava and various shots of Roman mosaics and drawings from the Naples National Archaeological Museum were added into the Paris footage. Maben also filmed additional transflex footage for insertion into the Pompeii performances. While both the director and the band were disappointed with this footage, due to a lack of time and money, there was no alternative left but to use it.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: During the filming in Paris, the band spontaneously suggested they would like to film a short blues with a howling dog, in the style of "Seamus" from "Meddle". Maben knew Madonna Bouglione, daughter of circus director Joseph Bouglione, who was known to walk about Paris with a dog called Nobs. Accordingly, Nobs was invited into the studio, where the footage was filmed.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Maben subsequently did some of the editing of the final cut at home, due to financial constraints. He regretted doing this, as he felt it was important to separate his work and home life, but, at the time, he had no choice.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The original premiere took place on 2 September 1972, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. This initial cut, running for one hour, only featured the live footage. The film was scheduled for a special premiere at London's Rainbow Theatre, on 25 November 1972. It was cancelled at the last minute by the theatre's owner, Rank Strand as they didn't have a certificate from the British Board of Film Censors and the theatre could be seen to be in competition with established cinemas.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Maben was concerned that one of the problems with the film was that it was too short. In early 1973, Maben was fly fishing with Waters, and suggested the possibility of improving the film by watching them at work in a recording studio. Subsequently, Maben was invited with a small crew using a single 35 mm camera to Abbey Road Studios to film supposed recording sessions of "The Dark Side of the Moon", as well as interviews conducted off-camera by Maben, and footage of the band eating and talking at the studio cafeteria. Maben was particularly happy with this footage, feeling it captured the spontaneous humour of the band.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Running at 80 minutes, this latest version premiered on 10 November 1973, at the Alouette Theatre in Montreal, the release organized in part by George Ritter Films, and Mutual Films. It was a financial success in Canada, and according to "Billboard", the film "did such amazing business in its first week in Montreal that the original number of prints ordered for Canada has doubled." The film's American release was overseen by the Cincinnati-based April Fools Films, an independent distributor founded for the purpose of distributing the film. Early test screenings in the US were held in April 1974 before premiering in other parts of the country, which happened later into the summer (accompanied in certain instances by a special quadraphonic mix). The film earned considerably more in the US, where, by October 1974, BoxOffice reported that the film had already grossed over $2 million.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The film was not financially successful according to Mason, though Maben disagrees, and suffered particularly from being overshadowed by the release of "The Dark Side of the Moon" not long after the original theatrical showing. It was released on various home video formats several times.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: A director's cut version of the film was released in 2002. It included all the original footage, including the interviews, along with some additional filming of the Apollo space program. It also includes the original one-hour cut as a bonus feature.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Maben was particularly pleased with positive reviews that came out of the film's showing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, but was disappointed to hear one New York critic describe it "like the size of an ant crawling around the great treasures of Pompeii."


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Reviewing the 1974 release, "Audience" regarded the film as "a handsome visual production." "The Hollywood Reporter" called it a "fully structured concept which stands on its own quite beyond its function of recording a live rock concert." Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film three stars out of four and wrote, "The interviews with Pink Floyd are too scattershot to achieve any significance; we are left with the music, which is extremely fine." Meanwhile, "Billboard" was not enthusiastic about the 1974 release, thinking it looked dated, and stated that the film was "dull, unimaginative and hokey, and does not do justice to the Pink Floyd Vision". Lawrence Van Gelder of "The New York Times" dismissed the film as "a fan-magazine article dressed up as a movie, with lots of close-ups of its heroes and an off-screen interviewer who occasionally drops in a question or a comment—about their equipment or their compatibility—and is satisfied with whatever he is told."


