{
        "Adele": {
            "knowledge": "Adele, (born May 5, 1988, Tottenham, London, England), English pop singer and songwriter whose soulful emotive voice and traditionally crafted songs made her one of the most broadly popular performers of her generation. Adkins was raised by a young single mother in various working-class neighbourhoods of London. As a child, she enjoyed singing contemporary pop music and learned to play the guitar and the clarinet. However, it was not until her early teens, when she discovered rhythm-and-blues singer Etta James and other mid-20th-century performers, that she began to consider a musical career. While she honed her talents at a government-funded secondary school for the performing arts, a friend began posting songs Adkins had written and recorded onto the social networking Web site Myspace. Her music eventually caught the attention of record labels, and in 2006, several months after graduating, she signed a contract with XL Recordings.After building anticipation in Britain with some well-received live performances, Adele (as she now billed herself) released her first album, 19, in 2008. (The title referred to the age at which she penned most of the tracks.) The recording debuted at number one on the British album chart, and critics praised Adele’s supple phrasing, her tasteful arrangements, and her ability to channel her intimate emotional experiences (especially with heartbreak) into songs that had wide resonance. She also earned comparisons to Amy Winehouse, another young British singer conspicuously influenced by soul music. (For many fans, however, Adele’s zaftig figure and down-to-earth persona made her the more-relatable star.) A performance on the television program Saturday Night Live helped introduce Adele to American audiences, and in early 2009 she won Grammy Awards for best new artist and best female pop vocal performance (for the lush bluesy song “Chasing Pavements”). For her next album, Adele enlisted a number of songwriters and producers, including Rick Rubin, to collaborate with her. The result, 21 (2011), was a bolder and more stylistically diverse set of material, with singles ranging from the earthy gospel- and disco-inflected “Rolling in the Deep” to the affecting breakup ballad “Someone like You.” Both songs hit number one in multiple countries, and, despite a vocal-cord ailment that forced Adele to cancel numerous tour dates in 2011, the album became the biggest-selling release of the year in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Additionally, with worldwide sales of more than 20 million copies by mid-2012, it was credited with helping revive the flagging recording industry. Following successful throat surgery, Adele performed at the 2012 Grammy Awards ceremony. She also collected six Grammy trophies, including those for album, record, and song of the year (the latter two honoured “Rolling in the Deep”). Days later she received two Brit Awards (the British equivalent of the Grammys). The sales spike for 21 after both events further confirmed the singer’s emergence as a commercial juggernaut. In 2013 Adele won the Grammy for best pop solo performance for “Set Fire to the Rain,” from her concert album Live at the Royal Albert Hall (2011), and she picked up an Academy Award for the brassy theme song she provided for the blockbuster James Bond movie Skyfall (2012). Later that year she was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). Adele returned in 2015 with the album 25. Although some critics felt it did not take enough risks, Adele’s voice was no less powerful, and her ability to sell records remained undiminished. The yearning single “Hello” became a hit in numerous countries, and more than 20 million copies of the album were sold worldwide. In addition, 25 earned Adele five more Grammys, including another sweep of the top categories (album, song, and record of the year). In 2021 the singer released her fourth studio album, 30. The emotionally candid work—many of the songs deal with her divorce and its aftermath—was widely acclaimed, and the single “Easy on Me” won the Grammy for best pop solo performance.",
            "gender":"F"
        },
        "Barack Obama": {
            "knowledge": "Obama, (born August 4, 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.), 44th president of the United States (2009–17) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (2005–08). He was the third African American to be elected to that body since the end of Reconstruction (1877). In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural Kenya, won a scholarship to study in the United States, and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Obama’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii and married less than a year later. When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at Harvard University; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.) Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a government-run school where he received some instruction in Islam and a Catholic private school where he took part in Christian schooling. He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad again—partly to pursue work on a Ph.D.—before divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu. Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on Chicago’s largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992. After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became active in the Democratic Party. He organized Project Vote, a drive that registered tens of thousands of African Americans on voting rolls and that is credited with helping Democrat Bill Clinton win Illinois and capture the presidency in 1992. The effort also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois state legislator, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. During this period, Obama wrote his first book and saw it published. The memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), is the story of Obama’s search for his biracial identity by tracing the lives of his now-deceased father and his extended family in Kenya. Obama lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights issues. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, where, most notably, he helped pass legislation that tightened campaign finance regulations, expanded health care to poor families, and reformed criminal justice and welfare laws. In 2004 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican Alan Keyes in the first U.S. Senate race in which the two leading candidates were African Americans. While campaigning for the U.S. Senate, Obama gained national recognition by delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. The speech wove a personal narrative of Obama’s biography with the theme that all Americans are connected in ways that transcend political, cultural, and geographical differences. The address lifted Obama’s once obscure memoir onto best-seller lists, and, after taking office the following year, Obama quickly became a major figure in his party. A trip to visit his father’s home in Kenya in August 2006 gained international media attention, and Obama’s star continued ascending. His second book, The Audacity of Hope (2006), a mainstream polemic on his vision for the United States, was published weeks later, instantly becoming a major best seller. In February 2007 he announced at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had served as a state legislator, that he would seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008. (For coverage of the 2008 election, see United States Presidential Election of 2008.)Obama’s personal charisma, stirring oratory, and his campaign promise to bring change to the established political system resonated with many Democrats, especially young and minority voters. On January 3, 2008, Obama won a surprise victory in the first major nominating contest, the Iowa caucus, over Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the overwhelming favourite to win the nomination. Five days later, however, Obama finished second to Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, and a bruising—and sometimes bitter—primary race ensued. Obama won more than a dozen states—including Illinois, his home state, and Missouri, a traditional political bellwether—on Super Tuesday, February 5. No clear front-runner for the nomination emerged, however, as Clinton won many states with large populations, such as California and New York. Obama produced an impressive string of victories later in the month, handily winning the 11 primaries and caucuses that immediately followed Super Tuesday, which gave him a significant lead in pledged delegates. His momentum slowed in early March when Clinton won significant victories in Ohio and Texas. Though still maintaining his edge in delegates, Obama lost the key Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Two weeks later he lost a close contest in Indiana but won the North Carolina primary by a large margin, widening his delegate lead over Clinton. She initially had a big lead in so-called superdelegates (Democratic Party officials allocated votes at the convention that were unaffiliated with state primary results), but, with Obama winning more states and actual delegates, many peeled away from her and went to Obama. On June 3, following the final primaries in Montana and South Dakota, the number of delegates pledged to Obama surpassed the total necessary to claim the Democratic nomination. On August 27 Obama became the first African American to be nominated for the presidency by either major party and went on to challenge Republican Sen. John McCain for the country’s highest office. McCain criticized Obama, still a first-term senator, as being too inexperienced for the job. To counter, Obama selected Joe Biden, a veteran senator from Delaware who had a long resume of foreign policy expertise, to be his vice presidential running mate. Obama and McCain waged a fierce and expensive contest. Obama, still bolstered by a fever of popular support, eschewed federal financing of his campaign and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it coming in small donations and over the Internet from a record number of donors. Obama’s fund-raising advantage helped him buy massive amounts of television advertising and organize deep grassroots organizations in key battleground states and in states that had voted Republican in previous presidential cycles. The two candidates offered a stark ideological choice for voters. Obama called for a swift withdrawal of most combat forces from Iraq and a restructuring of tax policy that would bring more relief to lower- and middle-class voters, while McCain said the United States must wait for full victory in Iraq and charged that Obama’s rhetoric was long on eloquence but short on substance. Just weeks before election day, Obama’s campaign seized on the economic meltdown that had resulted from the catastrophic failure of U.S. banks and financial institutions in September, calling it a result of the Republican free-market-driven policies of the eight-year administration of George W. Bush. Obama won the election, capturing nearly 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Not only did he hold all the states that John Kerry had won in the 2004 election, but he also captured a number of states (e.g., Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia) that the Republicans had carried in the previous two presidential elections. On election night tens of thousands gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to see Obama claim victory. Shortly after his win, Obama resigned from the Senate. On January 20, 2009, hundreds of thousands turned out in Washington, D.C., to witness Obama taking the oath of office as president. In an effort to improve the image of the United States abroad—which many believed had been much damaged during the Bush administration—Obama took a number of steps that indicated a significant shift in tone. He signed an executive order that banned excessive interrogation techniques; ordered the closing of the controversial military detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year (a deadline that was not met); proposed a “fresh start” to strained relations with Russia; and traveled to Cairo in June 2009 to deliver a historic speech in which he reached out to the Muslim world. Largely as a result of these efforts, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet some left-wing critics complained that he actually had adopted and even escalated most of the war and national security policies of his predecessor. Indeed, when Obama accepted the Nobel Prize in December, he said, “Evil does exist in the world” and “there will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” Notwithstanding that tough talk, there were others who criticized Obama for issuing only a mild condemnation of the Iranian government’s crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents following a disputed election in June 2009. Moreover, the Obama administration’s handling of national security was questioned by some when a Nigerian terrorist trained in Yemen was thwarted in an attempt to bomb an airliner headed for Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. After enjoying soaring popularity early in his term, Obama became the target of increasing criticism, largely due to the slow pace of economic recovery and continued high unemployment rates but also because of widespread opposition to Democratic efforts to reform health care insurance policy, the signature issue of the Obama presidential campaign. Obama had entered office promising to bring an end to partisan squabbling and legislative gridlock, yet, in the wake of the failure to obtain any real bipartisan cooperation, congressional Democrats, according to Republicans, had settled into governing without substantive Republican involvement. Republicans, on the other hand, according to Democrats, had become the “Party of No,” seeking to obstruct Democratic legislative initiatives without offering real alternative proposals. It was in this highly polarized environment that Obama and the Democrats attempted to enact health care insurance reform. Health care reform, popular with Americans during the election, became less so as legislators presented the proposed changes to their constituents in town hall meetings in summer 2009 that sometimes erupted into shouting matches between those with opposing viewpoints. It was at this time that the populist Tea Party movement, comprising libertarian-minded conservatives, emerged in opposition to the Democratic health care proposals but more generally in opposition to what they saw as excessive taxes and government involvement in the private sector. Republicans across the board complained that Democratic proposals constituted a “government takeover” of health care that would prove too costly and mortgage the future of generations to come. Their opposition to the Democratic plans was virtually lockstep. In many respects the president left the initiative for health care reform in the hands of congressional leaders. House Democrats responded in November 2009 by passing a bill that called for sweeping reform, including the creation of a “public option,” a lower-cost government-run program that would act as competition for private insurance companies. The Senate was more deliberate in its consideration. Obama seemed to let conservative Democrat Sen. Max Baucus take the lead in that body at the head of the “Group of Six,” comprising three Republican and three Democratic senators. The resulting bill that was passed by the Senate—holding the allegiance of all 58 Democrats plus independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, it barely survived a filibuster attempt by Republicans—proved to provide far fewer changes than its House counterpart, most notably leaving out the public option. Before a compromise could be reached on the two bills, the triumph of Republican Scott Brown in a special election for the seat formerly held by Sen. Ted Kennedy destroyed the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Many Democrats believed this meant that they would have to start over, as Republicans had been demanding. Obama and other Democratic leaders, especially Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, thought otherwise and continued to push for passage. Obama went on the offensive, skillfully moderating a nationally telecast summit of Republicans and Democrats at which the pros and cons of the Democratic proposals were debated. He also took his case outside the Beltway, in speech after speech, emphasizing the message that health care was a right and not a privilege and increasingly sharpening his criticism of the insurance industry. In March 2010, in an attempt to win the support of Democrats in the House who opposed the legislation because they felt it would weaken limitations on abortion funding, Obama promised to sign an executive order guaranteeing that it would not. With that crucial group on board, Pelosi confidently