The United States Supreme Court typically keeps all deliberations and draft opinions private while a case is pending. At the start of the publication process, the court releases a single slip opinion for the case. However, some instances of news leaks of private deliberations or draft opinions have occurred.

19th century
In 1852, ten days before the justices announced their ruling, the New-York Tribune published the decision in Pennsylvania v. Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company. When the case returned to the Court two years later, the Tribune published the ruling ahead of time again.

In February 1857, Associate Justice John Catron informed President-elect James Buchanan that the Supreme Court would write in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in federal territories. Catron wanted Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Pennsylvanian, to join the majority in Dred Scott so there would be at least one Northerner, who would be in favor of the majority's decision. Buchanan wrote to Grier asking him to join the Court's majority, which Grier did. At his inauguration, Buchanan referred to the Dred Scott decision and said the issue of slavery would soon be "speedily and finally" settled by the Supreme Court. The Tribune also published a running account of deliberations in the case, with Justice John McLean suspected of being the leaker.

20th century

Ashton Embry leaks
The Department of Justice indicted Ashton Embry, a former clerk of Justice Joseph McKenna, in 1919 for leaking pending decisions to Wall Street traders, including a railroad patent case. Embry had resigned a few months earlier to become a baker. No insider trading laws existed then, so Embry was charged with depriving "the United States of its lawful right and duty of promulgating information in the way and at the time required by law and at departmental regulation." The case never went to trial after the government's chief witness was "accused of conspiring with the Germans during World War I." Ninth Circuit Judge John B. Owens told Politico in 2022 that Embry is the only known case where "someone financially benefitted from disclosing inside information at the Supreme Court".

Roe v. Wade
While Roe v. Wade was being deliberated, The Washington Post published an article on July 4, 1972, covering infighting by the justices, including an internal memo written by Justice William O. Douglas.

Once a decision was finalized, Larry Hammond, a clerk for Justice Lewis Powell, leaked it to Time, on the condition it would not be published until the ruling was public. The announcement was delayed, but Time was already scheduled to publish and hit newsstands anyways. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger was "livid", and asked the other justices to identify the leaker so they could be punished. Hammond confessed to Powell, offering to resign, but Powell rejected that offer, telling Burger that Hammond was double-crossed. Burger met with Hammond and forgave him, and would also meet with editors from Time.

The reporter who broke the story, David C. Beckwith, said in 2022 that he spoke with about 15 people for the story, including Hammond.

Other 1970s and 1980s leaks
In 1977, NPR's Nina Totenberg reported that by a 5–3 vote, the Court declined to review cases of three defendants in Watergate cases.

Two years later, Chief Justice Warren Burger reassigned a member of the Court's print staff after determining they leaked the results of multiple cases to Tim O'Brien, an ABC News correspondent. In 1986, O'Brien correctly reported the 7–2 vote in Bowsher v. Synar, but got the specific day the Court was expected to announce its ruling wrong, as Burger delayed the announcement, likely because of the leak.

In 1981, United Press International received a draft of an opinion for County of Washington v. Gunther, but withheld publication because it was "unable to establish the authenticity."

Planned Parenthood v. Casey
In June 1992, an issue of the newsmagazine Newsweek contained an account of the Court's deliberations in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case involving abortion. The article cited various unnamed sources, including clerks, and correctly predicted that "at least three of the nine justices are planning to draft opinions in Casey" and that the decision would be issued on June 29. In a June 10, 1992 memorandum to all law clerks, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist admonished clerks to say nothing to the press about pending cases. The Rehnquist memo about the apparent leak became public in 2023, when the private papers of John Paul Stevens (who retired in 2010 and died in 2019) were released.

21st century
Multiple former law clerks leaked details about the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision to Vanity Fair in 2004.

In 2012, days after the ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius was announced, CBS News's Jan Crawford reported that Chief Justice John Roberts had switched his vote, from initially wanting to strike down the law in question, to eventually voting to uphold it.

In 2019, CNN reported on Roberts switching his vote in another high-profile case, Department of Commerce v. New York, which considered whether a question about citizenship status could be added to the 2020 United States census.

In 2022, during oral arguments in Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco, California, Justice Stephen Breyer commented that a claim was "pretty similar to what we just allowed in that case of the attorney general", inadvertently revealing the Court's decision in Cameron v. EMW Women's Surgical Center, P.S.C., eight days before it would be published.

In July 2022, Christian minister Rob Schenck, a former anti-abortion leader who had led a D.C.-based evangelical nonprofit group, sent a letter to Chief Justice Roberts saying that in 2014, he had been told in advance that Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. would be decided in favor of Hobby Lobby, and that the opinion would be authored by Justice Samuel Alito. Schenck reportedly obtained this information from a donor, Gayle Wright, who, with her husband, had dinner with Alito and his wife. Schenck gave interviews on the matter to The New York Times, which reported on it in November 2022, stating that "in months of examining Mr. Schenck's claims, The Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public." Alito denied the allegation, and said his relationship with the Wrights was "casual and purely social."

In 2023, Joan Biskupic reported in her book Nine Black Robes that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy had made negotiations with each other on two gay rights cases: Roberts would join Kennedy in granting, vacating, and remanding Pavan v. Smith, ruling that Arkansas could not prevent the name of a lesbian mother who had not given birth from appearing on her child's birth certificate; and Kennedy would join Roberts in granting the appeal of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Biskupic also wrote that the two orders were deliberately announced on the same day (June 26, 2017). In a post on The Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman speculated that the leak may have been several years old, possibly having come from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 2023, CNN reported that the justices left their first conference on Allen v. Milligan without a consensus on either side. However, after a series of negotiations between Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the chief justice convinced Kavanaugh, who was "[a]mbivalent during early internal debate," to join him in holding that Alabama's congressional districts were likely illegally racially gerrymandered.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization draft opinion

On May 2, 2022, Politico released a leaked 98-page draft opinion authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito in a highly watched abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which had five votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. The draft was from February, but Politico—and later, The Washington Post—reported that the five-vote majority was still intact. The authenticity of the draft was confirmed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who also directed the marshal of the Court, Gail Curley, to conduct an investigation into the source of the leak. It is unlikely that the leak violated any federal criminal laws, unless the draft was obtained by hacking, theft, or other unlawful means.

The final majority opinion released on June 24, 2022, was largely the same as the leaked draft, the main additions responding to the concurrence and dissent.

In January 2023, following an investigation led by the Marshal of the Supreme Court, the Court released a 20-page summary of its investigation. The analysis was independently reviewed by Michael Chertoff, a former judge and Cabinet secretary. The investigation failed "to identify ... by a preponderance of the evidence" the person or persons who leaked the Dobbs draft opinion. Investigators had reviewed computers network and printer logs and interviewed at least 97 court personnel. The investigation counted 82 staff members, in addition to the justices, who had access to the draft. Court staff were asked to provide sworn statements, but neither the justices nor their spouses were interviewed under oath or asked to provide affidavits.

See also
 Branzburg v. Hayes
 Brett Kavanaugh email leak

References

Leaks
Information sensitivity
News leaks

List of United States Supreme Court leaks


Khudiram Bose (also spelled Kshudiram/Khudiram Basu) (3 December 1889 – 11 August 1908) was an Indian revolutionary from Bengal Presidency who opposed British rule of India. For his role in the Muzaffarpur Conspiracy Case, along with Prafulla Chaki, he was sentenced to death and subsequently executed, making him one of the youngest martyrs of the Indian Independence Movement.

Khudiram, along with Prafulla Chaki, attempted to assassinate a British judge, Magistrate Douglas Kingsford, by throwing bombs on the carriage they suspected the man was in. Magistrate Kingsford, however, was seated in a different carriage, and the throwing of bombs resulted in the deaths of two British women. Prafulla fatally shot himself before the arrest. Khudiram was arrested and trialed for the murder of the two women, ultimately being sentenced to death. He was one of the first Indian revolutionaries in Bengal to be executed by the British.

At the time of his hanging, Khudiram was 18 years, 8 months, and 11 days, 10 hours old making him the second youngest revolutionary in India.

Mahatma Gandhi, however, denounced the violence, lamenting the deaths of the two innocent women. He stated "that the Indian people will not win their freedom through these methods." Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his newspaper Kesari, defended the two young men and called for immediate swaraj. This was followed by the immediate arrest of Tilak by the British colonial government on charges of sedition.

Early life
Khudiram Bose was born on 3 December 1889 in a Bengali Kayastha family in the small village named Mohobani, situated under the Keshpur Police Station in the undivided Medinipur district of Bengal. His father was a Tehsildar in the Nerajol.

Khudiram was the fourth child in a family of three daughters. His parents, Trailokyanath Bose and Lakshmipriya Devi had two sons before the birth of Khudiram but both of them died prematurely. Following the traditional customs prevalent in the culture, the newborn child was symbolically sold to his eldest sister in exchange of three handfuls of food grains locally known as Khud, in an attempt to save him from dying at an early age. This way he acquired the name, Khudiram.