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: However, more recent reviews have been favourable. Billboard reviewed a video release in 1984, and on this occasion, Faye Zuckerman, while not particularly keen on the footage in the Abbey Road canteen, stated it was "vastly superior to most other concert movies". Reviewing the Director's Cut DVD, Richie Unterberger said the film had "first-rate cinematography" and was "undeniably impressive", while Peter Marsh, reviewing for the BBC, stated it was "my favourite concert film of all time", though his opinions of the new computer generated imagery were mixed.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Due to the lack of time in filming, no tracks were filmed that were unreleased, but several alternative shots and outtakes were held in the Archives du Film du Bois D'Arcy near Paris. At some point, an employee of the owners, MHF Productions, decided this footage was of no value and incinerated all 548 cans of the original 35 mm negatives. Maben was particularly frustrated about the lack of additional shots for "One of These Days," which is primarily a Mason solo-piece in the released version. Mason recalls the reason for that is that the reel of film featuring the other members was lost attempting to assemble the original cut.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The hip hop group the Beastie Boys made a music video for their song "Gratitude" that appears to be a homage to the film. Shot by David Perez in New Zealand, in addition to copying its directorial style of slow horizontal tracking shots, overhead shots of the drums, close up shots of the bass and multiple shots of guitar filling the screen, the video shows a number of speaker cabinets that the group managed to purchase, still labelled "Pink Floyd, London". The video ends with a message that reads, "This video is dedicated to the memory of all the people who died at Pompeii." The Beastie Boys claimed in interviews that the song and the video came about from their desire to progress from being a straightforward hip hop group and add vintage instruments and old sound equipment to their repertoire.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: The rock band Korn filmed a similar show, "", in June 2010 to promote their ninth studio album, "". The show took place in a crop circle in Bakersfield, California, and had no audience beyond the crew workers.


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: Radiohead were noted for being fans of the film and regularly watched it when on tour. According to bassist Colin Greenwood, his brother Jonny made the whole band watch the film, saying "now this is how we should do videos". Colin, however, was critical of the direction, which he described as "Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar and Roger Waters with long greasy hair, sandals and dusty flares, staggers over and picks up this big beater and whacks this gong. Ridiculous."


title: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

text: In July 2016, Gilmour returned to the amphitheatre where the filming took place and performed two live concerts, this time with an audience. While there, he was named an honorary citizen of Pompeii and made a short documentary with English classicist Mary Beard that featured Adrian Maben, as can be seen in the subsequent film, "Live at Pompeii" (2017).


title: Queen dowager

text: A queen dowager or dowager queen (compare: princess dowager or dowager princess) is a title or status generally held by the widow of a king. In the case of the widow of an emperor, the title of empress dowager is used. Its full meaning is clear from the two words from which it is composed: queen indicates someone who served as queen consort (i.e. wife of a king), while dowager indicates a woman who holds the title from her deceased husband (a queen who rules in her own right instead of due to marriage to a king is a queen regnant). A queen mother is a former queen, often a dowager queen, who is the mother of the reigning monarch.


title: Queen dowager

text: Currently (2019) there are four queens dowager: Kesang Choden of Bhutan (who is the only living queen grandmother worldwide), Norodom Monineath of Cambodia (who is also queen mother), Lisa Najeeb Halaby (Noor Al'Hussein) of Jordan, and Sirikit Kitiyakara of Thailand (who is also queen mother). Queen Ratna of Nepal was queen dowager until the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy in 2008.


title: Queen dowager

text: A queen dowager has an important royal position (whether or not she is the mother of the reigning sovereign) but does not normally have any rights to succeed a king as monarch on his death unless she happens to be next in line to the throne (one possibility would be if the king and queen were also cousins and childless, the king had no other siblings, and she in her other position as his cousin was also his heiress presumptive).


title: Queen dowager

text: A queen dowager continues to enjoy the title, style, and precedence of a queen, but is no longer referred to as "the" queen. A new reigning king would have (at accession or eventually) a wife who would be the new queen consort and therefore "the" queen; and, of course, a queen regnant would also be called "the" queen. Many former queens consort do not formally use the word "dowager" as part of their titles. There may be more than one queen dowager at any given time. The Garter King of Arms's proclamation in the United Kingdom of the styles and titles of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at her funeral on 9 April 2002 illustrates her dual status as a queen dowager and a queen mother:


title: Queen dowager

text: A queen mother is a former queen, often a queen dowager, who is the mother of the current monarch. Not every queen mother is a queen dowager, such as Queen Paola of Belgium, who became the queen mother of her son Philippe after her husband Albert II abdicated the throne but retained the title of king. Not all queens dowager are the queen mother; they may have a relation other than mother to the reigning monarch, such as aunt or grandmother. For example, Mary, Queen of Scots, was queen dowager of France after the death of her husband Francis II, to whom she bore no children. Similarly, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen was queen dowager after her husband William IV was succeeded by his niece Victoria.