brought the Senate bill to the House floor for a special vote on Sunday night March 21. The bill passed 219–212 (34 Democrats and all the Republicans voted against it) and was followed by passage of a second bill that proposed “fixes” for the Senate bill. Democrats planned to employ the relatively infrequently used procedure known as reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority for passage, to get these fixes through the Senate. Speaking on television shortly after the House vote, Obama told the country, “This is what change looks like.” On March 23 Obama signed the bill into law. Senate Republican efforts to force another House vote on the bill of proposed fixes included the introduction of more than 40 amendments that were voted down along party lines. Ultimately, on March 25, the Senate voted 56–43 to pass the bill, which, because of procedural violations in some of its language, had to be returned to the House, where it passed again by a vote of 220–207. No Republicans in either house voted for the bill. The legislation would, once all its elements had taken effect over the next four years, prohibit denial of coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions and extend health care to some 30 million previously uninsured Americans. The bill made the attainment of health care insurance mandatory for all citizens, but it also called for a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans that would largely bankroll subsidies for premium payments for families earning less than $88,000 per year. Moreover, the bill promised a tax credit to small businesses that provide coverage for their employees. In some corners the bill was considered an unconstitutional “government takeover” of an industry representing one-sixth of the economy, and in others it was hailed as legislation as monumental as that which had come out of the civil rights movement. Responding to the economic crisis that had emerged in 2008 and prompted a rescue of the financial industry with up to $700 billion in government funds (see Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008), Obama—aided by large Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives—pushed through Congress a $787 billion stimulus package. By the third quarter of 2009 the plan had succeeded in reversing the dramatic decline in GDP, resulting in 2.2 percent positive growth on a per annum basis. Unemployment, however, had also risen, from 7.2 percent when Obama entered office to about 10 percent. And Republicans complained that the stimulus package cost too much, having swelled the federal deficit to $1.42 trillion. Still, it appeared that the U.S. economy was recovering, albeit slowly. The president could proudly point to the dramatic turnaround of General Motors: in June 2009 GM had lapsed into bankruptcy, necessitating a $60 billion government rescue and takeover of about three-fifths of its stock, but by May 2010 the auto manufacturer, employing a new business plan, had shown its first profit in three years. Obama looked forward to “Recovery Summer,” anticipating the payoff of the massive federal investment in infrastructure-improvement programs aimed at creating jobs and stimulating the economy. But as the summer of 2010 progressed, the prospects for the economy seemed to dim as unemployment stagnated (partly because of the demise of temporary jobs tied to the decennial census). Some economists feared that a second recessionary trough was approaching, while others argued that the stimulus package had been insufficient. Obama was able to claim another major legislative victory, however, in July, when Congress passed (60–39 in the Senate and 237–192 in the House) the most sweeping financial regulation since the New Deal. Among other statutes, the bill established a financial consumer-protection bureau within the Federal Reserve, empowered the government to take over and shut down large troubled financial firms, created a council of federal regulators to monitor the financial system, and subjected derivatives—the complex financial instruments that were partly responsible for the financial crisis—to government oversight. The spring and summer of 2010 would be remembered more, though, for a massive oil spill that dragged on for months in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest marine oil spill in history (see Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010). The disaster began with an explosion and fire that killed 11 workers and led to the collapse and sinking on April 22 of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform some 40 miles (60 km) off the coast of Louisiana. The resulting oil spill endangered marine life, fouled beaches, and brought a halt to fishing in a huge area. The Obama administration’s efforts to address the spill were criticized by some as ineffectual, as most Americans felt helpless in the face of the largely futile ongoing efforts by BP, the well’s owner, to staunch the spill. Ironically, in a policy shift just weeks before the spill, the president had proposed ending a long-standing ban on offshore oil exploration from northern Delaware to central Florida as well as in some other locations. In the spill’s wake, however, the Interior Department instituted a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling that included halting operations at more than 30 existing exploratory wells. Before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was finally contained and the well capped in July 2010, it was estimated that some 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released into the water. In happier news for the president, August 2010 marked the Senate confirmation of his second Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been confirmed in July 2009. For all of Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with much of the world, he—like George W. Bush—was a wartime president. With the situation in Iraq continuing to improve and the target date for ending U.S. combat operations there approaching, in February 2009 Obama increased the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops. Throughout his presidential campaign he had argued that the focus of U.S. military efforts should be in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, and, with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the military requested that Obama deploy an additional 40,000 troops there. After carefully weighing the situation for three months, Obama choose to send an additional 30,000 troops, a decision that was criticized by many in his party. In June 2010, as the Afghanistan War rivaled the Vietnam War as the longest in U.S. history and as American war deaths there topped the 1,000 mark, the president was faced with another challenge when Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO-U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and members of his staff made derisive comments about top Obama administration officials to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. Obama relieved McChrystal of command, replacing him with Gen. David Petraeus, who had been responsible for the surge strategy in Iraq. In August, on schedule, the U.S. combat mission in Iraq came to a close; though 50,000 American troops remained, the majority of U.S. forces had been withdrawn. In a televised national address marking the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Obama stressed the importance of American and NATO efforts in Afghanistan even as corruption continued to undermine the faith of the Afghan people in their government. Many columnists and political cartoonists were quick to see parallels between the potential pitfalls prolonged involvement in Afghanistan held for Obama’s ambitious plans for social legislation and the way in which the Vietnam War had undermined Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to build the Great Society. With the prospect of double-dip recession looming in summer 2010, some said Obama had been too preoccupied with the wars to give the economy the needed attention. In the run-up to the fall’s midterm congressional election, Obama found himself snagged in controversy over whether an Islamic centre and mosque should be built in New York City near the site of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Initially the president reacted by strongly supporting the constitutional right of Muslim Americans to freedom of religious expression, but then he seemed to waffle regarding the location of the mosque. All this came at a time when polling showed that nearly one-fifth of Americans incorrectly believed that Obama was Muslim, up from about one-tenth a year earlier. As Americans headed into the midterm election of 2010, much of the electorate was characterized as angry and pessimistic. The struggling economy and a persistent high level of unemployment were the central issues in an election that was widely viewed as a referendum on the first two years of Obama’s presidency. In the weeks before the election, Obama campaigned hard for Democratic candidates and sought to convince voters of the importance of his administration’s accomplishments, including staving off what some economists believed was a potential economic depression. He also emphasized that the change he had promised as a presidential candidate, as well as the Democratic Congress’s efforts to stimulate the economy, would take time. In the event, many of the independents who had supported Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 election swung back to the Republicans, and voters returned control of the House to the Republicans, who gained some 60 seats (the biggest swing since 1948). Although the Democrats held on to control of the Senate, their majority was severely reduced. Chastened but unbowed by the election results, Obama approached the second half of his term and the challenges of divided government with a renewed call for bipartisanship. With only weeks remaining in the congressional term, Obama and the administration aggressively courted Republicans with compromise proposals that resulted in a flurry of significant legislation that marked the lame-duck Congress as one of the most productive bodies in recent memory and that brought a rebound to the president’s popularity. Breaking a campaign pledge, Obama agreed to extend to all Americans (including the wealthiest) for another two years the tax cuts that had been enacted under the Bush administration. In return Republicans voted to extend unemployment benefits. In addition Congress rescinded the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces (fulfilling one of Obama’s campaign promises). Congress passed legislation that increased the number of children served by the school lunch program and improved the quality of food to be provided. And Congress extended medical benefits and compensation for the rescue workers who had responded to the September 11 attacks. Moreover, the Senate ratified a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty with Russia—one of the administration’s top foreign policy goals. On the other hand, a Republican filibuster in the Senate stalled the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have granted eventual citizenship to aliens brought to the United States when they were age 16 or younger. But even as gridlock was at least temporarily dislodged and partisanship eased during the season of legislative success, the debate over the vehemence of political polarization was quickly again at the centre of the national conversation when, on January 8, 2011, a gunman killed six people and critically wounded Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as she met with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords, a moderate Democrat who had voted to support the health care bill, had already had her office vandalized and had experienced an aggressive challenge to her seat from a Republican candidate who was backed by Tea Party supporters. She survived the gunman’s attack. In a well-received speech at a memorial for the victims in Tucson, Obama called for civility in American politics and public discourse and for discussions that heal instead of harm. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame,” he said, “let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” The year 2011 brought a series of world-shaking changes to the Middle East, where popular political uprisings resulted in abrupt ends to longtime authoritarian regimes in Tunisia (see Jasmine Revolution)and Egypt (see Egypt Uprising of 2011) and widespread demonstrations and conflict in other countries in the region. The Obama administration sought to carefully articulate its support for the demonstrators’ democratic aspirations, balancing past commitments to some of the threatened regimes with the U.S. advocacy of free representative government. Moreover, Obama attempted to take a role in world leadership without direct intervention in the affairs of other countries. In Libya, where the political revolt against the four-decade rule of Muammar al-Qaddafi transformed effectively into a civil war (see Libya Revolt of 2011), however, Obama felt U.S. intervention was necessary to prevent a humanitarian disaster as Qaddafi employed his overwhelming military advantage in a brutal attempt to expunge opposition. On March 19, U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking targets in Libya in an effort to disable Libya’s air force and air defense systems. After initially taking a leading role in these operations, the Obama administration relinquished command to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on March 27. On April 4, Obama officially announced that he would seek reelection. Less than a month later, on May 1, the president made a dramatic late-night Sunday television address to inform the world that U.S. special forces had killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a firefight in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, not far from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. (U.S. forces took custody of the body, which they buried at sea, and confirmed bin Laden’s identity through DNA testing.) “Justice has been done,” Obama said. “Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.” For all of Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with much of the world, he—like George W. Bush—was a wartime president. With the situation in Iraq continuing to improve and the target date for ending U.S. combat operations there approaching, in February 2009 Obama increased the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops. Throughout his presidential campaign he had argued that the focus of U.S. military efforts should be in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, and, with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the military requested that Obama deploy an additional 40,000 troops there. After carefully weighing the situation for three months, Obama choose to send an additional 30,000 troops, a decision that was criticized by many in his party. In June 2010, as the Afghanistan War rivaled the Vietnam War as the longest in U.S. history and as American war deaths there topped the 1,000 mark, the president was faced with another challenge when Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO-U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and members of his staff made derisive comments about top Obama administration officials to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. Obama relieved McChrystal of command, replacing him with Gen. David Petraeus, who had been responsible for the surge strategy in Iraq. In August, on schedule, the U.S. combat mission in Iraq came to a close; though 50,000 American troops remained, the majority of U.S. forces had been withdrawn. In a televised national address marking the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Obama stressed the importance of American and NATO efforts in Afghanistan even as corruption continued to undermine the faith of the Afghan people in their government. Many columnists and political cartoonists were quick to see parallels between the potential pitfalls prolonged involvement in Afghanistan held for Obama’s ambitious plans for social legislation and the way in which the Vietnam War had undermined Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to build the Great Society. With the prospect of double-dip recession looming in summer 2010, some said Obama had been too preoccupied with the wars to give the economy the needed attention. In the run-up to the fall’s midterm congressional election, Obama found himself snagged in controversy over whether an Islamic centre and mosque should be built in New York City near the site of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Initially the president reacted by strongly supporting the constitutional right of Muslim Americans to freedom of religious expression, but then he seemed to waffle regarding the location of the mosque. All this came at a time when polling showed that nearly one-fifth of Americans incorrectly believed