He lost his mother when he was six years old. His father died a year after. Aparupa Roy, his elder sister, brought him to her house at Hatgachha village under the Daspur Police Station. Anurupadevi's husband, Amritalal Roy, got him admitted to Tamluk's Hamilton High School.

In 1902 and 1903, Sri Aurobindo and Sister Nivedita visited Midnapore. They held a series of public lectures and private session with the existing revolutionary groups for freedom. Khudiram, a teenager, was an active participant in the discussions about the revolution.

Apparently, he joined Anushilan Samiti, and came into contact with the network of Barindra Kumar Ghosh of Calcutta. He became a volunteer at the age of 15, and was arrested for distributing pamphlets against the British rule in India. At the young age of 16, Khudiram took part in planting bombs near the police stations and targeted government officials.

Kingsford assassination attempts

First Attempt
The first attempt to kill Kingsford was in the form of a book bomb constructed by Hemchandra Kanungo, a revolutionary, who learnt bomb making techniques from Europe. An empty tin of Cadbury cocoa was packed with a pound of picric acid and three detonators. This was packed into a hollowed section of Herbert Broom's Commentaries on the Common Law and delivered wrapped in a brown paper to Kingsford's house by Paresh Mallick, a young revolutionary. Kingsford placed the unopened package in his shelf to examine later. By March 1908, fearful of the judge's safety, he was promoted to the District Judge position and transferred by the government to Muzaffarpur, Bihar. With him went his furniture, library and the book bomb.

The Reconnaissance at Muzaffarpur
Anushilan Samiti persisted in their attempt to kill Kingsford. In April, a two-man reconnaissance team visited Muzaffarpur, which included Prafulla Chaki. On their return, Hemchandra provided the bomb, which was composed of 6 ounces of dynamite, a detonator, and a black powder fuse. Prafulla Chaki returned to Muzaffarpur with a new boy, Khudiram Bose.

Police Suspicion
The activities of Aurobindo Ghosh, Barindra Ghosh and their associates roused suspicion. The Calcutta police became aware of the plans on Kingsford's life. Commissioner F.L. Halliday's alerts to the Superintendent of Police in Muzzafarpur were ignored. However, four men were assigned to guard the magistrate's house. In the meantime, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki adopted the name of Haren Sarkar and Dinesh Chandra Roy respectively and took up residence in a charitable inn (Dharamshala) run by Kishorimohan Bandyopadhyay. In the ensuing days, the duo monitored the activities and daily routine of their target. The two revolutionaries successfully hid their identities for over three weeks. The CID officer from Calcutta returned with a letter from the Superintendent of Muzaffarpur, Armstrong, that the duo had not arrived.

On the evening of 29 April, Khudiram and Prafulla were in place to execute their plans. Pretending to be schoolboys, they surveyed the Muzaffarpur park situated opposite The British Club, frequented by Kingsford. They were noticed by a constable.

Assassination attempts at Muzaffarpur
On a fateful day, Kingsford and his wife were playing bridge with the daughter and wife of Pringle Kennedy, a British barrister. They decided to head home around 8.30 PM. Kingsford and his wife were in a carriage identical to the one carrying Kennedy and his family. As their carriage reached the eastern gate of the compound of the European Club, Khudiram and Prafulla ran towards the carriage and threw the bombs into the carriage. A loud explosion ensued and the carriage was taken to Kingsford's house. The carriage was shattered and the Kennedy ladies sustained terrible injuries. Miss Kennedy died within an hour and Mrs. Kennedy died on 2 May of sustained injuries.

Escape
Khudiram and Prafulla went their own way to escape capture. By morning, Khudiram had walked 25 miles and he reached a station called Waini. As he asked for a glass of water at a tea stall, he was confronted by two armed constables, Fateh Singh, and Sheo Pershad Singh, who immediately suspected something upon seeing his dusty feet, and his exhausted and perspiring appearance. After a couple of questions, their suspicion became stronger, and they decided to detain Khudiram. Khudiram started struggling with the two men, and immediately, one of the two hidden revolvers fell out. Before Khudiram could use the other one to fire on the constables, one of them held him from behind in a bear-hug. The much younger and lightly built Khudiram had no more chance of defence or escape. On his person were found 37 rounds of ammunition, Rs. 30 in cash, a railway map and a page of the rail timetable. The fate of Khudiram was sealed forever. The Waini station is now known as Khudiram Bose Pusa Station.

On the other hand, Prafulla had travelled long arduous hours. Around midday, a civil named Trigunacharan Ghosh noticed a young way coming his way. He was aware of the bomb blast and realized that Prafulla was the other revolutionary. Ghosh decided to save his life, and let him bathe, eat, and rest in his house. He arranged for Prafulla to return to Kolkata the same night. He boarded a train from Samastipur for Mokamaghat, and continue his onward journey with a train to Howrah. A sub-inspector in the Indian Imperial Police, Nandalal Bannerjee, was travelling in the same compartment. He struck a conversation and realized Prafulla to be the other revolutionary. When Prafulla got down at the Shipwright station to drink water, Bannerjee sent a telegram to the Muzaffarpur police station. Banerjee tried to apprehend Prafulla at the Mokamaghat station. Prafulla tried to fight his way through with his revolver but in the end, down to his last bullet, he shot himself in the mouth.

On 1 May, the handcuffed Khudiram was brought from to Muzaffarpur. The entire town descended at the police station to take a look at the teenage boy surrounded by a team of armed policemen. Khudiram was taken to the house of the district magistrate, Mr. Woodman. The English daily, The Statesman, wrote on the following day, 2 May 1908:

<blockquote> The Railway station was crowded to see the boy. A mere boy of 18 or 19 years old, who looked quite determined. He came out of a first-class compartment and walked all the way to the phaeton, kept for him outside, like a cheerful boy who knows no anxiety.....on taking his seat the boy cheerfully cried 'Vandemataram'''.</blockquote>

Khudiram had to give a statement or declaration to the magistrate. He took full responsibility for the assassination, unknown that Prafulla was dead. Only after Khudiram finished giving his statement, the body of Prafulla reached Muzaffarpur. Khudiram realized that lying would go in vain. He identified the body of Prafulla and the British also received details from the encounter with sub-inspector Bannerjee. Instead of believing Khudiram, the British colonial authorities thought it more proper to detach Prafulla's head from his corpse and send it to Calcutta for better confirmation.

First hearing
The historical trial started on 21 May 1908, presided by Judge Corndoff, Nathuni Prasad and Janak Prasad in the Jury. Along with Khudiram, two others were tried for assisting the revolutionaries in their mission — Mrityunjay Chakraborty and Kishorimohan Bandopadhyay, who had accommodated Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki in his Dharmashala for their mission. Mrityunjay died during the trial, and subsequently, the trial of Kishorimohan was separated from that of Khudiram.

Mannum and Binod Bihari Majumdar were the prosecutors for the British colonial government. Lawyers Kalidas Basu, Upendranath Sen, and Kshetranath Bandopadhyay took up Khudiram's defence. They were joined later in the trial by Kulkamal Sen, Nagendra Lal Lahiri, and Satischandra Chakraborty—all of them fought the case without any fees.

On 23 May, Khudiram resubmitted his statement to magistrate E.W. Bredhowd, denying any involvement or responsibility in any aspect or stage of the entire mission and operation down to the bombing. Initially, Khudiram was not ready to sign this statement but did so after persuasion from his lawyers. On 13 June, the scheduled date for the verdict and sentence, the judge and the prosecutors received an anonymous letter of warning, which told them that there was one more bomb coming for them from Kolkata and that henceforth. it will be the Biharis, and not the Bengalis, who are going to kill them. On the other hand, it made the defence lawyers more confident as the letter was proof there could be other masterminds and executors of the Muzaffarpur bombing other than Khudiram, and that along with Khudiram's age should make the judge deliver sentencing other than death. But, to the disappointment to all, the Judge pronounced the death sentence for Khudiram.

Khudiram's immediate and spontaneous response was to smile. The judge, surprised, asked Khudiram whether he had understood the meaning of the pronounced sentence. Khudiram replied that he surely had. When the judge asked him again whether he had anything to say, in front of a packed audience, Khudiram replied with the same smile that if he could be given some time, he could teach the judge the skill of bomb-making. By then, the Judge was instructing the police to escort the boy out of the courtroom.

As per the legal system, Khudiram had 7 days to appeal to the High Court. Khudiram refused to appeal. However, after some persuasion by his counselors — with the logic that if he receives a life sentence instead of getting hanged because of this appeal, he would live to serve his nation once free and he would have age on his side when that happens — Khudiram finally agreed, in a detached manner, to go along with his defence team.

 Second hearing
The High Court hearing took place on 8 July 1908. Narendrakumar Basu came to Khudiram's defence and concentrated all his legal skills and experience in this case to save a boy who had overnight become a wonder and a hero for the whole country. He challenged the verdict of the session court by saying that the judging was not according to law and was flawed. He reasoned that according to article 164 of the penal code, the accused is required to submit his statement in front of a first class magistrate, which Mr. Woodman was not, and moreover, during the first statement Khudiram was not told anything of the person's identity and position.