title: Queen dowager

text: Not every mother of a reigning monarch is the queen mother or a queen dowager. For example, the mother of Queen Victoria of United Kingdom, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was not a queen dowager nor the queen mother because her husband, Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, had never been king. Similarly, whilst being the mothers of monarchs, both Augusta of Saxe-Gotha and Srinagarindra of Thailand were not styled queen dowager because their respective husbands, Frederick, Prince of Wales and Mahidol Adulyadej, Prince of Songkla, were never kings. Instead, Augusta held the title of "Dowager Princess of Wales" (a precedent was Henry VII of England's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, titled "My Lady the King's Mother"); Srinagarindra meanwhile received the designation "Princess Mother".


title: Queen dowager

text: As there is only one monarch, there can only be one queen mother. It is possible for there to be a queen mother and one or more queens dowager alive at any one time. This situation occurred in the Commonwealth realms in the period between the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952 and the death of her paternal grandmother on 24 March 1953. For slightly over a year, there were three queens alive:


title: Queen dowager

text: There were several former queens consort of England, Scotland, and later the United Kingdom, who were never queen mothers. The following queens were dowagers between the given dates, whether queen mothers or not:


title: Queen dowager

text: Note that in some of the countries mentioned below it is unusual to indicate a former queen-consort as a dowager.


title: Queen dowager

text: In Sweden, there has also been another title for a dowager queen, called "Riksänkedrottning", which means "Queen Dowager of the Realm". This title was used in the 16th and 17th centuries. The last time the title queen dowager was used was in 1913.


title: Queen dowager

text: In the novel series "The Princess Diaries", the character Princess Clarisse Marie Grimaldi Renaldo is the princess dowager of the principality of Genovia. In the films, where Genovia is portrayed as a kingdom, Clarisse is portrayed as a dowager queen.


title: Queen dowager

text: In the fantasy novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire", and later the HBO series "Game of Thrones", the character Cersei Lannister became the queen mother to King Joffrey Baratheon after her husband Robert Baratheon was killed in a hunting accident, although she managed to strong-arm the position of regent as well, and was thus known as the "queen regent". In the episode "High Sparrow", the new queen consort, Margaery Tyrell, mocks Cersei's loss of power by asking her to clarify whether she should be addressed as queen mother or dowager queen.


title: Queen dowager

text: In the 2015 Indian movie and its sequel , actress Ramya Krishnan portrays the character "Rajamatha Shivagami Devi". In most Indian languages, the word 'rajamata' means 'Queen-Mother'.


title: Queen dowager

text: In the video game "Long Live the Queen", after the queen regnant of the kingdom of Nova is assassinated, her widower is referred to as the king-dowager.