that Obama was Muslim, up from about one-tenth a year earlier. As Americans headed into the midterm election of 2010, much of the electorate was characterized as angry and pessimistic. The struggling economy and a persistent high level of unemployment were the central issues in an election that was widely viewed as a referendum on the first two years of Obama’s presidency. In the weeks before the election, Obama campaigned hard for Democratic candidates and sought to convince voters of the importance of his administration’s accomplishments, including staving off what some economists believed was a potential economic depression. He also emphasized that the change he had promised as a presidential candidate, as well as the Democratic Congress’s efforts to stimulate the economy, would take time. In the event, many of the independents who had supported Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 election swung back to the Republicans, and voters returned control of the House to the Republicans, who gained some 60 seats (the biggest swing since 1948). Although the Democrats held on to control of the Senate, their majority was severely reduced. Chastened but unbowed by the election results, Obama approached the second half of his term and the challenges of divided government with a renewed call for bipartisanship. With only weeks remaining in the congressional term, Obama and the administration aggressively courted Republicans with compromise proposals that resulted in a flurry of significant legislation that marked the lame-duck Congress as one of the most productive bodies in recent memory and that brought a rebound to the president’s popularity. Breaking a campaign pledge, Obama agreed to extend to all Americans (including the wealthiest) for another two years the tax cuts that had been enacted under the Bush administration. In return Republicans voted to extend unemployment benefits. In addition Congress rescinded the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces (fulfilling one of Obama’s campaign promises). Congress passed legislation that increased the number of children served by the school lunch program and improved the quality of food to be provided. And Congress extended medical benefits and compensation for the rescue workers who had responded to the September 11 attacks. Moreover, the Senate ratified a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty with Russia—one of the administration’s top foreign policy goals. On the other hand, a Republican filibuster in the Senate stalled the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have granted eventual citizenship to aliens brought to the United States when they were age 16 or younger. But even as gridlock was at least temporarily dislodged and partisanship eased during the season of legislative success, the debate over the vehemence of political polarization was quickly again at the centre of the national conversation when, on January 8, 2011, a gunman killed six people and critically wounded Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as she met with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords, a moderate Democrat who had voted to support the health care bill, had already had her office vandalized and had experienced an aggressive challenge to her seat from a Republican candidate who was backed by Tea Party supporters. She survived the gunman’s attack. In a well-received speech at a memorial for the victims in Tucson, Obama called for civility in American politics and public discourse and for discussions that heal instead of harm. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame,” he said, “let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” The year 2011 brought a series of world-shaking changes to the Middle East, where popular political uprisings resulted in abrupt ends to longtime authoritarian regimes in Tunisia (see Jasmine Revolution)and Egypt (see Egypt Uprising of 2011) and widespread demonstrations and conflict in other countries in the region. The Obama administration sought to carefully articulate its support for the demonstrators’ democratic aspirations, balancing past commitments to some of the threatened regimes with the U.S. advocacy of free representative government. Moreover, Obama attempted to take a role in world leadership without direct intervention in the affairs of other countries. In Libya, where the political revolt against the four-decade rule of Muammar al-Qaddafi transformed effectively into a civil war (see Libya Revolt of 2011), however, Obama felt U.S. intervention was necessary to prevent a humanitarian disaster as Qaddafi employed his overwhelming military advantage in a brutal attempt to expunge opposition. On March 19, U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking targets in Libya in an effort to disable Libya’s air force and air defense systems. After initially taking a leading role in these operations, the Obama administration relinquished command to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on March 27. On April 4, Obama officially announced that he would seek reelection. Less than a month later, on May 1, the president made a dramatic late-night Sunday television address to inform the world that U.S. special forces had killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a firefight in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, not far from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. (U.S. forces took custody of the body, which they buried at sea, and confirmed bin Laden’s identity through DNA testing.) “Justice has been done,” Obama said. “Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.” At the beginning of September 2012, at its national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Democratic Party officially nominated Obama and Biden as its candidates for president and vice president of the United States. On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Obama’s attention and that of the world was directed to Benghazi, Libya, where an attack on the U.S. diplomatic post resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Initially, it was thought that the attack had been a spontaneous outgrowth of rioting occurring outside the post in response to an anti-Islam film that had been produced in the United States. Angry demonstrations against the film had occurred elsewhere, most notably at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. In the following days and weeks, however, it became increasingly certain that the assault had been a premeditated terrorist attack. Obama promised to get to the bottom of the matter, but both he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged their ultimate responsibility in the situation. The issue persisted as a point of criticism of Obama by Romney and the right in general. Obama maintained a significant lead over Romney in September in the national opinion polls, partly a result of a “convention bounce” and partly because of negative perceptions some held of his Republican challenger. Those perceptions were deepened by the release of secretly shot footage at a private fund-raiser at which Romney said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…who believe that they are victims” and whom he would never be able to convince that “they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” In the heated aftermath, Romney stood by his remarks, though he said that they had not been “elegantly stated.” Both campaigns were spending fortunes in what was projected to be the most expensive presidential campaign in history, the first since the creation of the public financing system in which neither candidate accepted public funds and the spending limitations that went with them. Romney and the Republican Party, as well as Obama and the Democrats, each raised about $1 billion in donations, totals that did not include the tens of millions spent by “super PACs,” the political action committees that—as a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—were allowed to accept unlimited donations from wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions, provided that the PACs operated independently of the candidate’s campaign. Obama and Romney both presented themselves as champions of the middle class and those who aspired to join it. While the president offered a vision of American prosperity that spread centrifugally from the middle, his Republican challenger believed that economic well-being was initiated at the top by “job creators” and flowed down, an approach that Obama claimed had been tried in the past and failed. In highlighting the importance of tackling the deficit, Obama emphasized the need for spending cuts but proposed returning tax levels on the wealthiest Americans to those that were in place during the Bill Clinton administration. Romney advocated maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts, including those for people at the top of the economic pyramid, as well as providing additional cuts, while promising to reduce the deficit with spending cuts and the elimination of tax loopholes. He accused Obama of being unsympathetic to business while citing his own success as an entrepreneur as a prime qualification for the job of setting the economy right as president. Much of Romney’s campaign was grounded in a criticism of the handling of the economy by Obama, whom Romney blamed for the slowness of the recovery and the consequent hardships endured by the middle class, especially those who were among the long-term unemployed. Obama was quick to acknowledge the suffering of many Americans brought about by the Great Recession and the gradualness of recovery, but he was equally quick (too quick according to many Republicans) to point to the “bad hand” he had been dealt by the Bush administration. Some of the president’s supporters believed that he had not been adamant enough in emphasizing how his own policies had helped forestall much-greater economic calamity. Romney also promised to revoke the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he referred to derisively as “Obamacare,” a term the president proudly owned as he trumpeted the benefits of the act on the campaign trail. Reversing the advantage Republicans traditionally had enjoyed on defense and security issues, Obama repeatedly noted the elimination of Osama bin Laden on his watch. He also highlighted his successful removal of American forces from Iraq and his promise to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014. Despite his earlier political missteps, Romney stole Obama’s momentum and reenergized his campaign on October 3 with a commanding performance in the first presidential debate, in which he showed himself to be the president’s equal in terms of stature and presence. To some ears, Obama’s plea for patience with his policies sounded apologetic, and his performance was generally agreed to have been lacklustre. Biden breathed new life into the Democratic effort by taking the offensive in his debate with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a key spokesman for some of the most conservative elements within his party. Obama regained his stride in the second, town hall-style debate by engaging more forcefully with Romney, as he would again in the third and final presidential debate. Despite those strong performances, however, Obama seemingly had, at best, pulled even with Romney nationally. In the final weeks of the campaign, the candidates primarily focused on a handful of “battleground” states, whose electoral votes, it was believed, would determine the outcome of a razor-close election in the electoral college. In the last week of October, Sandy, a hurricane-turned-superstorm that had ravaged parts of the Caribbean, brought widespread destruction to the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states. New York City and New Jersey were particularly hard hit, and the image of Obama and New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie—up to that point one of the president’s most vocal critics—touring devastated areas in his state and bringing promises of rapid aid was a remarkable demonstration of bipartisan leadership by both men. On November 6, 2012, Obama won a narrow victory in the national popular vote but triumphed in almost all the battleground states to win a second term, garnering 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. “Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated,” he said in his election-night victory speech, adding that “we are not as divided as our politics suggest. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.” After the election, Obama and Boehner entered into negotiations to try to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, which involved either the expiration or enforcement of a series of economic measures set to transpire at the turn of the new year. They included the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, temporary payroll tax cuts initiated by the Obama administration, and some tax breaks for businesses, along with the automatic application of across-the-board spending cuts to the military and nonmilitary programs required by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which came to be known as sequestration. Although the president and the speaker of the House were unable to reach a workable compromise, Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cobbled together a last-minute agreement that passed the Senate 89–8 and House 257–167 (with 85 Republican votes in the lower chamber) on January 1, 2013. The bill preserved the Bush-era income tax cuts for individuals earning $400,000 or less annually and couples earning $450,000 or less (Obama had campaigned on setting those limits at $200,000 and $250,000, respectively) but raised taxes on those earning more than that from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the first federal tax increase in two decades. While it also raised taxes on dividends and inheritance for some, it did not extend the payroll tax cut. Obama signed the bill on January 2. At the top of the president’s agenda in 2013 was the introduction of gun-control legislation, an issue that again had taken centre stage in the aftermath of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults. (The shooter also killed himself and his mother that day.) Obama called upon Congress to enact legislation that would institute universal background checks for gun purchases, ban the sales of assault weapons and high-capacity (more than 10-round) magazines, provide for greater protection in schools, and place a renewed focus on treating mental illness. He also took the issue to the public, passionately advocating legislation in a series of campaign-style events at the same time that supporters of gun rights (most notably the National Rifle Association [NRA]) vehemently opposed his proposals. Despite polls that showed overwhelming public support for universal background checks, a bill focusing on a measure that would have greatly expanded background checks failed to receive sufficient support when it was considered by the Senate in April 2013. Conscious of the threat of filibuster, both parties had agreed that a supermajority of 60 votes would be required to move the bill or any amendments to it (including a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines) to a formal vote on passage. Although some Republicans (whose party generally opposed the legislation) voted for the measure calling for expanded background checks, some Democrats (whose party generally supported the legislation) voted against it, and it failed (54–46), as did all other proposed amendments, prompting withdrawal of the bill. As the NRA and other supporters of gun rights celebrated, Obama said the bill’s withdrawal marked “a pretty shameful day for Washington.” January’s budget compromise had delayed automatic cuts on military and social spending for two months, but, when the new March 1, 2013, deadline passed without Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement on an alternative approach to deficit reduction, sequestration began. It took a while for most Americans to feel the effects of the across-the-board cuts. However, as spring progressed, air-traffic delays ballooned as a result of short-staffing caused by forced furloughs of air-traffic controllers. Congress quickly allowed the Federal Aviation Administration to shift funds earmarked for facility improvement to salaries. At the same time, Air Force officials bemoaned a lack of preparedness that they felt was a consequence of reductions in flight practice and maintenance necessitated by the sequester cuts to military spending, and officials from a wide range of government-funded programs and agencies—from the Meals on Wheels program for seniors to the National Park Service—began to warn of looming problems. In May 2013 the Obama administration found itself much embattled, as new controversies arose to take their place alongside ongoing attempts by some Republicans—in particular, Rep. Darrell Issa of California in his role as chairman of the