Secondly, pointed out Basu, the article 364 requires that all questions to the accused be made in the mother tongue of the same, and all answers from the accused in his mother tongue be documented verbatim in that language, but which was done in English in Khudiram's case. Moreover, Khudiram's signature was required to be given on the statement on the same date and at the time of the statement in the presence of the magistrate, but in reality, Khudiram was made to sign the day after, and in front of a different person, who was an additional magistrate. Lastly, since such a statement is by definition required to be totally voluntary, with the magistrate being sure that it was so, there was no proof that Khudiram was allowed to give a voluntary statement without any direct or indirect manipulation after his capture.

Lastly, Narendrakumar Basu said that Prafulla aka "Dinesh" (the name used in the trial) was stronger than Khudiram was, and he was the bomb-expert among the two of them. Thus, it is highly likely that the actual thrower of the bomb was "Dinesh". Further, Prafulla's suicide on the verge of capture only reinforces the possibility of his being the actual thrower of the bombs.

After the defence, it was announced by the two British judges that the final verdict would be passed on 13 July 1908.

 Judgement
As Khudiram was the only of the two alive, his lone statement of a two-man team was the foundation for the entire case. Since all the legal arguments put forth by Narendrakumar Basu were believed to be technically correct, it was hoped that for the sake of the law—about which the British prided themselves ad infinitum — Khudiram's life would, at least, be spared. But, on a historical day, the British judges confirmed the conviction and sentence and dismissed the appeal.

 Execution
On 11 August, the region around the prison became packed with a swelling crowd before the scheduled time, 6 AM. People holding flower garlands filled up the front rows of the crowd. Upendranath Sen, the lawyer-journalist of the Bengali news daily "Bengalee", who was close to Khudiram, reports having reached the venue by 5 AM, in a car with all the necessary funerary arrangements and clothes. After the hanging, the funeral procession went through the city, with police guards holding back the crowd all along the central artery street. The people kept throwing their flowers on the body as the carriage passed by.

The Amrita Bazar Patrika, one of the prominent dailies of that era, carried the story of the hanging the next day, on 12 August. Under the headline "Khudiram's End: Died cheerful and smiling" the newspaper wrote:
An established Anglo-Indian newspaper, The Empire, wrote:

The Kesari, nationalist Marathi newspaper, observed on 26 May 1908:

The Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote a poem to honour him.

After martyrdom, Khudiram became so popular that weavers of Bengal started weaving a special type of dhoti, with 'Khudiram' written on its side. Boys studying in school colleges wore these dhotis and stitched and walked on the path of independence.

Statement made by Khudiram Bose
In his own words, Khudiram made a statement (which was updated) while under arrest, recorded by the special branch of the police, before he was hanged: "I was naughty in my childhood, But after I entered Midnapore Collegiate School a change overtook me".

Legacy

Khudiram Bose Central College – established in 1965 as an undergraduate college in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It offers only courses in arts and commerce. It is affiliated with the University of Calcutta.
Shahid Khudiram Station – a metro railway station near Garia in Kolkata.
Shahid Khudiram Bose Hospital – a hospital on BT Road near Municipality park.
Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail – the Muzaffarpur Jail, where the freedom fighter was incarcerated and hanged on 11 August 1908, was renamed.
Sahid Khudiram Siksha Prangan – a university campus for postgraduate studies of University of Calcutta, Kolkata. It is also known as Alipore Campus.
Khudiram Anushilan Kendra – located adjacent to the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Indoor Stadium in Kolkata.
Khudiram Bose Pusa railway station

 Films
Over the years, Khudiram Bose and his journey have been represented in several films.

 Main Khudiram Bose Hun (2017 film)
 Kudhiram Bose'' (2022 film)

See also

 Indian independence movement
 Revolutionary movement for Indian independence
 Anushilan Samiti
 Prafulla Chaki

References

Notes

Citations

Further reading

 .

External links
 Indian culture portal Govt of India

1889 births
1908 deaths
1908 murders in India
Indian Hindus
19th-century Indian people
20th-century Indian criminals
Anushilan Samiti
Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule
Executed Indian revolutionaries
Revolutionary movement for Indian independence
Indian nationalism
Indian people convicted of murder
20th-century executions by British India
People from Paschim Medinipur district
People executed by British India by hanging
Indian independence activists from West Bengal

Kshudiram Bose


The Gewisse Latin: Gewissæ) were a political group or band of Anglo-Saxons. They originally settled in the upper Thames river valley area. The Gewisse were the most powerful group in what would become the kingdom of Wessex.

Name

The name 'Gewisse' comes from an Old English word for "reliable" or "sure", In the genealogy of King Alfred of Wessex, is a supposed ancestor of Cerdic named Gewis. (also spelled Gwis). The true origin of the name cannot be determined accurately. the name was old in Bede's time. Bede stated the original name for the West Saxons was the Gewisse. The change in name from the Gewisse to the West Saxons seems to have taken place in the latter part of the 7th century. The Gewisse, like the 'Cantwara' (Kent-men) and the 'Meonwara' of Hampshire were political units, not tribes.

History

In 577 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claims the kings of the Gewisse captured Cirencester, Bath and Gloucester. The date is questionable but the Gewisse did hold those territories. The Gewisse found themselves limited in their ability to expand into new territories by the growing power of Mercia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 628 says that Cyngils and Cwichelm his son 'fought with Penda at Cirencester and came to an agreement with him there'. The 'agreement' meant giving Cirencester to Penda. It was a permanent loss of Cirencester. By the second half of the 7th century Gewisse was expanding towards the Southwest and Devon. At about the same time they lost territory in the Thames valley to Mercia. The change in name to Wessex may have reflected more a change in their territory.

Bishop Birinus began converting the Gewisse to Christianity in 634, In 635 he baptized their king Cynegils who established Birinus at Dorchester. But the Dorchester bishopric was never considered West Saxon by Bede. He considered it to be Gewisse. In 660 Cenwalh created a new diocese at Winchester and made Wine the first bishop. Bede referred to the Winchester diocese as West Saxon. At the time he was writing in the early 8th century, Bede treated the two names as interchangeable. But when writing of the reign of Cynegils he referred to them as "anciently known as the Gewissae."

Notes

References

Anglo-Saxons
+

Gewisse


Claudia Weill is an American film director best known for her film Girlfriends (1978), starring Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest, Bob Balaban and Eli Wallach, made independently and sold to Warner Brothers after multiple awards at Cannes, Filmex and Sundance. In 2019, Girlfriends was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

It's My Turn (1980 for Columbia Pictures)—with Jill Clayburgh, Michael Douglas, and Charles Grodin—won her the Donatello, or International Oscar for best new director.

Earlier work includes 30 films for Sesame Street, freelancing as a camerawoman, and numerous documentaries, notably The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, a documentary about the first women's delegation to China in 1973, headed by Shirley MacLaine, nominated for an Academy Award and released theatrically and on PBS.

Early life and education
In 1947, Weill was born in New York City. Weill's family was Jewish.

 In 1969, Weill graduated from Harvard University.

Career
Weill moved to Los Angeles in 1986. Weill began directing TV episodes of The Twilight Zone, Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Once and Again, Chicago Hope, and numerous pilots. More recently, she directed an episode of Girls for HBO.

As a theater director (Williamstown, The O'Neill, Sundance, ACT, Empty Space and in New York at MTC, the Public, and Circle Rep), she won the Drama Desk's Best Director Award for the premiere of Donald Margulies' Found a Peanut produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theater in 1984.

She directed The Belle of Belfast by Nate Rufus Edelman at EST and the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, Twelfth Night for Antaeus, the West Coast Premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (with Linda Hunt) at the Pasadena Playhouse, Memory House, End Days, Tape, numerous workshops of Modern Orthodox, Adam Baum and the Jew Movie (Goldfarb), The Parents' Evening by Bathsheba Doran at the Vineyard Playhouse, and Huck and Holden by Rajiv Joseph at the Black Dahlia, among others.

In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Weill's name and picture.

When making her follow-up to Girlfriends, It's My Turn, Weill experienced sexism and sexual harassment from producer Ray Stark. He also interfered with her vision of the film. Due to this she directed no more feature films.

Weill has taught directing for film, television and/or theater at Harvard, Juilliard, Cal Arts, USC Graduate School of Cinema Studies, Columbia, The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. She mentors playwrights and directors.

Filmography

Films
This is a partial list of films credited as director:
 1975 The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir
 1978 Girlfriends
 1980 It's My Turn
 1986 Johnny Bull (TV movie)
 1988  Giving Up the Ghost (TV movie)
 1991 Face of a Stranger (TV movie)
 1992 A Child Lost Forever (TV movie)
 1996 Critical Choices (TV movie)
 2013 He's Way More Famous Than You as herself

Personal life
In 1985, Weill married Walter S. Teller. They have two sons, Sam Teller and Eli Teller.