title: Celestial spheres

text: The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below. When scholars applied Ptolemy's epicycles, they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them. By combining this nested sphere model with astronomical observations, scholars calculated what became generally accepted values at the time for the distances to the Sun: about , to the other planets, and to the edge of the universe: about . The nested sphere model's distances to the Sun and planets differ significantly from modern measurements of the distances, and the size of the universe is now known to be inconceivably large and continuously expanding.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Albert Van Helden has suggested that from about 1250 until the 17th century, virtually all educated Europeans were familiar with the Ptolemaic model of "nesting spheres and the cosmic dimensions derived from it". Even following the adoption of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe, new versions of the celestial sphere model were introduced, with the planetary spheres following this sequence from the central Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Mainstream belief in the theory of celestial spheres did not survive the Scientific Revolution. In the early 1600s, Kepler continued to discuss celestial spheres, although he did not consider that the planets were carried by the spheres but held that they moved in elliptical paths described by Kepler's laws of planetary motion. In the late 1600s, Greek and medieval theories concerning the motion of terrestrial and celestial objects were replaced by Newton's law of universal gravitation and Newtonian mechanics, which explain how Kepler's laws arise from the gravitational attraction between bodies.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre. The fixed stars are also open vents in such wheel rims, but there are so many such wheels for the stars that their contiguous rims all together form a continuous spherical shell encompassing the Earth. All these wheel rims had originally been formed out of an original sphere of fire wholly encompassing the Earth, which had disintegrated into many individual rings. Hence, in Anaximanders's cosmogony, in the beginning was the sphere, out of which celestial rings were formed, from some of which the stellar sphere was in turn composed. As viewed from the Earth, the ring of the Sun was highest, that of the Moon was lower, and the sphere of the stars was lowest.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Following Anaximander, his pupil Anaximenes (c. 585–528/4) held that the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are all made of fire. But whilst the stars are fastened on a revolving crystal sphere like nails or studs, the Sun, Moon, and planets, and also the Earth, all just ride on air like leaves because of their breadth. And whilst the fixed stars are carried around in a complete circle by the stellar sphere, the Sun, Moon and planets do not revolve under the Earth between setting and rising again like the stars do, but rather on setting they go laterally around the Earth like a cap turning halfway around the head until they rise again. And unlike Anaximander, he relegated the fixed stars to the region most distant from the Earth. The most enduring feature of Anaximenes' cosmos was its conception of the stars being fixed on a crystal sphere as in a rigid frame, which became a fundamental principle of cosmology down to Copernicus and Kepler.


title: Celestial spheres

text: After Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical. And much later in the fourth century BC Plato's "Timaeus" proposed that the body of the cosmos was made in the most perfect and uniform shape, that of a sphere containing the fixed stars. But it posited that the planets were spherical bodies set in rotating bands or rings rather than wheel rims as in Anaximander's cosmology.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Instead of bands, Plato's student Eudoxus developed a planetary model using concentric spheres for all the planets, with three spheres each for his models of the Moon and the Sun and four each for the models of the other five planets, thus making 26 spheres in all. Callippus modified this system, using five spheres for his models of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars and retaining four spheres for the models of Jupiter and Saturn, thus making 33 spheres in all. Each planet is attached to the innermost of its own particular set of spheres. Although the models of Eudoxus and Callippus qualitatively describe the major features of the motion of the planets, they fail to account exactly for these motions and therefore cannot provide quantitative predictions. Although historians of Greek science have traditionally considered these models to be merely geometrical representations, recent studies have proposed that they were also intended to be physically real or have withheld judgment, noting the limited evidence to resolve the question.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In his "Metaphysics", Aristotle developed a physical cosmology of spheres, based on the mathematical models of Eudoxus. In Aristotle's fully developed celestial model, the spherical Earth is at the centre of the universe and the planets are moved by either 47 or 55 interconnected spheres that form a unified planetary system, whereas in the models of Eudoxus and Callippus each planet's individual set of spheres were not connected to those of the next planet. Aristotle says the exact number of spheres, and hence the number of movers, is to be determined by astronomical investigation, but he added additional spheres to those proposed by Eudoxus and Callippus, to counteract the motion of the outer spheres. Aristotle considers that these spheres are made of an unchanging fifth element, the aether. Each of these concentric spheres is moved by its own god—an unchanging divine unmoved mover, and who moves its sphere simply by virtue of being loved by it.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In his "Almagest", the astronomer Ptolemy (fl. ca. 150 AD) developed geometrical predictive models of the motions of the stars and planets and extended them to a unified physical model of the cosmos in his "Planetary hypotheses". By using eccentrics and epicycles, his geometrical model achieved greater mathematical detail and predictive accuracy than had been exhibited by earlier concentric spherical models of the cosmos. In Ptolemy's physical model, each planet is contained in two or more spheres, but in Book 2 of his "Planetary Hypotheses" Ptolemy depicted thick circular slices rather than spheres as in its Book 1. One sphere/slice is the deferent, with a centre offset somewhat from the Earth; the other sphere/slice is an epicycle embedded in the deferent, with the planet embedded in the epicyclical sphere/slice. Ptolemy's model of nesting spheres provided the general dimensions of the cosmos, the greatest distance of Saturn being 19,865 times the radius of the Earth and the distance of the fixed stars being at least 20,000 Earth radii.