House Oversight Committee—not only to find further fault with the State Department and the administration regarding the 2012 attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi but also to allege that there had been a cover-up in the aftermath of the attack. At the centre of the renewed efforts to prove that the administration had misled the public were recently revealed e-mails that indicated State Department and other administration officials had asked that references to the al-Qaeda-linked group Anṣār al-Sharīʿah and prior warnings of danger be stricken from the talking points to be used by UN Ambassador Susan Rice when she appeared on television news programs several days after the attack. Republican critics alleged that these changes showed that the administration had “scrubbed” Rice’s remarks in order not to tarnish Obama’s record on security during the run-up to the presidential election. The Obama administration dismissed the claims of a cover-up as politically motivated and contended that the process of developing the talking points was concerned not with politics but with differences between individuals in the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency regarding the yet-to-be-understood nature of the attack. (The focus of much Republican criticism regarding the attack was Hillary Clinton, who had resigned as secretary of state in February—to be replaced by John Kerry—but who was a potential candidate for the 2016 presidential election.) The administration found itself on the defensive when employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) were accused of having used excessive scrutiny to delay approval of tax-exempt status for some conservative political groups. Obama condemned this “misconduct” by the IRS as “inexcusable,” requested and received the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS, and promised that the Treasury Department would establish safeguards to ensure that such behaviour would not recur. Also troubling for the president were revelations that in spring 2012 the Justice Department had subpoenaed access to the records of some 20 phone lines used by reporters and editors who worked in several offices of the Associated Press without notifying that organization. This action had been taken as part of a widespread investigation into a national-security news leak related to a terrorist plot, hatched and foiled in Yemen, to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. Learning in May 2013 that the Justice Department had subpoenaed access to these phone records without having notified them, representatives of the Associated Press, as well as some legislators from both parties, said that they were deeply disturbed by what they saw as an egregious violation of the freedom of the press. Attorney General Eric Holder (who had earlier recused himself from involvement with the investigation because he had been questioned as part of it) characterized the investigation as involving one of the “most serious leaks” he had ever encountered. The Obama administration responded in part by calling for renewed pursuit of legislation that would create a federal “shield” law to provide the same sort of protection that many state laws provided for the confidentiality of journalists’ sources and communications. All three scandals became the focus of congressional investigations. June brought a new set of problems for the administration when it was forced to respond to the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had compelled a telecommunications company to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers. This secret information was leaked to The Guardian newspaper by American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who also disclosed the existence of a program that mined data from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Internet-related companies for the NSA, the FBI, and a British agency. Snowden, who was charged with espionage, ended up in Russia, where he was granted temporary refugee status, further straining relations between that country and the United States, which were already at loggerheads over developments in the Syrian Civil War. Russia’s continued support of its ally Syria (as well as that of China) prevented the UN Security Council from responding forcefully to the war. Obama, seemingly seeking to avoid open-ended involvement in another Middle Eastern conflict, had been cautious in his response to the situation in Syria, prompting some critics to label him the “avoider-in-chief.” As the death count in Syria rose and reports surfaced of the use of chemical weapons by the forces of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad, the engagement of the U.S. government increased. Food and financial aid from the U.S. were extended to the Syrian opposition in February 2013, and the beginning of military aid was promised in June. Obama had said in May 2012 that what he called his “calculus” for U.S. involvement in Syria would change if “we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” That “red line” appeared to have been crossed when hundreds of people died allegedly as a result of Syrian government forces’ use chemical weapons in suburban Damascus on August 21, 2013. On August 30 U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had “high certainty” that chemical weapons had been used in the incident and that government forces had carried out the attack. He also reported a death toll (more than 1,400) that was considerably higher than earlier estimates. The Syrian government continued to deny its use of chemical weapons and blamed the opposition. Although the British Parliament had voted against endorsing Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for military intervention in principle, Obama indicated that a U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British involvement. French Pres. François Hollande, on the other hand, continued to express support for French involvement in a military response. On August 31 Obama shifted gears and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the findings of UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after inspecting the site of the attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that surface-to-surface rockets had delivered the nerve agent sarin in the attack. The report did not indicate blame for the attack. In the meantime, on September 14, Russia and the United States brokered a framework agreement under which the Syrian government would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, release a comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its chemical mixing and filling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014. While the Obama administration indicated that the framework included an appeal to the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force should Syria not fulfill the terms of the agreement, the Russian government said it had not agreed to that condition. The Obama administration’s foreign policy in the region was also being tested by events in Egypt, where the military had removed Pres. Mohamed Morsi from power in July. Because the U.S. government was legally prohibited from providing financial aid (which amounted to more that $1 billion annually for Egypt) to countries whose leadership changed as the result of a coup, the administration hesitated to label the change in power a coup. However, Obama was adamant in urging a swift return to civilian rule, and the stakes went up when hundreds of Morsi’s supporters were killed by government forces in separate incidents in July and August. Obamacare remained a thorn in the side of Republicans, particularly those associated with the Tea Party movement, who led an attempt to include a one-year delay of funding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in a continuing resolution to fund the federal budget that faced an October 1 deadline. The president, for his part, promised to veto the resolution if it contained defunding of Obamacare. After the House Republican majority refused to give up its requirement of a funding delay for Obamacare and the Senate Democratic majority refused to endorse a continuing resolution that included that requirement, the federal government partially shut down for the first time in 17 years, furloughing hundreds of thousands of employees and closing government offices. Obama was adamant that any discussion on the budget would be contingent upon fully reopening the government, and he maintained that stance as the October 17 deadline for extending the national debt ceiling approached and with it the threat of default. On October 16, moderate Republicans voted with Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass a bill forged by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that ended the partial shutdown by funding government agencies and offices through January 15, 2014, extended the government’s borrowing power through February 7, and tasked a negotiating committee with coming up with long-term budgetary solutions. By the end of 2013 the House and the Senate had passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, based on a compromise that replaced the bulk of the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration with targeted cuts and raised discretionary spending (divided evenly between military and nonmilitary funding). The resulting budget was intended to last through the 2014 fiscal year. With the temporary resolution of the budget battle, public attention shifted to the troubled rollout of Obamacare in early October 2013 and to the initially miserable performance of HealthCare.gov, the website that acted as a marketplace for insurance plans and the place for those in 36 states to apply for health coverage. Republicans lambasted the website, which was often slow and erratic or simply inoperable. Far fewer users were able to access the site and apply for insurance than had been hoped, prompting the administration to order a “tech surge” in late October. Progress in overcoming the glitches was slow, but as HealthCare.gov’s performance improved, Obama went on the offensive, encouraging Americans to sign up for coverage. At the beginning of April 2014, after the end of the first open enrollment period, he announced that 7.1 million Americans had signed up for private insurance plans through the marketplace, meeting the administration’s target. “The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay,” Obama declared, yet criticism of Obamacare and calls for its removal remained a rallying cry for Republicans as they prepared for the 2014 midterm congressional election. Events in the Middle East continued to make that region an important focus of Obama’s foreign policy in 2014. However, the president’s attention dramatically shifted early in the year to a developing crisis in Ukraine. After widespread protests led to the impeachment and then the end of the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (who called his dismissal a coup d’état), elements within the predominantly ethnically Russian autonomous republic of Crimea, supported by Russian troops, engineered Crimea’s self-declared separation from Ukraine and annexation by Russia (confirmed by the Russian parliament in March). Obama joined a host of Western leaders in condemning Russia’s aggressive actions and sought to isolate it by suspending it from the Group of Eight and imposing sanctions on a number of individual Russian leaders. Moreover, in a show of support for Ukraine, Obama met with its newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, in early June. At the end of May, five Taliban leaders who been prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp were exchanged by the Obama administration for Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. Army sergeant who had been a captive of the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2009. The exchange was initially hailed as a victory for the administration, but it quickly became controversial. Some Republicans argued that the administration had given up too much for Bergdahl, and politicians from both sides of the aisle criticized the president for failing to consult Congress prior to the exchange (law required the administration to give Congress notice 30 days before releasing Guantánamo Bay detainees; the White House cited evidence of Bergdahl’s failing health and other factors that necessitated urgent action). The matter became further clouded by the ambiguous circumstances of Bergdahl’s capture, including allegations that he had attempted to desert. Meanwhile, in early summer 2014, nearly three years after the removal of the final U.S. troops from Iraq, Obama found himself forced to again respond to events there, when the controversial U.S.-supported regime of Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī was threatened by the takeover of several cities (including the country’s second largest, Mosul) by a rapidly spreading Sunni insurgency spearheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS] and as the Islamic State), a group that emerged in April 2013. Some critics sought to blame Obama for this new instability in Iraq, accusing him of having removed U.S. troops too soon. The president remained reluctant to put “boots on the ground,” even as he dispatched some 300 U.S. Special Operations troops in mid-June to train, advise, and support Iraqi security forces, and he called on the Iraqi government to resolve the situation. Mālikī’s State of Law coalition had won the largest number of seats in parliamentary elections in April 2014, paving the way for Mālikī to claim a third term as prime minister, but in response to pressure from former supporters both inside and outside Iraq, he stepped aside in favour of a less-divisive figure from the State of Law coalition, Haider al-Abadi, who was nominated to form a new cabinet in early August. On August 8 the United States began to launch air strikes against ISIL in Iraq to prevent it from advancing farther into Kurdish territory. In September Obama responded even more aggressively to ISIL’s advances in both Iraq and Syria, as well as to a growing sense of the terrorist threat posed by ISIL elsewhere (brought home to Americans through videos released by ISIL depicting the beheadings of two U.S. journalists held hostage by the group). In a televised address on September 10, Obama announced that he had initiated a significant escalation of the campaign against ISIL, including the authorization of air strikes inside Syria for the first time and an increase of those in Iraq. Although he continued to pledge that he would not return U.S. combat troops to the region, Obama asked Congress to approve some $500 million for the training and arming of “moderate” Syrians. In the following weeks, as U.S.