References

External links

 Claudia Weill at playingonair.org

American television directors
American women film directors
20th-century American Jews
American women television directors
Living people
Place of birth missing (living people)
Harvard University alumni
1947 births
21st-century American Jews
20th-century American women
21st-century American women
Jewish American film directors
Jewish American screenwriters

Claudia Weill


The Santa Cueva de Nuestra Señora de Covadonga (English: the Holy Cave of Our Lady of Covadonga) is a Catholic sanctuary located in Asturias, northern Spain. It is a cave in the Picos de Europa mountains, which gives its name to the parish of Covadonga in the municipality of Cangas de Onís. The name refers to the sanctuary, dedicated to the Virgin of Covadonga, where the first battle of the Spanish Reconquest took place in 718.

Description and history

The origin of the cave as place of cult is controversial. It seems to have been originally another place of confluence of Pagan Cult (in this case a fountain and cave together, seen as holy sites) as the Old English Wilweorthunga, meaning "well of worship" had been in Prehistorical times and still during the Roman Empire occupation. The Christian tradition has it that Pelagius, chasing a criminal, who had taken refuge in the cave, meets a hermit who was venerating the Virgin Mary. The hermit asked Pelagius to forgive the criminal, since the criminal had resorted to the protection of the Virgin, and says that one day that he too would need to seek shelter in the Cave.

Muslim chronicles about the Battle of Covadonga say that in this cave  Pelagius's forces fled, feeding on honey bees left in the crevices of the rock. Christian chronicles claim that the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary was crucial in the victory, repelling attacks against the cave.

The first construction in the Holy Cave dates back of the reign of Alfonso I of Asturias, who, to commemorate the victory of Pelagius to the Muslims, built a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, that would give rise to the invocation of the Our Lady of Covadonga (popularly known as La Santina). In addition to the altar dedicated to the Virgin, two others were built for Saint John the Baptist and Saint Andrew. Alfonso presented this church to the Benedictine monks.

The cave was covered with wood, and in 1777 a fire destroyed the medieval Marian statue. The current wooden image of Virgin and Child dates to the 16th century and was donated to the sanctuary by the Cathedral of Oviedo in 1778.

During the civil war the Virgin image disappeared and was found in the Embassy of Spain in France in 1939. The present chapel of Romanesque style is the work of Luis Menéndez-Pidal and Alvarez.

Royal pantheon of Covadonga
The shrine of Covadonga was very important for the early (8th century) Christian kingdom of Asturias. Members of the royal family buried in the  (), were the following:

 Pelagius of Asturias (died 737). First king of Asturias and son of Duke Favila.
 Queen Gaudiosa, Pelagius's wife.
 A sister of the King Pelagius.
 Alfonso I of Asturias (693-757). Third king of Asturias, son of Peter of Cantabria, Duke of Cantabria.
 Queen Ermesinda. Alfonso I's wife, daughter of King Pelagius and Queen Gaudiosa, and sister of the King Favila of Asturias.

Pelagius died in Cangas de Onís, where he had his court in 737. After his death, his body was buried in the Church of Santa Eulalia of Abamia, located in the Asturian town of Abamia, where his wife had been also  previously buried. The chronicler Ambrosio Morales noted in his work that Alfonso X the Wise, king of Castile and Leon, ordered to move the remains of Pelagius and his wife to the Holy Cave of Covadonga.

See also
Cueva de Achbinico
Marian apparition
Royal Collegiate church of San Fernando

References

External links

 Real Sitio de Covadonga

Buildings and structures in Asturias
Shrines to the Virgin Mary
Covadonga
Tourist attractions in Asturias
Religion in Asturias
Landforms of Asturias
Burials in Spain
Pelagius of Asturias
Roman Catholic shrines in Spain

Santa Cueva de Covadonga


A medical officer of health, also known as a medical health officer, chief health officer, chief public health officer or district medical officer, is the title commonly used for the senior government official of a health department, usually at a municipal, county/district, state/province, or regional level. The post is held by a physician who serves to advise and lead a team of public health professionals such as environmental health officers and public health nurses on matters of public health importance.

The equivalent senior health official at the national level is often referred to as the chief medical officer (CMO), although the title varies across countries, for example known as the surgeon general in the United States and the chief public health officer in Canada.

Australia

The national senior adviser on health matters is known as the chief medical officer, while those at state and territory level are mostly known as the chief health officer (CHO), with one CMO and one chief public health officer.

Canada

The chief public health officer of Canada is the senior health official for the federal government.

In Ontario, one individual is named chief medical officer of health for the province and has powers to issue guidance, to issue provincial orders, and to coordinate public health responses with medical officers of health, who oversee various public health units.

In British Columbia, the provincial health officer is the senior health official for the provincial government.

The roles of the medical officer of health varies across jurisdictions, but always include responsibilities related to public health and safety, and may include the following functions:
 responsibility for communicable disease control;
 assessing environmental threats to human health;
 providing leadership in public health emergency situations;
 overseeing health surveillance activities;
 providing expert advice on health promotion and disease prevention;
 recommending and developing public health policy.

India
In India, a medical officer generally has a minimum of MBBS degree or MD degree from a recognised medical college and university and his/her name is registered in National Medical Council and in a state medical council. They are posted mainly at primary health centre and community health centres.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the municipal position was an elected head of the local board of health, however the term MOH has also been used to refer to the chief medical officer. Under the Metropolis Local Management Act 1855, London municipalities were each required to appoint a medical officer. In 1856, 48 officers took up appointments in the city, and these specialists formed Metropolitan Association of Medical Officers of Health. They were important and influential in the establishment of municipal hospitals under the provisions of the Local Government Act 1929. In the 1974 NHS reorganisation they were replaced by Community Physicians who were attached to the different levels of the NHS.

United States

The surgeon general of the United States is the senior health officer in the United States.

Health officer is a common term used in the United States for public health officials, such as medical health officers and environmental health officers. They may serve at the global, federal, state, county, or municipal level.

The end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st saw major issues for health officials and health officers include tobacco control, injury prevention, public health surveillance, disease control, access to health care, health equity, health disparities, cultural competence, access to preventive services such as immunizations and health promotion.

See also
 Environmental health officer
 National public health institutes

References

Further reading

External links
 American Association of Public Health Physicians

Public health
Health care occupations
Water supply and sanitation in London

Medical officer of health


Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American philosopher, neuroscientist,  author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.

Harris's first book, The End of Faith (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks. Harris has since written six additional books: Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in 2010, the long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014, and (with British writer Maajid Nawaz) Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015. Harris's work has been translated into over 20 languages. Some critics have argued that Harris's writings are Islamophobic. Harris and his supporters, however, reject this characterization, adding that such a labeling is an attempt to silence criticism.

Harris has debated with many prominent figures on the topics of God or religion, including William Lane Craig, Jordan Peterson, Rick Warren, Robert Wright, Andrew Sullivan, Reza Aslan, David Wolpe, Deepak Chopra, Ben Shapiro, and Jean Houston. Since September 2013, Harris has hosted the Making Sense podcast (originally titled Waking Up), which has a large listenership. In September 2018, Harris released a meditation app, Waking Up with Sam Harris. He was one of the original core members of the so-called "intellectual dark web", although Harris has stated that he does not identify as a part of that group.

Early life and education
Samuel Benjamin Harris was born in Los Angeles, California, on April 9, 1967. He is the son of the late actor Berkeley Harris, who appeared mainly in Western films, and TV writer and producer Susan Harris (née Spivak), who created Soap and The Golden Girls, among other series. His father, born in North Carolina, came from a Quaker background, and his mother is Jewish but not religious. He was raised by his mother following his parents' divorce when he was age two. Harris has stated that his upbringing was entirely secular and that his parents rarely discussed religion, though he also stated that he was not raised as an atheist.

While his original major was in English, Harris became interested in philosophical questions while at Stanford University after an experience with MDMA. The experience interested him in the idea he might be able to achieve spiritual insights without the use of drugs. Leaving Stanford in his second year, a quarter after his psychoactive experience, he visited India and Nepal, where he studied meditation with teachers of Buddhist and Hindu religions, including Dilgo Khyentse. For a few weeks in the early 1990s, he was a volunteer guard in the security detail of the Dalai Lama.

In 1997, after eleven years overseas, Harris returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000. Harris began writing his first book, The End of Faith, immediately after the September 11 attacks.

He received a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles, using functional magnetic resonance imaging to conduct research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. His thesis was titled The Moral Landscape: How Science Could Determine Human Values. His advisor was Mark S. Cohen.

Career

Writing
Harris's writing concerns philosophy, neuroscience, and criticism of religion. He came to prominence for his criticism of religion (Islam in particular) and he is described as one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. He has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Economist, London Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic. Five of Harris's books have been New York Times bestsellers, and his writing has been translated into over 20 languages. The End of Faith (2004) remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks.

Harris has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss's 2016 self-help book Tools of Titans.

Debates on religion
In September 2006 Harris debated Robert Wright on the rationality of religious belief.  In 2007, he engaged in a lengthy debate with conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan on the Internet forum Beliefnet. In April 2007, Harris debated with evangelical pastor Rick Warren for Newsweek magazine. Harris debated with Rabbi David Wolpe in 2007. In 2010, Harris joined Michael Shermer to debate with Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on the future of God in a debate hosted by ABC News Nightline. Harris debated with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig in April 2011 on whether there can be an objective morality without God. In June and July 2018, he met with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson for a series of debates on religion, particularly the relationship between religious values and scientific fact in defining truth. Harris has debated with the scholar Reza Aslan.