title: Celestial spheres

text: The planetary spheres were arranged outwards from the spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe in this order: the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In more detailed models the seven planetary spheres contained other secondary spheres within them. The planetary spheres were followed by the stellar sphere containing the fixed stars; other scholars added a ninth sphere to account for the precession of the equinoxes, a tenth to account for the supposed trepidation of the equinoxes, and even an eleventh to account for the changing obliquity of the ecliptic. In antiquity the order of the lower planets was not universally agreed. Plato and his followers ordered them Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, and then followed the standard model for the upper spheres. Others disagreed about the relative place of the spheres of Mercury and Venus: Ptolemy placed both of them beneath the Sun with Venus above Mercury, but noted others placed them both above the Sun; some medieval thinkers, such as al-Bitruji, placed the sphere of Venus above the Sun and that of Mercury below it.


title: Celestial spheres

text: A series of astronomers, beginning with the Muslim astronomer al-Farghānī, used the Ptolemaic model of nesting spheres to compute distances to the stars and planetary spheres. Al-Farghānī's distance to the stars was 20,110 Earth radii which, on the assumption that the radius of the Earth was , came to . An introduction to Ptolemy's "Almagest", the "Tashil al-Majisti", believed to be written by Thābit ibn Qurra, presented minor variations of Ptolemy's distances to the celestial spheres. In his "Zij", Al-Battānī presented independent calculations of the distances to the planets on the model of nesting spheres, which he thought was due to scholars writing after Ptolemy. His calculations yielded a distance of 19,000 Earth radii to the stars.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Around the turn of the millennium, the Arabic astronomer and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) presented a development of Ptolemy's geocentric models in terms of nested spheres. Despite the similarity of this concept to that of Ptolemy's "Planetary Hypotheses", al-Haytham's presentation differs in sufficient detail that it has been argued that it reflects an independent development of the concept. In chapters 15–16 of his "Book of Optics", Ibn al-Haytham also said that the celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Near the end of the twelfth century, the Spanish Muslim astronomer al-Bitrūjī (Alpetragius) sought to explain the complex motions of the planets without Ptolemy's epicycles and eccentrics, using an Aristotelian framework of purely concentric spheres that moved with differing speeds from east to west. This model was much less accurate as a predictive astronomical model, but it was discussed by later European astronomers and philosophers.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In the thirteenth century the astronomer al-'Urḍi proposed a radical change to Ptolemy's system of nesting spheres. In his "Kitāb al-Hayáh", he recalculated the distance of the planets using parameters which he redetermined. Taking the distance of the Sun as 1,266 Earth radii, he was forced to place the sphere of Venus above the sphere of the Sun; as a further refinement, he added the planet's diameters to the thickness of their spheres. As a consequence, his version of the nesting spheres model had the sphere of the stars at a distance of 140,177 Earth radii.