-led attacks increased, Obama championed an effort to grow the coalition of countries that had committed to confronting ISIL. By the end of September, some 20 countries were contributing air support or military equipment to the coalition effort, including France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain. Dozens of other countries provided humanitarian aid. An effort to expand that coalition and to define the necessity of combating ISIL’s “network of death” was central to Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24. Also in that address he echoed his September 10 speech in denouncing Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and he called on the world to come together to respond to global warming and to help contain the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Africa. A number of political observers praised the president for putting the United States at the forefront of these efforts after having been, in their eyes, recently indecisive in his foreign policy. On the domestic front, Obama continued to use the power of executive action to address issues that remained bogged down in Congress. In February 2014 Obama, unable to persuade Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, signed an executive order raising the hourly minimum wage of federal contract workers to $10.10. In June he took on climate change, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to instate new rules calling for power plants to significantly reduce their carbon emissions by 2030. Speaker of the House Boehner responded to Obama’s use of executive action by accusing the president of having “repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators” and by threatening to bring a lawsuit against him for misusing his executive powers. “So sue me,” a combative Obama said in early July, his remark aimed at House Republicans. “As long as they’re doing nothing,” he continued, “I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something.” Immigration reform, an issue that Obama had attempted to address in June 2012 with executive action (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, often called DACA, that deferred for two years deportations of immigrants who had come to the United States illegally as children), was back in the spotlight in 2014 as a crisis arose along the country’s border with Mexico. From October 2013 to mid-June 2014 some 50,000 unaccompanied children from Central America were apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. In July the administration sought $3.7 billion from Congress to confront the crisis. In early August 2014 Obama carefully sought not to take sides when the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, by a white police officer resulted in days of civil unrest and protests fueled by tensions between the predominantly Black population of Ferguson, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb, and its predominantly white government and police department. The president did, however, cite the incident in his September speech to the UN as an example of “our own racial and ethnic tensions” while pointing to the failure of Americans at times “to live up to our ideals.” On September 19 there was a scare at the White House when, only minutes after the first family had left the residence, a man leapt the surrounding fence and made his way into the White House. The security breach spurred a congressional hearing that addressed other recent lapses by the Secret Service, and soon afterward its director, Julia Pierson, resigned. With Obama’s approval rating bobbing at about 40 percent, Republicans framed the midterm congressional elections in November 2014 as a referendum on his presidency. The electorate—seemingly unhappy with the president’s response to the Ebola crisis, the advances of ISIL in Iraq and Syria, congressional gridlock, and a range of other issues, as well as being disappointed with the pace and nature of the economic recovery—handed the Democrats a crushing defeat. In gaining 12 seats, Republicans were in a position to match the largest majority that they had enjoyed in the House since 1947, and, moreover, they retook control of the Senate, gaining 9 seats to reach a total of 54, after the results were in for the December runoff election in Louisiana (a Republican victory). On November 20 Obama once again employed an executive order in an attempt to overcome legislative gridlock when he announced reform of U.S. immigration policy that would grant work permits and temporary legal status to more than four million illegal immigrants. The action would delay deportation and allow parents of children who were legal residents or U.S. citizens to apply for three-year work permits, provided that they had been in the country for five years or more. The order also removed the age limitation from the president’s 2012 executive order regarding immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children and changed the year by which they were required to have immigrated from 2007 to 2010. Vowing to counteract the order, Republicans accused Obama of skirting Congress and engaging in an imperial presidency. In December 2013, at a memorial for South African leader Nelson Mandela, Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro had shared a handshake that seemed to offer symbolic new hope for improved Cuban-U.S. relations. On December 17, 2014, after some 18 months of secret negotiations fostered by Canada and the Vatican, that handshake bore fruit as Obama and Castro simultaneously addressed national television audiences to announce the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba that had been suspended in January 1961. “We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests,” Obama said. At the beginning of his administration, he had hoped to restart relations, but that initiative had been undermined by the incarceration of Alan Gross, a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who had been held in Cuba since 2009 after being convicted of importing illegal technology and attempting to establish secret Internet service for Cuban Jews. The announcement of renewed diplomatic relations was accompanied by the release of Gross and a prisoner exchange of three Cuban intelligence agents who had been jailed in the United States since 1998 for a U.S. intelligence agent who had been captive in Cuba for nearly 20 years. Because the more-than-five-decade embargo on trade with Cuba was codified in U.S. law, rescinding it was beyond the scope of Obama’s executive authority and would require congressional action, which was anything but assured, given the widespread opposition among Republicans to normalizing relations. Nevertheless, Obama was able to mandate the establishment of an embassy in Havana, a review of Cuba’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism, and the easing of some travel and financial restrictions (including an increase in the amount of money expatriates were allowed to remit to Cuba). In December Obama’s response to police violence was again questioned after a grand jury failed to indict a New York City policeman for his responsibility in the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed African American man who died after having a choke hold applied to him during his arrest on Staten Island in July. The president and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio established a task force charged with improving relations between minority communities and police, but many of those around the country who had taken to the streets to proclaim that “Black lives matter” felt that Obama was not doing enough. The first half of 2015 was a roller-coaster ride of low and high points for the president: on one hand, the country continued to experience a rash of deeply troubling incidents of race-related violence, while, on the other hand, the Supreme Court ruled as the administration had hoped it would in a pair of landmark cases. In an episode reminiscent of the events in Ferguson and Staten Island, on April 19 a young African American man in Baltimore died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury while in police custody. Rioting erupted in Baltimore on the day of his funeral, April 27. As troubling as the incidents of police violence and the issues of police accountability were, the country was even more stunned and saddened when, on June 17, nine African Americans were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man, in a hate crime in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. In his eulogy for one of the shooting’s victims—the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator—Obama addressed gun control, race relations, and the symbolic impact of the Confederate flag, which he said represented more than just “ancestral pride” because for many it was a “reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.” (In the wake of the shooting, the flying of the Confederate flag at the state capitol in South Carolina was the object of renewed criticism, and on July 10, in response to legislative action by South Carolina lawmakers, the flag was removed permanently from the capitol grounds.) Perhaps this tragedy causes…us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men…caught up in the criminal justice system and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal. Obama’s hopes for the removal of discrimination received a huge boost on June 26 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling thereby legalized the practice of same-sex marriage throughout the country. One day earlier, in King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court further solidified the legality of Obamacare by upholding that part of the legislation that allowed the government to provide subsidies to poor and middle-class citizens in order to help them purchase health care. Lifted by those successes, Obama’s approval rating climbed over 50 percent for the first time in more than two years. July brought yet another policy success for the president when a final agreement was reached between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council [China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom], along with Germany) that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the reduction of sanctions against the country. The agreement came after more than a decade of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear research program, which many observers suspected was aimed at developing nuclear weapons, though Iran maintained that it was intended for peaceful purposes. An interim agreement had been reached in November 2013, and the final agreement largely followed the terms of the framework document that was accepted by all parties in April 2015. Under the terms of the agreement, Iran would greatly reduce its nuclear stockpile over a 10-year period and give inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities in exchange for the gradual removal of sanctions. In praising the agreement, Obama said that “every pathway to a nuclear weapon” for Iran had been cut off, but many Republicans were quick to denounce the accord, which Congress had 60 days to consider with the options of accepting, rejecting, or taking no action on it. On September 10 the Republican-led effort to reject the treaty was stalled in its tracks when opponents of the agreement in the Senate were unable to secure enough votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster that had blocked the passage of a measure aimed at repealing the treaty. Yet another major policy goal had been achieved by Obama without the aid of a single Republican vote. In that vein, on August 3, 2015, the president announced new climate regulations requiring U.S. power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. The new rules also required that 28 percent of electrical generation be fueled by renewable energy by the same deadline. In February 2016, however, a lawsuit brought against the action was granted a stay request by the Supreme Court even before the regulation had been reviewed by a federal appeals court, an unprecedented step that critics described as judicial activism. The stay was to remain in place as the lawsuit made its way through the courts, with a final decision possibly not coming until 2017. Environmentalists were able to claim a victory in November 2015 when Obama, having completed a seven-year review, announced that he had rejected the proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Supporters of the pipeline had argued that construction of the pipeline would create jobs and promote economic growth, while opponents countered that extracting the petroleum from tar sands in Alberta would contribute significantly to global warming. The August 14 flag raising presided over by Secretary Kerry at the reopened U.S. embassy in Havana provided a foreign policy milestone for the Obama administration, after the U.S. and Cuba had officially opened their embassies in each other’s capital on July 20. At the end of July, Obama had become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Ethiopia as well as the first U.S. chief executive to address the African Union at its headquarters in Addis Ababa. In early October, after some eight years of negotiations, another of the president’s principal foreign policy objectives appeared within reach with the signing in Atlanta of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a regional trade deal between 12 Pacific Rim countries (the U.S., Japan, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam). Congressional ratification of the treaty, however, was far from a certainty. In the last half of the year, Obama again focused on the gun violence that continued to occur throughout the country. Following the mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, on October 1, 2015, the president renewed his calls for action. At the end of November there was an uproar in Chicago following the court-ordered release of a video showing a policeman shooting and killing an African American teenager in October 2014. Days later a gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three and wounding nine. On December 2 the country was further shocked when a husband and wife attacked a holiday party at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and injuring another 22. Initially, Obama reacted to that incident as another example of the mass violence that can result from what he saw as too-lenient gun laws. However, after it became clear that the assailants had militant Islamist sympathies, the president made a rare national television address on December 6, in which he characterized the San Bernardino shootings as a terrorist attack and attempted to calm the fears of jittery Americans and reassure doubters that his administration took the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously and that it would be “overcome.” Republicans and some members of his own party continued to criticize Obama’s response to ISIL as insufficient and flawed. Having admitted in June 2015 that the administration still did not have a “complete strategy” to confront ISIL (and still suffering for his 2014 characterization of ISIL as the “junior varsity” in comparison with al-Qaeda), Obama, at the end of October 2015, authorized the deployment of several dozen special-operations troops in Syria to help coordinate local ground forces in the north of the country and undertake other open-ended missions there—an action that seemed to violate his long-standing promise to not “put boots on the ground” in Syria. The measure came at a time when Russia had become directly involved in the Syrian Civil War, and the deployment was framed as part of an evolving policy that included a significant diplomatic effort to begin talks aimed at effecting a political transition in Syria. At the beginning of the new year, Obama returned again to the matter of gun violence. Long frustrated by congressional gridlock that prevented the passage of gun-related legislation, on January 5, 2016, he announced executive actions aimed at expanding background checks for gun purchasers and recodifying the definition of a regulated gun dealer. Mindful of the kind of Republican accusations of presidential overreach that had landed earlier executive actions in the courts, Obama was careful to undertake action that he described as “well within” his legal authority. The redefinition of regulated gun dealing targeted online sales of guns and sales of weapons at gun shows that had not been subject to background checks. In his announcement of the executive action, Obama, reflecting on the tragedy of the 2012 Newtown shootings that had deeply affected him, wiped tears from his cheeks as he said, “Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad. And by the way, it [gun violence] happens on the streets of Chicago every day.” Several days later, at a special televised town meeting at George Mason University, Obama discussed his executive action with both supporters and opponents of gun-control reform. When Obama came before a joint session of Congress on January 12 to deliver his final State of the Union message, there was an empty seat in the gallery next to Michelle Obama to symbolize the loss of life brought about by gun violence. The president struck a positive tone in his address, countering fears of Islamist terrorism by calling the United States “the most powerful nation on Earth” and characterizing gloomy Republican assessments of the country’s economic decline as “fiction” while saying that the U.S. has “the strongest, most durable economy in the world.” Rather than recite a litany of policy initiatives, Obama, echoing former president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” address, focused on four pivotal questions that were summarized on the White House’s website: How do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in the new economy? How do we make technology work for us, and not against us, as we solve our biggest challenges? How do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman? How can we make our politics reflect the best in us, and not the worst? Having come into office determined to end partisan gridlock, Obama lamented his failure to do so: “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency—that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” The death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in early February provided Obama with the opportunity to replace one of the Supreme Court’s staunchest judicial conservatives. In March the president nominated the highly regarded moderate Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as Scalia’s replacement, but Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the 2016 presidential election. Returning to an issue that he had first tackled early in his presidency, on February 23, 2016, Obama announced that the Department of Defense had submitted to Congress a new plan for closing the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He called the camp a stain on the U.S. record of upholding the rule of law and said that its continued operation was “counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit.” Ongoing Republican opposition had frustrated attempts by Obama to have some of the detainees transferred to the United States, but throughout his presidency he had overseen the transfer of detainees to countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Georgia, Senegal, Bosnia, Slovakia, and Uruguay, with more than 180 detainees having left Guantánamo under Obama’s watch while several dozen detainees remained. In March Obama welcomed a state visit by Canada’s youthful new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, whose presence created the kind of excitement that had always seemed to attend the charismatic Obama at the beginning of his own tenure in office. The amiability between Obama and Trudeau was a far cry from Obama’s chilly relationship with Canada’s former leader, Conservative Stephen Harper. Obama made a trio of historic state visits himself in 2016. In mid-March he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba in more than 80 years and in May the first sitting U.S. chief executive to visit Hiroshima, Japan, the site of the world’s first nuclear strike, where the United States had dropped an atomic bomb toward the end of World War II that resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 people. In his speech at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Obama pointedly did not apologize for the bombing or call into question U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons. Instead, he sought to emphasize the importance of a future without nuclear weapons “in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.” Obama’s solemn appearance in Hiroshima came at the end of a roughly weeklong trip to Asia that had begun with a visit to another former wartime adversary of the United States, Vietnam. In Hanoi Obama announced an end to the more-than-50-year embargo on sales of U.S.