Podcast
In September 2013, Harris began releasing the Waking Up podcast (since re-titled Making Sense). Episodes vary in length but often last over two hours. Releases do not follow a regular schedule.

The podcast focuses on a wide array of topics related to science and spirituality, including philosophy, religion, morality, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics and artificial intelligence. Harris has interviewed a wide range of guests, including scientists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and authors. Guests have included Jordan Peterson, Dan Dennett, Janna Levin, Sharon Salzberg, and David Chalmers.

Meditation app
In September 2018, Harris released a meditation course app, Waking Up with Sam Harris. The app provides daily meditations; long guided meditations; daily "Moments" (brief meditations and reminders); conversations with thought leaders in psychology, meditation, philosophy, psychedelics, and other disciplines; a selection of lessons on various topics, such as Mind & Emotion, Free Will, and Doing Good; and more. Users of the app are introduced to several types of meditation, such as mindfulness meditation, vipassanā-style meditation, loving-kindness meditation, and Dzogchen.

In September 2020, Harris announced his commitment to donate at least 10% of Waking Up's profits to highly effective charities, thus becoming the first company to sign the Giving What We Can pledge for companies. The pledge was retroactive, taking into account the profits since the day the app launched 2 years previously.

Views

Religion

Harris is a critic of religion, and is a leading figure in the New Atheist movement. Harris is particularly opposed to what he refers to as dogmatic belief, and says that "Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a betrayal of science – and yet it is the lifeblood of religion." While purportedly opposed to religion in general and the belief systems of them, Harris believes that all religions are not created equal. Often invoking Jainism to contrast Islam as a whole, Harris highlights the difference in the specific doctrine and scripture as the main indicator of a religion's value, or lack thereof.

In 2006, Harris described Islam as "all fringe and no center", and wrote in The End of Faith that "the doctrine of Islam [...] represents a unique danger to all of us", arguing that the war on terror is really a war against Islam. In 2014, Harris said he considers Islam to be "especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse", as it involves what Harris considers to be "bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior." In 2015 Harris and secular Islamic activist Maajid Nawaz cowrote  Islam and the Future of Tolerance. In this book, Harris argues that the word Islamophobia is a "pernicious meme", a label which prevents discussion about the threat of Islam. Harris has been described in 2020 by Jonathan Matusitz, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, as "a champion of the counter-jihad left".

Harris is critical of the Christian right in politics in the United States, blaming them for the political focus on "pseudo-problems like gay marriage". He is also critical of liberal Christianityas represented, for instance, by the theology of Paul Tillichwhich he argues claims to base its beliefs on the Bible despite actually being influenced by secular modernity. He further states that in so doing liberal Christianity provides rhetorical cover to fundamentalists.

Spirituality

Harris holds that there is "nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have."

Harris rejects the dichotomy between spirituality and rationality, favoring a middle path that preserves spirituality and science but does not involve religion. He writes that spirituality should be understood in light of scientific disciplines like neuroscience and psychology. Science, he contends, can show how to maximize human well-being, but may fail to answer certain questions about the nature of being, answers to some of which he says are discoverable directly through our experience. His conception of spirituality does not involve a belief in any god.

In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), Harris describes his experience with Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, and recommends it to his readers. He writes that the purpose of spirituality (as he defines it – he concedes that the term's uses are diverse and sometimes indefensible) is to become aware that our sense of self is illusory, and says this realization brings both happiness and insight into the nature of consciousness, mirroring core Buddhist beliefs. This process of realization, he argues, is based on experience and is not contingent on faith. Harris especially recommends the "headless" meditation technique as written about by Douglas Harding.

Science and morality
In The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that science can answer moral problems and aid human well-being.

Free will

Harris says that the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent. Harris writes in Free Will that neuroscience "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."

Philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that Harris's book Free Will successfully refuted the common understanding of free will, but that he failed to respond adequately to the compatibilist understanding of free will. Dennett said the book was valuable because it expressed the views of many eminent scientists, but that it nonetheless contained a "veritable museum of mistakes" and that "Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic."

Artificial intelligence
Harris is a frequent critic of Artificial intelligence. He has discussed existential risk from artificial general intelligence in depth. He has given a TED talk on the topic, arguing it will be a major threat in the future and criticizing the paucity of human interest on the subject. He argues the dangers from artificial intelligence (AI) follow from three premises: that intelligence is the result of physical information processing, that humans will continue innovation in AI, and that humans are nowhere near the maximum possible extent of intelligence. Harris states that even if superintelligent AI is five to ten decades away, the scale of its implications for human civilization warrants discussion of the issue in the present.

Political views
Harris describes himself as a liberal, is a registered Democrat and has never voted Republican in presidential elections. He supports same-sex marriage and decriminalizing drugs. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Harris said that he supported most of the criticism against the Bush administration's war in Iraq, and all criticism of fiscal policy and the administration's treatment of science. Harris also said that liberalism has grown "dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world" regarding threats allegedly posed by Islamic fundamentalism.

Israel
Harris opposes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and Jewish claims of ownership made in the Bible. Despite this, Harris has said due to the hostility towards Jews, he has conceded that if there is one religious group which needs protections in the form of a state, it is Israel.

With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he has criticized both Israel and Palestine for committing war crimes. He has indicated that he believes that Israel genuinely wants peace and that its neighbours are more devoted to the destruction of Israel. Harris has also said that Palestine is more guilty, citing Palestine and Hamas' use of human shields and genocidal rhetoric towards the Jews as reasons Palestine is more morally culpable. He names these as reasons that Israel has a right to defend itself against Palestine.

Presidential elections
In the 2008 United States presidential election, he supported the candidacy of Barack Obama and opposed Republican John McCain's candidacy. During the 2016 United States presidential election, Harris supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders, and despite calling her "a terribly flawed candidate for the presidency", he favored her in the general election and came out strongly in opposition to Donald Trump's candidacy. Harris has criticized Trump for lying, stating in 2018 that Trump "has assaulted truth more than anyone in human history."

In the 2020 United States presidential election, Harris supported Andrew Yang in the Democratic primaries. Harris also introduced Yang to podcaster Joe Rogan. After the 2020 election, he said that he did not care what was on Hunter Biden's laptop, telling the Triggernometry podcast that  "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basementI would not have cared", arguing more broadly that both Trump and Biden had been in the public eye for decades, and that Biden would have had to have engaged in an extraordinarily large scale of mendacity to come even close to the level of scandal Trump is known to have engaged in. He went on to say that nothing on the laptop would come close to even the "Trump University" scandal. He also said that Twitter's brief censoring of the laptop story on its platform was a "conspiracy" but that it was warranted. He has, however, since clarified that the word "warranted" was out of place, but that the decision could nevertheless be justifiable, since the story could have influenced the election at a time when it was not yet known if the story was true.

Economics
Harris supports raising taxes on the wealthy and reducing government spending, and has criticized billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for paying relatively little in tax. He has proposed taxing 10% for estates worth above 10 million, taxing 50% for estates worth over a billion dollars, and then using the money to fund an infrastructure bank.

He has accused conservatives of perceiving raising taxes as a form of theft or punishment, and of believing that by being rich they create value for others.  He has regarded this view as ludicrous, saying "markets aren't perfectly reflective of the value of goods and services, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy".

Gun rights
Harris owns guns and wrote in 2015 that he understood people's hostility towards gun culture in the United States and the political influence of the National Rifle Association of America. However, he argued that there is a rational case for gun ownership due to the fact that the police can not always be relied on and that guns are a good alternative.

Harris has stated that he disagrees with proposals by liberals and gun control advocates for restricting guns, such as the assault weapons ban, since more gun crimes are committed with handguns than the semi-automatic weapons which the ban would target. Harris has also said that the left-wing media gets many things wrong about guns. He has, however, offered support for certain regulations on gun ownership, such as mandatory training, licensure, and background checks before a gun can be legally purchased.

COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he criticized commentators for pushing views on COVID-19 that he considered to be "patently insane". Harris accused these commentators of believing that COVID-19 policies were a way of implementing social control and to crackdown on people's freedom politically. Harris has feuded with Bret Weinstein over his views on COVID-19. In 2023, he said that if COVID-19 had killed more children, there would be no patience for vaccine skepticism.

In March 2023, he hosted Matt Ridley and Alina Chan on his podcast to discuss the origins of COVID-19 and the potential that the COVID-19 virus was made in a lab.

Intellectual dark web
Harris has been described, alongside others such as Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson, as a member of the intellectual dark web, a group that opposes political correctness and identity politics. New York Times journalist Bari Weiss described the group as "a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation – on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums – that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now." In November 2020, Harris stated that he does not identify as a part of that group. In 2021 Harris stated that he had "turn[ed] in [his] imaginary membership card to this imaginary organization".