title: Celestial spheres

text: About the same time, scholars in European universities began to address the implications of the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle and astronomy of Ptolemy. Both astronomical scholars and popular writers considered the implications of the nested sphere model for the dimensions of the universe. Campanus of Novara's introductory astronomical text, the "Theorica planetarum", used the model of nesting spheres to compute the distances of the various planets from the Earth, which he gave as 22,612 Earth radii or 73,387,747 miles. In his "Opus Majus", Roger Bacon cited Al-Farghānī's distance to the stars of 20,110 Earth radii, or 65,357,700 miles, from which he computed the circumference of the universe to be 410,818,517 miles. Clear evidence that this model was thought to represent physical reality is the accounts found in Bacon's "Opus Majus" of the time needed to walk to the Moon and in the popular Middle English "South English Legendary", that it would take 8,000 years to reach the highest starry heaven. General understanding of the dimensions of the universe derived from the nested sphere model reached wider audiences through the presentations in Hebrew by Moses Maimonides, in French by Gossuin of Metz, and in Italian by Dante Alighieri.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Philosophers were less concerned with such mathematical calculations than with the nature of the celestial spheres, their relation to revealed accounts of created nature, and the causes of their motion.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Adi Setia describes the debate among Islamic scholars in the twelfth century, based on the commentary of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi about whether the celestial spheres are real, concrete physical bodies or "merely the abstract circles in the heavens traced out… by the various stars and planets." Setia points out that most of the learned, and the astronomers, said they were solid spheres "on which the stars turn… and this view is closer to the apparent sense of the Qur'anic verses regarding the celestial orbits." However, al-Razi mentions that some, such as the Islamic scholar Dahhak, considered them to be abstract. Al-Razi himself, was undecided, he said: "In truth, there is no way to ascertain the characteristics of the heavens except by authority [of divine revelation or prophetic traditions]." Setia concludes: "Thus it seems that for al-Razi (and for others before and after him), astronomical models, whatever their utility or lack thereof for ordering the heavens, are not founded on sound rational proofs, and so no intellectual commitment can be made to them insofar as description and explanation of celestial realities are concerned."


title: Celestial spheres

text: Christian and Muslim philosophers modified Ptolemy's system to include an unmoved outermost region, the empyrean heaven, which came to be identified as the dwelling place of God and all the elect. Medieval Christians identified the sphere of stars with the Biblical firmament and sometimes posited an invisible layer of water above the firmament, to accord with Genesis. An outer sphere, inhabited by angels, appeared in some accounts.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Edward Grant, a historian of science, has provided evidence that medieval scholastic philosophers generally considered the celestial spheres to be solid in the sense of three-dimensional or continuous, but most did not consider them solid in the sense of hard. The consensus was that the celestial spheres were made of some kind of continuous fluid.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Later in the century, the mutakallim Adud al-Din al-Iji (1281–1355) rejected the principle of uniform and circular motion, following the Ash'ari doctrine of atomism, which maintained that all physical effects were caused directly by God's will rather than by natural causes. He maintained that the celestial spheres were "imaginary things" and "more tenuous than a spider's web". His views were challenged by al-Jurjani (1339–1413), who maintained that even if the celestial spheres "do not have an external reality, yet they are things that are correctly imagined and correspond to what [exists] in actuality".


title: Celestial spheres

text: Medieval astronomers and philosophers developed diverse theories about the causes of the celestial spheres' motions. They attempted to explain the spheres' motions in terms of the materials of which they were thought to be made, external movers such as celestial intelligences, and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed forces. Most of these models were qualitative, although a few incorporated quantitative analyses that related speed, motive force and resistance. By the end of the Middle Ages, the common opinion in Europe was that celestial bodies were moved by external intelligences, identified with the angels of revelation. The outermost moving sphere, which moved with the daily motion affecting all subordinate spheres, was moved by an unmoved mover, the Prime Mover, who was identified with God. Each of the lower spheres was moved by a subordinate spiritual mover (a replacement for Aristotle's multiple divine movers), called an intelligence.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Early in the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing the Earth from its central place in favour of the Sun, yet he called his great work "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres"). Although Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that, like many of his predecessors, he accepted non-solid celestial spheres. Copernicus rejected the ninth and tenth spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth, and moved the Sun from its orb to the center of the universe. The planetary orbs circled the center of the universe in the following order: Mercury, Venus, the great orb containing the Earth and the orb of the Moon, then the orbs of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Finally he retained the eighth sphere of the stars, which he held to be stationary.


title: Celestial spheres

text: The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges, delineated the spheres of the new cosmological system in his "Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes …" (1576). Here he arranged the "orbes" in the new Copernican order, expanding one sphere to carry "the globe of mortalitye", the Earth, the four classical elements, and the Moon, and expanding the sphere of stars infinitely to encompass all the stars and also to serve as "the court of the Great God, the habitacle of the elect, and of the coelestiall angelles."