-made weapons to Vietnam. The Obama administration’s advocacy of civil rights took a variety of forms in 2016. In early May Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis met with local officials to discuss the creation of a national monument commemorating the gay rights movement at the Stonewall Inn, the historic Greenwich Village bar where police and gay rights activists had clashed in 1969. Later that month U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Department of Justice’s filing of suit in federal district court in support of the transgender community to block the enforcement of a recently adopted North Carolina state law that required public agencies to limit the use of restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms to persons whose biological sex (as indicated on their birth certificates) corresponds to the sex for which the facility is intended. Gun violence continued to shake the country. In June Obama and Vice President Biden traveled to Orlando, Florida, to meet with survivors and families of victims of the mass shooting earlier that month at the Pulse nightclub, the deadliest such event in modern U.S. history. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others were wounded in the attack by a lone gunman on the vibrant centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Less than a month later, on July 7, in downtown Dallas, as a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, was winding to a close, a sniper who was upset by those shootings shot and killed four police officers, along with a rapid transit officer, and wounded several others. Speaking at a memorial for the slain officers, Obama said: Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience.…I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem.…Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each other’s shoes and look at the world through each other’s eyes, so that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie who’s kind of goofing off but not dangerous—and the teenager—maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words and values and authority of his parents.…We can decide to come together and make our country reflect the good inside us, the hopes and simple dreams we share. At the end of July, as one of the keynote speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Obama eloquently praised Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee to replace him in the Oval Office, but, arguably, the convention’s most-rousing speech had been delivered a few days earlier by the first lady, Michelle Obama. The president campaigned actively in support of Clinton, whose Republican opponent, real-estate developer and reality television star Donald Trump, had vowed to undo many of Obama’s policy and legislative achievements. Upending the predictions of polls and pundits, Trump won the election, capturing key battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to triumph in the Electoral College with 304 electoral votes to 227 for Clinton, though she won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes. In closing his Farewell Address at Chicago’s McCormick Place on January 10, 2017, Obama said …I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change—but in yours. I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes, we can.",
            "gender": "M"
        },
        "Cate Blanchett": {
            "knowledge": "Blanchett, (born May 14, 1969, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), Australian actress known for her multidimensional characters and wide range of roles. Blanchett grew up in suburban Melbourne with an Australian mother and an American father, who died when Blanchett was 10 years old. She studied art history at the University of Melbourne before graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1992. Her professional acting career began on the Australian stage. She performed with the Sydney Theatre Company in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Timothy Daly’s Kafka Dances. In 1993 she starred opposite Geoffrey Rush in David Mamet’s Oleanna, as a student who accuses her teacher of sexual harassment. Blanchett made her television debut in 1993, and she soon landed leading roles in the miniseries Heartland (1994) and Bordertown (1995). She moved to feature films with Paradise Road (1997), a historical drama about a Japanese war camp in World War II. Blanchett’s reputation grew with her next two feature films: the bittersweet romantic comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997; later released as The Wedding Party) and Oscar and Lucinda (1997), in which she played a rebellious heiress ostracized from Australian society. Her breakthrough role was as young Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 film Elizabeth, which earned her an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award for best actress. Blanchett was praised for capturing the emotional complexity of the queen’s development from a lovestruck adolescent to an indomitable political force who represses her emotional vulnerability. Blanchett subsequently appeared in films that covered numerous genres and character types, securing her reputation as a versatile actress. She took supporting parts in Pushing Tin (1999), a comedy about air traffic controllers, and in the dramatic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). As the lead character in The Gift (2000), she played a psychic whose visions involve her in the investigation of a local woman’s murder. In 2001 she portrayed a kidnapped housewife who falls in love with her captors in Bandits. She next appeared as the elf queen Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, and 2003), the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy. In the western The Missing (2003), Blanchett brought her trademark complexity to the role of a young woman forced to confront her estranged father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) in order to reclaim her kidnapped daughter. She earned further critical acclaim for her performance as an Irish journalist who runs afoul of the mob in Veronica Guerin (2003). In 2004 she starred in Wes Anderson’s offbeat comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, playing a pregnant reporter in a bizarre love triangle with the ship’s captain (played by Bill Murray) and someone who may be his son (played by Owen Wilson). Returning to her study of historical characters, Blanchett portrayed Hollywood star Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004), Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, and won an Academy Award for the role. She later appeared in the dramas Babel (2006), The Good German (2006), and Notes on a Scandal (2006). In the unconventional biopic I’m Not There (2007), she starred as one of several characters based on the musician Bob Dylan at different stages in his life. As the character Jude, a star making the dramatic shift from acoustic folk to electric rock, Blanchett was praised for capturing the elusive and bewildering qualities attributed to Dylan. Her performance earned her another Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actress. In 2007 Blanchett reprised her role as the English queen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which explores Elizabeth’s political battles with Spain and her personal relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh; she earned another Oscar nomination for her performance. The following year she played the Soviet villain Irina Spalko in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), another addition to the series of action-adventure films following the dashing archaeologist. In 2008 she also starred opposite Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a drama about a man who ages backward. Two years later she appeared as Marion Loxley in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. The action drama starred Russell Crowe in the title role as the outlaw hero. In the thriller Hanna (2011), Blanchett portrayed a CIA agent in pursuit of a former agent and his teenage daughter, whom he has trained to be an assassin. Blanchett again assumed the role of Galadriel in the Hobbit trilogy—An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), all based on the Tolkien novel that preceded The Lord of the Rings. Her performance in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013), as a socialite struggling to cope with a decline in circumstances, won her further acclaim, including an Oscar for best actress; she also received her third Golden Globe. She played a French art historian and Resistance member in The Monuments Men (2014), which fictionalized Allied efforts to recover art stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Blanchett then sank her teeth into the role of the wicked stepmother of the title character in Cinderella (2015). In Truth (2015) she played CBS producer Mary Mapes, who was fired after the accuracy of a segment by reporter Dan Rather on U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s military service was called into question. Carol, a drama in which she played a married socialite who enters a romantic relationship with a younger store clerk (Rooney Mara), earned her a seventh Oscar nomination. She then joined the ensemble of Knight of Cups (2015), Terrence Malick’s experimental meditation on Hollywood, and later appeared in his film Song to Song (2017), a romantic drama set against the Austin, Texas, music scene. Also in 2017 Blanchett earned critical praise for her vivacious portrayal of Hela, the goddess of death, in Thor: Ragnarok. The next year she starred in Ocean’s 8, the female-driven reboot of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise from the early 2000s, and The House with a Clock in Its Walls, an adaptation of a 1973 children’s fantasy novel. Blanchett was then lauded for her guest appearance as a performance artist akin to Marina Abramović on the mockumentary TV series Documentary Now! in 2019. That year she also played the eponymous character in Where’d You Go, Bernadette, a film based on the best-selling novel. Blanchett’s credits from 2020 included the TV miniseries Mrs. America, in which she portrayed the activist Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. In 2021 Blanchett appeared in the films Don’t Look Up, a dramedy about an impending comet strike that will destroy Earth, and  Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. In the latter, a film noir adapted from a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the actress played a manipulative psychoanalyst who meets a scheming carnival worker (Bradley Cooper). Blanchett earned widespread acclaim for her performance in Tár (2022), a character study about a trailblazing conductor whose career is derailed by allegations of sexual misconduct. In addition to winning a Golden Globe, she also earned her eighth Oscar nomination. In addition to her film work, Blanchett remained active in the theatre. In 2008 she and her husband, writer Andrew Upton, became artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. Blanchett left the position in 2013, though Upton remained. Her performances with the company included Hedda Gabler (2004) and The War of the Roses (2009). In 2017 she made her Broadway debut in The Present, which was based on a play by Anton Chekhov. For her performance, Blanchett received a Tony Award nomination.",
            "questions": [
                "When and where were you born?",
                "What was your educational background, and where did you study art history?",
                "Where did you begin your professional acting career?",
                "What was your breakthrough role, and what award did you receive for it?",
                "In which films did you play historical figures, and what were your characters' names?",
                "In which film did you portray a character with psychic abilities?",
                "What role did you play in 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy?",
                "What character did you portray in 'The Missing' (2003)?",
                "In which film did you play a Hollywood star and win an Academy Award?",
                "Mention three films in which you appeared in 2006.",
                "In 'I'm Not There' (2007), which musician's various stages of life did you portray?",
                "What was your role in 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age' (2007), and what was the movie about?",
                "Who did you play in 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' (2008)?",
                "Describe your character in 'Blue Jasmine' (2013) and the recognition you received for it.",
                "What was your role in 'Cinderella' (2015)?",
                "In 'Carol' (2015), what was the character you portrayed, and who played your love interest?",
                "Name two films you appeared in directed by Terrence Malick.",
                "What character did you play in 'Thor: Ragnarok' (2017)?",
                "In which TV series did you portray an activist opposing the Equal Rights Amendment?",
                "What were two of your notable film appearances in 2021, and what were these movies about?"
                ],
            "answers": [
                "I was born on May 14, 1969, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.",
                "I studied art history at the University of Melbourne and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1992.",
                "I began my professional acting career in Australia.",
                "My breakthrough role was as young Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 film 'Elizabeth,' for which I earned a Golden Globe Award.",
                "I played historical figures in 'Elizabeth' (Queen Elizabeth I) and 'The Aviator' (Katharine Hepburn).",
                "I portrayed a character with psychic abilities in 'The Gift'.",
                "I played the character Galadriel.",
                "I portrayed a young woman forced to confront my estranged father in order to reclaim my kidnapped daughter.",
                "The Aviator",
                "In 2006, I appeared in 'Babel,' 'The Good German,' and 'Notes on a Scandal.'",
                "In 'I'm Not There' (2007), I portrayed Bob Dylan's character, Jude.",
                "My role in 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age' (2007) was Queen Elizabeth I. The movie explored her political battles with Spain and her personal relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh.",
                "I played the character Irina Spalko.",
                "I played a socialite struggling to cope with a decline in circumstances and won an Oscar for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award.",
                "My role was the wicked stepmother.",
                "I portrayed Carol, and Rooney Mara played my love interest.",
                "I appeared in Terrence Malick's films 'Knight of Cups' and 'Song to Song.'",
                "I played the character Hela, the goddess of death.",
                "In the TV series 'Mrs. America.'",
                "In 2021, I appeared in 'Don't Look Up', a dramedy about an impending comet strike  that will destroy Earth, and 'Nightmare Alley', a film noir adapted from a novel by William Lindsay Gresham."