In 2023 during an interview with the Daily Beast, Harris explained that he had broken away from the intellectual dark web due to disagreements with Bret Weinstein, and Maajid Nawaz obsession with covid conspiracy theories and criticism of covid policies. He also cited him becoming disenchanted with Dave Rubin for having been captured by his audience and said "Rubin became far more cynical than I would have thought possible. And it's very depressing. He was a friend, he's not a friend anymore".

Controversies

Race and IQ controversy
In April 2017, Harris hosted the social scientist Charles Murray on his podcast, discussing topics including the heritability of IQ and race and intelligence. Harris stated the invitation was out of indignation at a violent protest against Murray at Middlebury College the month before and not out of particular interest in the material at hand. The podcast episode garnered significant criticism, most notably from Vox and Slate. In the Vox article, scientists, including Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, accused Harris of participating in "pseudoscientific racialist speculation" and peddling "junk science". Harris and Murray were defended by commentators Andrew Sullivan and Kyle Smith. Harris and Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein later discussed the affair in a podcast interview in which Klein accused Harris of "thinking tribally" and Harris accused the Vox article of leading people to think he was racist.

Accusations of Islamophobia
Harris has been accused of Islamophobia by journalist Glenn Greenwald and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. Greenwald characterized some of Harris's statements as Islamophobic, such as: "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists," and "[t]he only future devout Muslims can envisage – as Muslims – is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed." After Harris and Chomsky exchanged a series of emails on terrorism and U.S. foreign policy in 2015, Chomsky said Harris had not prepared adequately for the exchange and that this revealed his work as unserious. Kyle Schmidlin also wrote in Salon that he considered Chomsky the winner of the exchange because Harris's arguments relied excessively on thought experiments with little application to the real world. In a 2016 interview with Al Jazeera English UpFront, Chomsky further criticized Harris, saying he "specializes in hysterical, slanderous charges against people he doesn't like."

Harris has countered that his views on this and other topics are frequently misrepresented by "unethical critics" who "deliberately" take his words out of context. He has also criticized the validity of the term "Islamophobia". "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences, but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people," he wrote following a disagreement with actor Ben Affleck in October 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill Maher. Affleck had described Harris's and host Bill Maher's views on Muslims as "gross" and "racist", and Harris's statement that "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas" as an "ugly thing to say". Affleck also compared Harris's and Maher's rhetoric to that of people who use antisemitic canards or define African-Americans in terms of intraracial crime. Several conservative American media pundits in turn criticized Affleck and praised Harris and Maher for broaching the topic, saying that discussing it had become taboo.

Harris's dialogue on Islam with Maajid Nawaz received a combination of positive reviews and mixed reviews. Irshad Manji wrote: "Their back-and-forth clarifies multiple confusions that plague the public conversation about Islam." Of Harris specifically, she said "[he] is right that liberals must end their silence about the religious motives behind much Islamist terror. At the same time, he ought to call out another double standard that feeds the liberal reflex to excuse Islamists: Atheists do not make nearly enough noise about hatred toward Muslims."

Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University, accused Sam Harris of being a "new atheist crusader" while having never studied Islam thoroughly and having no special insight into any Muslim community on earth. He further accused Harris of engaging in such language to justify Western imperialism in the Muslim world. An article published in The Guardian accused Harris, along with Milo Yiannopoulos,  of influencing young white men into becoming racists and anti-Muslim bigots. Hatewatch staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) wrote that members of the "skeptics" movement, of which Harris is "one of the most public faces", help to "channel people into the alt-right." Bari Weiss wrote that the SPLC had misrepresented Harris's views.

Chris Hedges accused Harris of "advancing neoconservative agendas" and of advocating a nuclear first strike policy on Muslims if an Islamist regime ever obtained nuclear weapons, quoting from The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Harris that "in such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own." In 2018, Nathan J. Robinson also criticized Harris for promoting the possibility of a nuclear first strike on an Islamist regime.

Reception and recognition
Harris's first two books, in which he lays out his criticisms of religion, received negative reviews from Christian scholars. From secular sources, the books received a mixture of negative reviews and positive reviews. In his review of The End of Faith, American historian Alexander Saxton criticized what he called Harris's "vitriolic and selective polemic against Islam", (emphasis in original) which he said "obscure[s] the obvious reality that the invasion of Iraq and the War against Terror are driven by religious irrationalities, cultivated and conceded to, at high policy levels in the U.S., and which are at least comparable to the irrationality of Islamic crusaders and Jihadists." By contrast, Stephanie Merritt wrote of the same book that Harris's "central argument in The End of Faith is sound: religion is the only area of human knowledge in which it is still acceptable to hold beliefs dating from antiquity and a modern society should subject those beliefs to the same principles that govern scientific, medical or geographical inquiry – particularly if they are inherently hostile to those with different ideas." Harris's first book, The End of Faith (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

Harris's next two books, which discuss philosophical issues relating to ethics and free will, received several negative academic reviews. In his review of The Moral Landscape, neuroscientist Kenan Malik criticized Harris for not engaging adequately with philosophical literature: "Imagine a sociologist who wrote about evolutionary theory without discussing the work of Darwin, Fisher, Mayr, Hamilton, Trivers or Dawkins on the grounds that he did not come to his conclusions by reading about biology and because discussing concepts such as 'adaptation', 'speciation', 'homology', 'phylogenetics' or 'kin selection' would 'increase the amount of boredom in the universe'. How seriously would we, and should we, take his argument?" On the other hand, The Moral Landscape received a largely positive review from psychologists James Diller and Andrew Nuzzolilli. Additionally, Free Will received a mixed academic review from philosopher Paul Pardi, who acknowledged that while it suffers from some conceptual confusions and that the core argument is a bit too 'breezy', it serves as a "good primer on key ideas in physicalist theories of freedom and the will".

Harris's book on spirituality and meditation received mainly positive reviews as well as some mixed reviews. It was praised by Frank Bruni, for example, who described it as "so entirely of this moment, so keenly in touch with the growing number of Americans who are willing to say that they do not find the succor they crave, or a truth that makes sense to them, in organized religion."

In 2018, Robert Wright, a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, published an article in Wired criticizing Harris, whom he described as "annoying" and "deluded". Wright wrote that Harris, despite claiming to be a champion of rationality, ignored his own cognitive biases and engaged in faulty and inconsistent arguments in his book The End of Faith. He wrote that "the famous proponent of New Atheism is on a crusade against tribalism but seems oblivious to his own version of it." Wright wrote that these biases are rooted in natural selection and impact everyone, but that they can be mitigated when acknowledged.

The UK Business Insider included Harris's podcast in their list of "8 podcasts that will change how you think about human behavior" in 2017, and PC Magazine included it in their list of "The Best Podcasts of 2018". In January 2020, Max Sanderson included Harris's podcast as a "Producer pick" in a "podcasts of the week" section for The Guardian. The Waking Up podcast won the 2017 Webby Award for "People's Voice" in the category "Science & Education" under "Podcasts & Digital Audio".

Harris was included on a list of the "100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People 2019" in the Watkins Review, a publication of Watkins Books, a London esoterica bookshop.

Personal life

In 2004, Harris married Annaka Gorton, an author and editor of nonfiction and scientific books after engaging in a common interest about the nature of consciousness. They have two daughters and live in Los Angeles.

In September 2020, Harris became a member of Giving What We Can, an effective altruism organization whose members pledge to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities, both as an individual and as a company with Waking Up.

Harris  practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Works

Books

Documentary

 Amila, D. & Shapiro, J. (2018). Islam and the Future of Tolerance. United States: The Orchard.

Peer-reviewed articles

Notes

References

External links

1967 births
21st-century American essayists
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American philosophers
21st-century atheists
21st-century American educators
21st-century social scientists
Action theorists
Activists from California
American atheism activists
American cognitive neuroscientists
American consciousness researchers and theorists
American critics of Islam
American ethicists
American male essayists
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Jewish descent
American podcasters
American practitioners of Brazilian jiu-jitsu
American psychedelic drug advocates
American science writers
American secularists
American skeptics
American social sciences writers
American spiritual writers
Analytic philosophers
Artificial intelligence ethicists
Artificial intelligence researchers
Atheist philosophers
California Democrats
Criticism of religion
Critics of alternative medicine
Critics of conspiracy theories
Critics of creationism
Critics of multiculturalism
Critics of postmodernism
Critics of religions
American critics of Christianity
Epistemologists
Free speech activists
Freethought writers
Living people
Metaphysics writers
Moral realists
New Atheism
People associated with effective altruism
Philosophers of love
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of psychology
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of technology
Race and intelligence controversy
Rationalists
Science activists
Stanford University alumni
Students of U Pandita
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about globalization
Writers about religion and science
Writers from Los Angeles

Sam Harris


Pyrenean Mastiff is a mastiff or livestock guardian-type dog that descends from the Great Pyrenees and the Spanish Mastiff.

Trivia: This dog is very fluffy. This dog does not descend from Newfoundland instead it descends from the Great Pyrenees and the Mastin Espanol (AKA Spanish Mastiff).