title: Celestial spheres

text: In the sixteenth century, a number of philosophers, theologians, and astronomers—among them Francesco Patrizi, Andrea Cisalpino, Peter Ramus, Robert Bellarmine, Giordano Bruno, Jerónimo Muñoz, Michael Neander, Jean Pena, and Christoph Rothmann—abandoned the concept of celestial spheres. Rothmann argued from observations of the comet of 1585 that the lack of observed parallax indicated that the comet was beyond Saturn, while the absence of observed refraction indicated the celestial region was of the same material as air, hence there were no planetary spheres.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Tycho Brahe's investigations of a series of comets from 1577 to 1585, aided by Rothmann's discussion of the comet of 1585 and Michael Maestlin's tabulated distances of the comet of 1577, which passed through the planetary orbs, led Tycho to conclude that "the structure of the heavens was very fluid and simple." Tycho opposed his view to that of "very many modern philosophers" who divided the heavens into "various orbs made of hard and impervious matter." Edward Grant found relatively few believers in hard celestial spheres before Copernicus and concluded that the idea first became common sometime between the publication of Copernicus's "De revolutionibus" in 1542 and Tycho Brahe's publication of his cometary research in 1588.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In his early "Mysterium Cosmographicum", Johannes Kepler considered the distances of the planets and the consequent gaps required between the planetary spheres implied by the Copernican system, which had been noted by his former teacher, Michael Maestlin. Kepler's Platonic cosmology filled the large gaps with the five Platonic polyhedra, which accounted for the spheres' measured astronomical distance. In Kepler's mature celestial physics, the spheres were regarded as the purely geometric spatial regions containing each planetary orbit rather than as the rotating physical orbs of the earlier Aristotelian celestial physics. The eccentricity of each planet's orbit thereby defined the radii of the inner and outer limits of its celestial sphere and thus its thickness. In Kepler's celestial mechanics, the cause of planetary motion became the rotating Sun, itself rotated by its own motive soul. However, an immobile stellar sphere was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology.


title: Celestial spheres

text: In Cicero's "Dream of Scipio," the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the "Dream of Scipio" by the Roman writer Macrobius, which included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages.


title: Celestial spheres

text: Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the spiritual plane, where God was at the center and the Earth at the periphery. Near the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante, in the "Paradiso" of his "Divine Comedy", described God as a light at the center of the cosmos. Here the poet ascends beyond physical existence to the Empyrean Heaven, where he comes face to face with God himself and is granted understanding of both divine and human nature. Later in the century, the illuminator of Nicole Oresme's "Le livre du Ciel et du Monde", a translation of and commentary on Aristotle's "De caelo" produced for Oresme's patron, King Charles V, employed the same motif. He drew the spheres in the conventional order, with the Moon closest to the Earth and the stars highest, but the spheres were concave upwards, centered on God, rather than concave downwards, centered on the Earth. Below this figure Oresme quotes the Psalms that "The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."


title: Celestial spheres

text: The late-16th-century Portuguese epic "The Lusiads" vividly portrays the celestial spheres as a "great machine of the universe" constructed by God. The explorer Vasco da Gama is shown the celestial spheres in the form of a mechanical model. Contrary to Cicero's representation, da Gama's tour of the spheres begins with the Empyrean, then descends inward toward Earth, culminating in a survey of the domains and divisions of earthly kingdoms, thus magnifying the importance of human deeds in the divine plan.


title: Overseas departments and regions of France

text: The overseas departments and regions of France (, ; "DROM") are departments of France that are outside metropolitan France, the European part of France. They have exactly the same status as mainland France's regions and departments. The French Constitution provides that, in general, French laws and regulations (France's civil code, penal code, administrative law, social laws, tax laws, etc.) apply to French overseas regions the same as in metropolitan France, but can be adapted as needed to suit the region's particular needs. Hence, the local administrations of French overseas regions cannot themselves pass new laws.