            ],
        "gender": "F"  
        },
    "David Beckham": {
        "knowledge": "Beckham, (born May 2, 1975, Leytonstone, East London, England), English football (soccer) player who gained international fame for his on-field play as well as for his highly publicized personal life. At age 11 Beckham won a football contest, and as a teenager he competed on Manchester United’s youth squad, leading it to a national championship in 1992. Three years later he began playing with the professional team in league competition, and during the 1995–96 season he helped Manchester United win the league title and the Football Association (FA) Cup. Beckham attracted national attention in August 1996 when he scored a goal from the halfway line (a feat roughly equivalent to a golfer’s hole in one). The following year Manchester United successfully defended its league title, and Beckham was voted Young Player of the Year. In the 1998–99 season Manchester United won the league title, the FA Cup, and the European Cup. Beckham was named best midfielder and Most Valuable Player. Considered one of the sport’s elite players, he was perhaps best known for his free kicks and crosses; the 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham paid homage to his kicking ability. After helping Manchester United win three more league titles (2000, 2001, and 2003), he left the team in 2003 to join the Spanish football club Real Madrid. Four years later he signed a record-setting deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States. In October 2008 Beckham signed to play with Italian football powerhouse AC Milan during the MLS off-season. In 2011 he helped the Galaxy win an MLS Cup title. The Galaxy won a second MLS Cup title in 2012, and Beckham left the team at the end of the season. In 2013 he joined the French first-league team Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), and PSG won the French domestic title in his one season with the team. Beckham retired from football soon after winning his championship with PSG. In 1996 Beckham first played on England’s national team, in a World Cup qualifying match. At the 1998 World Cup he drew much criticism after he was ejected from a game for kicking an opponent. England lost the match and was eliminated from the competition. In 2000 Beckham was made captain of the national team. At the 2002 and 2006 World Cups, England was defeated in the quarterfinals. After the 2006 tournament, Beckham stepped down as captain, and he was later dropped from England’s national team. He was recalled to the team in 2007, and the following year he posted his 100th international appearance, becoming the fifth person to do so in the history of English football. Beckham was poised to be the first Englishman to appear in four World Cups, but he tore his Achilles tendon while playing for AC Milan in March 2010 and was ruled out for the 2010 tournament. A healthy but older Beckham was not selected for the English side at the 2012 European Championship, and he finished his national career with 115 international games played, the most in his country’s history for a non-goalkeeper. After his playing days ended, Beckham remained involved in soccer. He notably was the owner and president of the MLS team Inter Miami CF, which made its debut in 2020. In 1999 Beckham married singer Victoria Adams, best known as “Posh Spice” of the Spice Girls pop group, in a lavish ceremony. The intense media attention to the couple increased Beckham’s popularity around the world, as did his style of dress and ever-changing hairstyles. In 2003 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He released an eponymous memoir in 2014.",
        "questions": [
            "When and where were you born?",
            "What did you win at the age of 11?",
            "Which professional football team did you join as a teenager?",
            "In which season did you and your team win the league title and the FA Cup?",
            "What memorable feat did you achieve in August 1996?",
            "In which season did you and your team win the league title, FA Cup, and the European Cup?",
            "What were you particularly known for in your football career?",
            "Which Spanish football club did you join in 2003?",
            "Which team did you sign a record-setting deal with in 2007?",
            "In which year did you help the LA Galaxy win an MLS Cup title?",
            "How many MLS Cup titles did the LA Galaxy win during your time with the team?",
            "Which French first-league team did you join in 2013, and what did you achieve during your time with them?",
            "When did you retire from professional football?",
            "In which year did you first play for England's national team, and in what type of match?",
            "What controversy surrounded you at the 1998 World Cup?",
            "When were you made the captain of England's national team?",
            "How far did England go in the 2002 and 2006 World Cups with you as part of the team?",
            "What happened to you in your football career after the 2006 World Cup?",
            "How many international appearances did you make for England, and what record did you set in 2008?",
            "What did you do after retiring from professional football, and which soccer team were you notably involved with?"
            ],
        "answers": [
            "I was born on May 2, 1975, in Leytonstone, East London, England.",
            "I won a football contest at the age of 11.",
            "I joined Manchester United's youth squad as a teenager.",
            "In the 1995–96 season.",
            "I scored a memorable goal from the halfway line.",
            "In the 1998–99 season, Manchester United won the league title, the FA Cup, and the European Cup.",
            "I was particularly known for my free kicks and crosses.",
            "I joined the Spanish football club Real Madrid.",
            "I signed a record-setting deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer (MLS) in 2007.",
            "I helped the LA Galaxy win an MLS Cup title in 2011.",
            "The LA Galaxy won two MLS Cup titles during my time with the team.",
            "I joined Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) in 2013, and PSG won the French domestic title in my one season with the team.",
            "I retired from football soon after winning the championship with PSG.",
            "I first played on England's national team in a World Cup qualifying match in 1996.",
            "I drew criticism at the 1998 World Cup when I was ejected from a game for kicking an opponent.",
            "I was made captain of the national team in 2000.",
            "At the 2002 and 2006 World Cups, England was defeated in the quarterfinals with me as part of the team.",
            "I stepped down as captain, and I was later dropped from England's national team.",
            "I posted my 100th international appearance, becoming the fifth person to do so in the history of English football.",
            "I remained involved in soccer and was the owner and president of the MLS team Inter Miami CF."
            ],
        "gender": "M" 
        },
    "Emma Watson": {
        "knowledge": "Watson, (born April 15, 1990, Paris, France), British actress and activist who was perhaps best known for playing the young wizard Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films. She also garnered attention as a spokesperson for women’s equality. Watson was born in Paris to British parents who divorced when she was young. She and her brother went to live with their mother in Oxfordshire, England. While a child, Watson decided she wanted to be an actress. Besides attending school, she took acting and singing classes. She also appeared in several school plays. Watson began acting in earnest in 1999 after she auditioned for a part in the film adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001). She won the role of smart and logical Hermione, one of Harry Potter’s best friends. The film was a box-office hit, and Watson reprised her role in the franchise’s other movies: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011). After the Potter films ended, Watson began to look for more mature roles. Her first major part was in the drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), in which she played a high-school senior who becomes friends with a clinically depressed freshman. She subsequently appeared in the crime drama The Bling Ring (2013), the historical thriller The Colony (also known as Colonia; 2015), and the sci-fi thriller The Circle (2017). These films had limited success at the box-office, but Watson had another blockbuster hit with the live-action Disney adaptation (2017) of Beauty and the Beast. In 2019 she appeared as Meg March in Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed Little Women, which was based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s book. Meanwhile, in the midst of her acting career, Watson pursued a college degree. In 2009 she began attending Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She took time off as needed for filming, and she also studied for a year at the University of Oxford. Watson graduated from Brown in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. That year she was named a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She was an advocate for women’s rights and gender equality. From 2016 to 2020 Watson ran an online feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf, to read and discuss books by and about women.",
        "questions": [
            "When and where were you born?",
            "What are you best known for in your career?",
            "Where did you grow up and who did you live with after your parents' divorce?",
            "What did you decide to be as a child?",
            "What steps did you take to pursue your interest in acting as a child?",
            "In which year did you begin your acting career?",
            "How did you land the role of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films?",
            "Can you name some of the Harry Potter films in which you played Hermione?",
            "What was your first major role after the Harry Potter series ended?",
            "What was the plot of 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'?",
            "In which films did you subsequently appear after 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'?",
            "Can you name the Disney adaptation in which you had a blockbuster hit?",
            "In 2019, who did you portray in the film 'Little Women,' and what is the source of the story?",
            "Where and when did you pursue your college degree?",
            "What was your major at Brown University, and when did you graduate?",
            "What role did you take on in 2014, and for what organization?",
            "What were some of your advocacies and causes as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador?",
            "What was the purpose of 'Our Shared Shelf,' the online book club you ran from 2016 to 2020?",
            "How did you balance your education with your acting career?",
            "What are some of your notable achievements and contributions?"
        ],
        "answers": [
            "I was born on April 15, 1990, in Paris, France.",
            "I am best known for playing the young wizard Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films.",
            "I grew up in Paris, France, and after my parents' divorce, I lived with my mother and brother in Oxfordshire, England.",
            "I decided I wanted to be an actress when I was a child.",
            "I took acting and singing classes and appeared in several school plays.",
            "I began my acting career in 1999.",
            "I auditioned for the role of Hermione Granger in the film adaptation of 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone' (2001) and won the part.",
            "I played Hermione Granger in the entire Harry Potter film series, including 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' (2002), 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' (2004), 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' (2005), 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' (2007), 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' (2009), 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1' (2010), and 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' (2011).",
            "My first major role after the Harry Potter series was in the drama 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' (2012).",
            "The film 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' is about the journey of a clinically depressed high school freshman and the friendships he forms.",
            "After 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' I appeared in films like 'The Bling Ring' (2013), 'The Colony' (also known as 'Colonia'; 2015), and 'The Circle' (2017).",
            "I had a blockbuster hit with the live-action Disney adaptation of 'Beauty and the Beast' in 2017.",
            "In 2019, I portrayed Meg March in Greta Gerwig's acclaimed adaptation of 'Little Women,' based on Louisa May Alcott's classic children's book.",
            "I began attending Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2009. I took time off as needed for filming and also studied for a year at the University of Oxford.",
            "I graduated from Brown in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in English literature.",
            "In 2014, I was named a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador.",
            "As a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, I advocated for women's rights and gender equality.",
            "I ran the book club to read and discuss books by and about women.",
            "I took time off from university as needed for filming.",
            "Some of my notable achievements and contributions include my acting career and advocacy for women's rights."