Dog breeds
FCI breeds

Pyrenean Mastiff


The Darling River hardyhead (Craterocephalus amniculus) is a species of fish in the family Atherinidae endemic to Australia.  The species name amniculus is from the Latin meaning a small creek or stream, in reference to the habitat where these fish are often found.

Craterocephalus amniculus is recorded to be vulnerable to becoming an endangered species because of its restricted range, but the threats and information regarding this recording have not been verified or documented.

Description
The Darling River hardyhead is a small, laterally compressed fish that has a slender and elongated body. The large eyes are silvery in colour and it has narrow lips with few teeth in the mouth. The back is a dusky gold colour while it is silvery gold below. There is a dark, silvery stripe that runs the length of the flanks.  They attain a maximum length of . This species has two small, dorsal fin which have short bases and with the second positioned directly over the anal fin. The caudal fin is forked and the pectoral fins are located high on the body while the anal fin has 5–8 rays. It has small scales that infrequently overlap and there is a count of 37–38 along the midlateral with a transverse count of 14–18 scales. Normally there are no scales on top of head, although sometimes small and circular may be present. The mouth is protractile but its gape is restricted by a ligament situated about a third of the way along the mouth.

Distribution
The Darling River hardyhead occurs in the northern section of the Murray-Darling basin where it inhabits the upper tributaries of the River Darling in the border area between Queensland and New South Wales. Within the Murray-Darlin basin this species has been recorded from the Condamine, Peel, Namoi, Macintyre and Cockburn rivers and in Boiling Down and Warialda Creeks. This is a disjunct distribution and the presence of Un-specked hardyheads seems to exclude this species. Where it does occur it is reported to be relatively common. In the catchment of the Hunter River the Darling River hardyhead occurs between .

Habitat and biology
The Darling River hardyhead occurs in slow-flowing, clear, shallow rivers and streams or among the aquatic vegetation at the margins of these waters. It will also occur in faster currents such as those that are found where a deeper pool drains. Their life history is almost unknown but small juvenile specimens have been collected in September. It has been reported to occur solitarily or in schools which can be formed of more than fifty fishes. In the Macintyre River, spawning seems to run from September to February. What is known is that they form pairs to spawn and after mating the females lay the eggs among aquatic vegetation.

Breeding and spawning occurs in the middle of summer.

They are omnivorous with the bulk of their diet consisting of algae and insect larvae but gastropods, small crustaceans, worms and the eggs of fish have all been recorded as being consumed by this species.

Conservation
The Darling River hardyhead is threatened by habitat degradation associated with agriculture and damaging factors include soil erosion, land clearance, the clearing of riverside vegetation, erosion of riverbanks caused by livestock, flood management and water abstraction. It is also threatened by introduced fish species such as mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), goldfish, common carp and rainbow trout, the latter often stocked.

Taxonomy
The Darling River hardyhead was previously misidentified as Craterocephalus eyresii and was not described until 1990 when Lucy Crowley and Walter Ivantsoff published a description of this species from a type locality of Cockburn River, Nemingha, New South Wales. The populations of similar hardyheads in the Hunter catchment have been provisionally assigned to this species but may, on further investigation, prove to be a different species.

References

Darling River hardyhead
Fish of the Murray-Darling basin
Vulnerable fauna of Australia
Darling River hardyhead
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot

Darling River hardyhead


The Democratic July 14 Movement (, translit. harakat 14 tammuz ad-dimoqratia) was a front of Iraqi political forces, a broad unity opposing Ba'athist rule over Iraq. It emerged through the cooperation between the Iraqi Communist Party-Central Command leader Najim Mahmud (in exile in Paris), Colonel Salim al-Fakhri and others. The name 'July 14' referred to the July 14 Revolution of 1958. Al-Fakhri had been an important associate of Abd al-Karim Qasim and had been proposed as Prime Minister by the plotters of the failed Ar-Rashid revolt. The movement claimed to represent the genuine legacy of July 14, 1958 from which, according to the organization, Qasim and his military associates had deviated from.

In November 1979 the Supreme National Committee of the Democratic July 14 Movement published a manifesto in Baghdad, titled 'A Project for a National Pact'. The manifesto called for the overthrow of the Ba'athist government, right of self-determination of the Kurds through the possibility of a referendum, democratizing the Iraqi Armed Forces, economic and eventually political integration of the Arab states and re-orientation of the national oil policy.

The Democratic July 14 Movement proved short-lived, as differences erupted between its leaders. Al-Fakhri projected himself as the main leader of the movement, in contradiction to the agreed principle of collective leadership. In July 1980 he held separate negotiations with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani, for the construction of an Iraqi national front against Saddam Hussein's rule. Other constituents of the Democratic July 14 Movement questioned al-Fakhri on what mandate these negotiations had been taken place. By early 1981, the movement had broken apart and ceased to function.

See also
Al-Ansar (Iraq)
Ba'athist Iraq
Iraqi Communist Party
Iraqi National Congress

References

Arab nationalism in Iraq
Communism in Iraq
Defunct political party alliances in Iraq
Iraqi democracy movements
Kurdistan independence movement
Pan-Arabist organizations
Popular fronts

Democratic July 14 Movement


The Rockaway Beach Hotel, also known as the Hotel Imperial, was a very large hotel built in Rockaway, Queens, New York City during the late 1870s and early 1880s by the Rockaway Improvement Company. The hotel, promoted as the "biggest hotel in the world", ran along the Rockaway beachfront from the present-day Beach 110th Street to Beach 116th Street, thus locating it in the contemporary Rockaway Park neighborhood rather than Rockaway Beach as the name implies.

The hotel, the product of an age of superlatives which also produced the Brooklyn Bridge, was 1184 feet (360.9m) long and 250 feet (76.2m) wide. Construction of the hotel was beset by labor difficulties and lack of capital; a railroad station opened in front of the hotel on August 26, 1880, but, except for one wing which was pressed into service for the summer of 1881, the hotel, although construction was completed, never actually opened for business. It was torn down for its lumber in 1889.

The name "Rockaway Beach Hotel" has been used for at least two smaller hotels since the original's demolition.

Sources
Vincent Seyfried and William Asadorian, Old Rockaway, New York, in Early Photographs, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 2000.
Vincent F. Seyfried, The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part Five, published by the author, Garden City, Long Island, 1966.

1881 establishments in New York (state)
1889 disestablishments in New York (state)
Hotel buildings completed in 1881
Hotels in Queens, New York
Rockaway, Queens
Demolished hotels in New York City
Hotels established in 1881
Railway hotels in the United States

Rockaway Beach Hotel


Regicide is the purposeful killing of a monarch or sovereign of a polity and is often associated with the usurpation of power. A regicide can also be the person responsible for the killing. The word comes from the Latin roots of regis and cida (cidium), meaning "of monarch" and "killer" respectively.

In the British tradition, it refers to the judicial execution of a king after a trial, reflecting the historical precedent of the trial and execution of Charles I of England. The concept of regicide has also been explored in media and the arts through pieces like Macbeth (Macbeth's killing of King Duncan) and The Lion King.

History
In Western Christianity, regicide was far more common prior to 1200/1300. Sverre Bagge counts 20 cases of regicide between 1200 and 1800, which means that 6% of monarchs were killed by their subjects. He counts 94 cases of regicide between 600 and 1200, which means that 21.8% of monarchs were killed by their subjects. He argues that the most likely reasons for the decline in regicide is that clear rules of succession were established, which made it hard to remove rightful heirs to the throne, and only made it so that the nearest heir (and their backers) had a motive to kill the monarch.

There is evidence that regicide and the ability of states to keep or even expand their territories are negative correlated: Firstly, elite violence hindered the development of territorial state capacity, and the killing of rulers also directly resulted in a more likely loss of territory. And secondly, state capacity, reflected by territorial state capacity, could be hypothesized to have had a restraining effect on interpersonal violence. This would be consistent with Pinker's (2011) view that modern state capacity leads to a reduction in violence, both interpersonal and in terms of military conflict.

Britain
Before the Tudor period, English kings had been murdered while imprisoned (for example Edward II and Edward V) or killed in battle by their subjects (for example Richard III), but none of these deaths are usually referred to as regicide.

Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
The word regicide seems to have come into popular use among continental Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against the "crowned regicide" Queen Elizabeth I, for—among other things—executing Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587, although she had abdicated the Scottish crown some 20 years earlier. Elizabeth had originally been excommunicated by Pope Pius V, in Regnans in Excelsis, for converting England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England.

Execution of Charles I of England

After the First English Civil War, King Charles I was a prisoner of the Parliamentarians. They tried to negotiate a compromise with him, but he stuck steadfastly to his view that he was King by divine right and attempted in secret to raise an army to fight against them. It became obvious to the leaders of the Parliamentarians that they could not negotiate a settlement with him and they could not trust him to refrain from raising an army against them; they reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to be put to death. On 13 December 1648, the House of Commons broke off negotiations with the King. Two days later, the Council of Officers of the New Model Army voted that the King be moved from the Isle of Wight, where he was prisoner, to Windsor "in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice". Then in the middle of December, the King was moved from Windsor to St James's Palace, Westminster. The House of Commons of the Rump Parliament passed a Bill setting up a High Court of Justice in order to try Charles I for high treason 'in the name of the people of England.'  From a Royalist and post-restoration perspective, this Bill was not lawful, as the House of Lords refused to pass it and it predictably failed to receive the Royal Assent. However, the Parliamentary leaders and the Army pressed on with the trial anyway.