text: As integral parts of France and the European Union, overseas departments are represented in the National Assembly, Senate, and Economic and Social Council, vote to elect members of the European Parliament (MEP), and also use the euro as their currency. The overseas departments and regions are not the same as the overseas collectivities, which have a semi-autonomous status.


text: Each overseas department is the sole department in its own overseas region () with powers identical to the regions of metropolitan France. Because of the one-to-one correspondence, informal usage does not distinguish the two, and the French media use the term ("DOM") almost exclusively.


text: Guadeloupe and Réunion each have separate departmental and regional councils, while in Mayotte, Guiana and Martinique, the two layers of government are consolidated so one body wields both sets of powers. The overseas departments acquired these additional powers in 1982, when France's decentralisation policy dictated that they be given elected regional councils and other regional powers; however, the term "overseas region" was only introduced with the French constitutional amendment of 28 March 2003.


text: France's earliest, short-lived attempt at setting up overseas departments was after Napoleon's conquest of the Republic of Venice in 1797, when the hitherto Venetian Ionian Islands fell to the French Directory and were organised as the departments of Mer-Égée, Ithaque and Corcyre. In 1798 the Russian Admiral Fyodor Ushakov evicted the French from these islands, and though France regained them via the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, the three departments were not revived.


text: Under the 1947 Constitution of the Fourth Republic, the French colonies of Algeria in North Africa, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean were defined as overseas departments. Algeria became independent in 1962 while the others are still French departments.


text: Since 1982, following the French government's policy of decentralisation, overseas departments have elected regional councils with powers similar to those of the regions of metropolitan France. As a result of a constitutional revision that occurred in 2003, these regions are now to be called "overseas regions"; indeed the new wording of the Constitution gives no precedence to the terms overseas department or overseas region, though the latter is still virtually unused by the French media.


text: The overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon was an overseas department from 1976 to 1985. All five of France's overseas departments have between 200,000 and 1,000,000 people each, whereas Saint Pierre and Miquelon has only about 6,000, and the smaller collectivity unit therefore seemed more appropriate for the islands.


text: The overseas collectivity of Mayotte held a referendum on 29 March 2009. Of the votes, 95% were in favor of becoming an overseas department. Mayotte became an overseas department on 31 March 2011.


title: Owen Coyle

text: Owen Columba Coyle (born 14 July 1966) is a professional football manager and former player who is currently the manager of Scottish Championship club Queen's Park. He played as a striker for several clubs in England and Scotland, and made one appearance for the Republic of Ireland national team.


title: Owen Coyle

text: Coyle began his career at Dumbarton, and also played for Clydebank and Airdrieonians before joining English club Bolton Wanderers in 1993. He appeared for Bolton in the Premier League before a return to Scotland with Dundee United. He went on to play for several other Scottish clubs, including Motherwell, Dunfermline Athletic, Falkirk and St Johnstone. Qualifying by descent, he played for the Republic of Ireland under-21s and B team before he made one full international appearance in 1994.


title: Owen Coyle

text: Upon retiring from playing, Coyle managed Falkirk and St Johnstone, before joining then Championship side Burnley in November 2007. In his first full season in charge, Burnley won promotion to the Premier League in 2009. He then moved to Bolton Wanderers in January 2010, halfway through his first season in the Premier League; Coyle stated this move was due to Bolton being "ten years ahead of Burnley". After leaving Bolton in October 2012, Coyle was appointed manager of Wigan Athletic in June 2013, only to leave the club six months later. He was made head coach of Houston Dynamo in December 2014, until he left by mutual agreement in May 2016. He then managed Blackburn Rovers between June 2016 and February 2017. He returned to Scotland to manage Ross County in September 2017, but resigned from this position after five months.


title: Owen Coyle

text: On 3 December 2019, Coyle was appointed as head coach of Indian club Chennaiyin. He led them from bottom of the table to the ISL final. After a stint with Jamshedpur, he returned to Scottish football in March 2022 with Queen's Park.


title: Owen Coyle

text: Coyle began his senior career with Dumbarton in 1985 where he played alongside his brothers Joe and Tommy. In 1988, he joined Clydebank.