At his trial in the High Court of Justice on Saturday 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall, Charles asked "I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful". In view of the historic issues involved, both sides based themselves on surprisingly technical legal grounds.  Charles did not dispute that Parliament as a whole did have some judicial powers, but he maintained that the House of Commons on its own could not try anybody, and so he refused to plead.  At that time under English law, if a prisoner refused to plead, he would be treated identically to one who had pleaded guilty. This has since changed; a refusal to plead is now interpreted as a not-guilty plea.

Charles was found guilty on Saturday 27 January 1649, and his death warrant was signed by fifty-nine commissioners. To show their agreement with the sentence of death, all of the Commissioners who were present rose to their feet.

On the day of his execution, 30 January 1649, Charles dressed in two shirts so that he would not shiver from the cold, lest it be said that he was shivering from fear. His execution was delayed by several hours so that the House of Commons could pass an emergency bill to make it an offence to proclaim a new King, and to declare the representatives of the people, the House of Commons, as the source of all just power. Charles was then escorted through a window of the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall to an outdoor scaffold where he would be beheaded. He forgave those who had passed sentence on him and gave instructions to his enemies that they should learn to "know their duty to God, the King – that is, my successors – and the people". He then gave a brief speech outlining his unchanged views of the relationship between the monarchy and the monarch's subjects, ending with the words "I am the martyr of the people". His head was severed from his body with one blow.

One week later, the Rump, sitting in the House of Commons, passed a bill abolishing the monarchy. Ardent Royalists refused to accept it on the basis that there could never be a vacancy of the Crown. Others refused because, as the bill had not passed the House of Lords and did not have Royal Assent, it could not become an Act of Parliament.

The Declaration of Breda eleven years later paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. At the time of the restoration, thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living.  Parliament, with the assent of the new king, Charles II, enacted the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, giving a general pardon to those who had committed crimes during the civil war and interregnum, but the regicides were among those excluded from it.  A number fled. Some, such as Daniel Blagrave, fled to continental Europe, while others like John Dixwell, Edward Whalley, and William Goffe fled to New Haven, Connecticut. Those regicides who could be found and arrested were put on trial. Six were found guilty and suffered the fate of being hanged, drawn and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, and Gregory Clement. The captain of the guard at the trial, Daniel Axtell, who encouraged his men to barrack the King when he tried to speak in his own defence, an influential preacher, Hugh Peters, and the leading prosecutor at the trial, John Cook, were executed in a similar manner. Colonel Francis Hacker, who signed the order to the executioner of the king and commanded the guard around the scaffold and at the trial, was hanged. Concern amongst the royal ministers over the negative impact on popular sentiment of these public tortures and executions led to jail sentences being substituted for the remaining regicides.

Some regicides, such as Richard Ingoldsby and Philip Nye, were conditionally pardoned, while a further nineteen served life imprisonment. The bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, which had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were disinterred and hanged, drawn and quartered in posthumous executions. In 1662, three more regicides, John Okey, John Barkstead and Miles Corbet, were also hanged, drawn and quartered. The officers of the court that tried Charles I, those who prosecuted him, and those who signed his death warrant, have been known ever since the restoration as regicides.

The Parliamentary Archives in the Palace of Westminster, London, holds the original death warrant for Charles I.

Britain, 1760–1850
Some people throughout in the 1760–1850 period in England and Great Britain who have been suspected, arrested, and perhaps punished for trying to lethally harm the reigning monarch, which has sometimes been understood to be attempted "regicide", do not appear to have had the intention of actually killing the king or queen. According to Poole (2000), the actions and utterances of English figures such as Nicholson, Firth, Sutherland, Hadfield, Collins, Oxford, Francis and Bean, all of whom tried to get the monarch's attention for some matter, "point more often to physical remonstance after experiences of extreme frustration with an ineffectual petitioning process." Others who did try to kill the ruler did so not in order to replace the monarchy with a republic, but because they hoped that their successor would be a better ruler, and able to address certain issues which, in the would-be assassins' views, the current sovereign failed to properly act on. According to British radical orator John Thelwall (1764–1834), regicide was simply a means of replacing an unacceptable monarch with a better one.

France
On 25 June 1836, a Frenchman named Alibaud attempted to assassinate the "July Monarch" Louis Philippe I by shooting him. At trial, Alibaud held the king responsible for the economic ruin of his family, compared himself to Marcus Junius Brutus (most well known amongst the assassins of Julius Caesar), and stated: "Regicide is the right of all men who are debarred from any justice but that which they take into their own hands." He was executed by guillotine.

Mexico
The separate 19th century executions of two of Mexico's emperors were carried out by Republicans.

After the abolishment of the First Mexican Empire, Agustin I was first exiled and on 11 May 1823, the ex-emperor boarded the British ship Rawlins en route to Livorno, Italy (then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), accompanied by his wife, children, and some servants. After Conservative political factions in Mexico finally convinced Iturbide to return, and unaware of the consequences of a law aimed solely at him, he was taken prisoner by a general he had himself pardoned as emperor. He was executed by firing squad on 19 July 1824. The aftermath of his execution was met with indignation by Mexican royalists. The sentiment of those horrified by the execution was compiled by novelist Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari in "El cadalso de Padilla:" "Done is the dark crime, for which we will doubtlessly be called Parricides."

Later, after the downfall of the Second Mexican Empire, which saw the reign of Maximilian I of Mexico—a member of the House of Habsburg, which had previously ruled Mexico as New Spain from the 16th to 18th century— the Republican forces of Benito Juarez, with aid from the U.S. and sabotage by Colonel Miguel López, captured and executed him on 19 June 1867. Emperor Maximilian's last words were "…May my blood which is about to be spilled end the bloodshed which has been experienced in my new motherland. Long live Mexico! Long live its independence!".

Portugal

Iraq

On July 14, 1958, at least four members of the ruling Hashemite family (including the King and the Crown Prince) of the Kingdom of Iraq were killed by revolutionaries of the Nationalist Officers' Organization under the command of Abdul Salam Arif.

Italy
King Umberto I was assassinated by Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci on the evening of 29 July 1900 in Monza.  Bresci claimed he wanted to avenge the people killed in Milan in the course of the Bava Beccaris massacre.

Usurpation

Regicide has particular resonance within the concept of the divine right of kings, whereby monarchs were presumed by decision of God to have a divinely anointed authority to rule. As such, an attack on a king by one of his own subjects was taken to amount to a direct challenge to the monarch, to his divine right to rule, and thus to God's will.

The biblical David refused to harm King Saul, because he was the Lord's anointed, even though Saul was seeking his life; and when Saul eventually was killed in battle and a person reported to David that he helped kill Saul, David put the man to death, even though Saul had been his enemy, because he had raised his hands against the Lord's anointed. Christian concepts of the inviolability of the person of the monarch have great influence from this story. Diarmait mac Cerbaill, King of Tara (mentioned above), was killed by Áed Dub mac Suibni in 565. According to Adomnan of Iona's Life of St Columba, Áed Dub mac Suibni received God's punishment for this crime by being impaled by a treacherous spear many years later and then falling from his ship into a lake and drowning.

Even after the disappearance of the divine right of kings and the appearance of constitutional monarchies, the term continued and continues to be used to describe the murder of a king.

In France, the judicial penalty for regicides (i.e. those who had murdered, or attempted to murder, the king) was especially hard, even in regard to the harsh judicial practices of pre-revolutionary France. As with many criminals, the regicide was tortured so as to make him tell the names of his accomplices. However, the method of execution itself was a form of torture. Here is a description of the death of Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to kill Louis XV:

In Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault cites this case of Damiens the Regicide as an example of disproportionate punishment in the era preceding the "Age of Reason".  The classical school of criminology asserts that the punishment "should fit the crime", and should thus be proportionate and not extreme.  This approach was spoofed by Gilbert and Sullivan, when The Mikado sang, "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime".

In common with earlier executions for regicides:
 the hand that attempted the murder is burnt
 the regicide is dismembered alive

In both the François Ravaillac and the Damiens cases, court papers refer to the offenders as a patricide, rather than as regicide, which lets one deduce that, through divine right, the king was also regarded as "Father of the country".

See also
 List of regicides
 Fifth Monarchists saw the overthrow of Charles I as a divine sign of the second coming of Jesus.
 Society of King Charles the Martyr
 Monarchomachs
 Fratricide (killing one's brother)
 Matricide (killing one's mother)
 Patricide (killing of one's father)
 Sororicide (killing one's sister)
 Tyrannicide (killing of a tyrant)

Notes

References

Further reading
 David Lagomarsino, Charles T. Wood (Editor) The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History Pub: Dartmouth College, (1989),
 Geoffrey Robertson The Tyrannicide Brief, Pub: Random House, (2005),

External links

Monarchy

Murder
Treason
Killings by type

Regicide