        ], 
        "gender": "F" 
        },
        "Lady Gaga":{
            "knowledge": "Lady Gaga, (born March 28, 1986, New York City, New York, U.S.), American singer-songwriter and performance artist, known for her flamboyant costumes, provocative lyrics, and strong vocal talents, who achieved enormous popular success with songs such as “Just Dance,” “Bad Romance,” and “Born This Way.” Germanotta was born into an Italian American family in New York City. She learned music at an early age and was performing onstage in New York City clubs by the time she was a teenager. She attended an all-girls school, Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Manhattan before going on to study music at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She studied at Tisch for two years before dropping out to manage her own career. After dropping out, she began transforming herself from Germanotta into Lady Gaga, whose style combined glam rock and over-the-top fashion design. In 2007 she and performance artist Lady Starlight formed a revue called the Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow. That same year Lady Gaga, who also wrote songs for other pop artists such as Fergie, the Pussycat Dolls, and Britney Spears, was signed by the singer Akon to Interscope Records and began preparing her debut album, The Fame, which was released in 2008. Although she modeled herself on such theatrical performers as David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period, the New York Dolls, Grace Slick, and Freddie Mercury—her adopted stage name was derived from Queen’s song “Radio Ga Ga”—she created a character that came to occupy a unique space in the music world. Her fashion combined with her up-tempo, synthetic dance music and her edgy, theatrical performance to create stunning sounds and visuals. Indeed, while producing music, Lady Gaga also created her own sexually charged fashions—replete with dazzling wigs and space-age bodysuits—through her creative team Haus of Gaga. Her first single, “Just Dance,” became popular in clubs throughout the United States and Europe and eventually landed at number one on the Billboard Pop Songs chart (also called the radio chart). Three other singles off The Fame—“Poker Face,” “LoveGame,” and “Paparazzi”—also reached number one on the radio chart, making Lady Gaga the first artist in the 17-year history of that chart to have four number ones from a debut album. The Fame was well received critically and proved enormously successful commercially, selling more than eight million copies worldwide by the end of 2009. The album also yielded Lady Gaga five Grammy nominations, including for album of the year and song of the year (“Poker Face”); she captured two Grammys—best dance recording (“Poker Face”) and best electronic/dance album (The Fame)—and her opening duet with Sir Elton John was among the most talked-about elements of the 2010 Grammys telecast. In February 2010 she also picked up three Brit Awards (the British equivalent of the Grammys)—for best international female, best album, and breakthrough act. Her second album, The Fame Monster, was released in November 2009 (it was originally conceived as a bonus disc) and almost instantly produced another hit, “Bad Romance.” Other popular singles from the album followed, including “Telephone” (which featured Beyoncé, as did a nine-minute video produced by Jonas Åkerlund starring the pair and referencing Quentin Tarantino’s film Kill Bill: Vol. 1 [2003]) and “Alejandro.” During 2010 Lady Gaga proved to be one of the most commercially successful artists, with a sold-out concert tour (which had been launched to coincide with the release of The Fame Monster), while she also headlined Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival and played in front of a record 20,000 people at NBC’s Today show. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s most powerful women, and she capped off 2010 by being named Billboard magazine’s artist of the year. After arriving at the 2011 Grammy Awards ceremony encased in a giant egg, Lady Gaga went on to claim honours for best pop vocal album (for The Fame Monster) and best female pop vocal performance and best short form video (for “Bad Romance”). Lady Gaga’s third album, Born This Way (2011), found the entertainer reaching back to earlier musical eras for inspiration. As a blonde dance-pop performer with a penchant for provocation, Lady Gaga had often earned comparisons to the singer Madonna, and on the album’s first two singles the similarities were especially pronounced. The title track was a self-empowerment anthem in the style of Madonna’s 1989 single “Express Yourself,” while “Judas” brazenly mixed sexual and religious imagery. Both songs quickly became hits. Other tracks on the album featured guest appearances from guitarist Brian May of Queen and saxophonist Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. In 2013 Lady Gaga released Artpop. Although the energetic lead single “Applause” extended her string of chart successes, the album was perceived as a commercial disappointment. She came back the following year with Cheek to Cheek, a collection of standards that she recorded with Tony Bennett. The recording topped the Billboard 200 as well as the jazz and traditional jazz album charts, and it earned the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. The duo also won that award for their second collaboration, Love for Sale (2021), a tribute album to Cole Porter. During this time Lady Gaga continued to record solo albums. The relatively understated Joanne (2016) performed poorly until Lady Gaga’s halftime Super Bowl performance in February 2017 brought it favourable attention. For her sixth studio album, Chromatica (2020), Lady Gaga returned to her earlier music, mixing disco and electronic-pop. In addition to recording music, Lady Gaga made occasional film appearances, notably in Machete Kills (2013) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). She played a vampiric countess with no regard for life or suffering in the fifth season of the television show American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–16). For her performance in the anthology series, Lady Gaga received a Golden Globe Award. She also appeared in the sixth season, which aired in 2016. Lady Gaga garnered critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for her first lead role, a guileless up-and-coming singer-songwriter in the 2018 remake of the movie A Star Is Born. She cowrote most of that movie’s songs, many of which she performed with costar and director Bradley Cooper. The lead single, “Shallow,” won two Grammy Awards and the Oscar for best original song. In 2021 Lady Gaga appeared in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, which centres on the true story of the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who headed his family’s luxury fashion brand. Lady Gaga also contributed songs to other films. She notably cowrote and performed “Til It Happens to You” for the documentary The Hunting Ground (2015) and “Hold My Hand” for Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Both tracks received Oscar nominations for best original song. Lady Gaga cultivated a devoted following, particularly among gay men (she acknowledged her own bisexuality), who became some of her most loyal fans. She became particularly outspoken on gay rights, especially same-sex marriage, and was a featured speaker at the 2009 National Equality March in Washington, D.C. In 2021 Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the U.S. presidential inauguration of Joe Biden.",
            "questions": [
                "When and where were you born?",
                "What is your family background?",
                "Which New York City school did you attend before pursuing music?",
                "Where did you study music before dropping out to manage your own career?",
                "What was the name of the revue you formed with Lady Starlight in 2007?",
                "Who signed you to Interscope Records in 2007?",
                "What was the title of your debut album, and when was it released?",
                "How many Grammy nominations did you receive for 'The Fame' album, and in which categories did you win?",
                "What was the title of your second album, and what was its initial purpose?",
                "Which hit single from 'The Fame Monster' was released in November 2009?",
                "Which famous artist was featured in the song 'Telephone'?",
                "In 2010, what was the capacity of the crowd at your performance on NBC's Today show?",
                "Which magazines named you one of the most influential people and one of the world's most powerful women in 2010?",
                "Who did you collaborate with for the album 'Cheek to Cheek'?",
                "What type of songs did you record for 'Cheek to Cheek,' and which Grammy did it win?",
                "What was the title of your sixth studio album, released in 2020?",
                "In which television series did you portray a vampiric countess and receive a Golden Globe Award?",
                "For which role did you receive an Academy Award nomination, and what was the name of the movie?",
                "For which song from the movie 'A Star Is Born' did you win two Grammy Awards and an Oscar for Best Original Song?",
                "In Ridley Scott's 'House of Gucci,' what true story does the movie center on?"
            ],
            "answers": [
                "I was born on March 28, 1986, in New York City.",
                "I was born into an Italian American family.",
                "I attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan.",
                "I studied music at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University before dropping out to manage my own career.",
                "The revue I formed with Lady Starlight in 2007 was called the 'Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow.'",
                "I was signed by the singer Akon to Interscope Records in 2007.",
                "My debut album was titled 'The Fame,' and it was released in 2008.",
                "I received five Grammy nominations for 'The Fame,' and I won two Grammys for 'Poker Face' (best dance recording) and 'The Fame' (best electronic/dance album).",
                "My second album was titled 'The Fame Monster,' and it was originally conceived as a bonus disc.",
                "The hit single from 'The Fame Monster' that was released in November 2009 was 'Bad Romance.'",
                "Beyoncé was featured in the song 'Telephone.'",
                "In 2010, I played in front of a record 20,000 people at NBC's Today show.",
                "I was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the world's most powerful women in 2010.",
                "I collaborated with Tony Bennett for the album 'Cheek to Cheek.'",
                "'Cheek to Cheek' featured standards and won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album.",
                "My sixth studio album, released in 2020, was titled 'Chromatica.'",
                "In the fifth season of the television show 'American Horror Story: Hotel' (2015–16).",
                "I received an Academy Award nomination for my lead role in the 2018 remake of the movie 'A Star Is Born.'",
                "The song 'Shallow' from 'A Star Is Born'.",
                "It centers on the true story of the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who headed his family's luxury fashion brand."
            ], 
            "gender": "F" 
        },
        "Madonna":{
        "knowledge": "Madonna, (born August 16, 1958, Bay City, Michigan, U.S.), American singer, songwriter, actress, and entrepreneur whose immense popularity in the 1980s and ’90s allowed her to achieve levels of power and control that were nearly unprecedented for a woman in the entertainment industry. Born into a large Italian American family, Madonna studied dance at the University of Michigan and with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City in the late 1970s before relocating briefly to Paris as a member of Patrick Hernandez’s disco revue. Returning to New York City, she performed with a number of rock groups before signing with Sire Records. Her first hit, “Holiday,” in 1983, provided the blueprint for her later material—an upbeat dance club sound with sharp production and an immediate appeal. Madonna’s melodic pop incorporated catchy choruses, and her lyrics concerned love, sex, and relationships—ranging from the breezy innocence of “True Blue” (1986) to the erotic fantasies of “Justify My Love” (1990) to the spirituality of later songs such as “Ray of Light” (1998). Criticized by some as being limited in range, her sweet girlish voice nonetheless was well suited to pop music. Madonna was the first female artist to exploit fully the potential of the music video. She collaborated with top designers (Jean-Paul Gaultier), photographers (Steven Meisel and Herb Ritts), and directors (Mary Lambert and David Fincher), drawing inspiration from underground club culture or the avant-garde to create distinctive sexual and satirical images—from the knowing ingenue of “Like a Virgin” (1984) to the controversial red-dressed “sinner” who kisses a Black saint in “Like a Prayer” (1989). By 1991 she had scored 21 top ten hits in the United States and sold some 70 million albums internationally, generating $1.2 billion in sales. Committed to controlling her image and career herself, Madonna became the head of Maverick, a subsidiary of Time Warner created by the entertainment giant as part of a $60 million deal with the performer. Her success signaled a clear message of financial control to other women in the industry, but in terms of image she was a more ambivalent role model. In 1992 Madonna took her role as a sexual siren to its full extent when she published Sex, a soft-core pornographic coffee-table book featuring her in a variety of “erotic” poses. She was criticized for being exploitative and overcalculating, and writer Norman Mailer said she had become “secretary to herself.” Soon afterward Madonna temporarily withdrew from pop music to concentrate on a film career that had begun with a strong performance in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), faltered with the flimsy Shanghai Surprise (1986) and Dick Tracy (1990), and recovered with Truth or Dare (1991, also known as In Bed with Madonna), a documentary of one of her tours, and A League of Their Own (1992). She scored massive success in 1996 with the starring role in the film musical Evita. That year she also gave birth to a daughter. In 1998 Madonna released her first album of new material in four years, Ray of Light. A fusion of techno music and self-conscious lyrics, it was a commercial and critical success, earning the singer her first musical Grammy Awards, among them the award for best pop album (her previous win had been for a video). She won another Grammy the following year, for the song “Beautiful Stranger,” which she cowrote and performed for the movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999). Her experimentation in electronica continued with Music (2000). In 2005 she returned to her roots with Confessions on a Dance Floor, which took the Grammy for best electronic/dance album. Despite a marriage in the 1980s to actor Sean Penn and another to English director Guy Ritchie (married 2000; divorced 2008), with whom she had a son, Madonna remained resolutely independent. (She also later adopted four children from Malawi.) That independent streak, however, did not prevent her from enlisting the biggest names in music to assist on specific projects. This fact was clear on Hard Candy (2008), a hip-hop-infused effort with writing and vocal and production work by Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Pharrell Williams of the hit-making duo the Neptunes. With MDNA (2012), which featured cameos from rappers M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, she continued to prove herself a shrewd assimilator of cutting-edge musical styles. Rebel Heart (2015), featuring production work by Diplo and Kanye West and guest appearances from Minaj and Chance the Rapper, was an ode to her career. In 2019 Madonna released her 14th studio album, Madame X, which was inspired by her 2017 move to Lisbon, Portugal, and contained music influenced by Latin pop, art pop, and hip-hop. Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. In addition to acting in movies—she also starred in the romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (2000) and in Ritchie’s Swept Away (2002)—Madonna pursued work behind the camera. She cowrote and directed Filth and Wisdom (2008), a comedy about a trio of mismatched flatmates in London, as well as the drama W.E. (2011), which juxtaposed the historical romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII with the fictional story of a woman in the 1990s researching Simpson’s life.",
        "questions": [
            "When and where were you born?",
            "Where did you study dance before your career took off?",
            "Which was your first hit song, and what year was it released?",
            "How did you pioneer the use of music videos in your career?",
            "What was your role in Maverick, a subsidiary of Time Warner?",
            "In 1992, you published a controversial coffee-table book called 'Sex.' What was the book about?",
            "What significant documentary film did you release in 1991?",
            "What major musical role did you play in the film 'Evita' in 1996?",
            "Which album brought you your first Grammy Awards?",
            "Who did you collaborate with on your albums 'Hard Candy' and 'MDNA'?",
            "Where did you move to in 2017 and the place inspired which album in 2019?",
            "When were you inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?",
            "Besides singing, in which films did you take on acting roles?",
            "What was the subject of the film 'W.E.' that you directed?",
            "Who were your notable spouses, and how many children did you adopt?",
            "Which song did you perform for the movie 'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)'?",
            "How did your 1980s and '90s popularity empower you in the entertainment industry?",
            "By 1991 how many top ten hits in the US had you scored and how many albums did you sell internationally?",
            "What kind of music is your album 'Music' known for?",
            "What was the focus of your 2015 album 'Rebel Heart'?"
            ],
        "answers": [
            "I was born on August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, U.S.",
            "I studied dance at the University of Michigan and with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City in the late 1970s.",
            "My first hit song was 'Holiday,' and it was released in 1983.",
            "I was the first female artist to exploit fully the potential of the music video, collaborating with top designers, photographers, and directors to create distinctive sexual and satirical images.",
            "I became the head of Maverick.",
            "It was a controversial coffee-table book featuring soft-core pornographic content and her various erotic poses.",
            "I released 'Truth or Dare,' also known as 'In Bed with Madonna.'",
            "I played the starring role in the film musical 'Evita' in 1996.",
            "I won my first Grammy Awards for the album, Ray of Light.",
            "I collaborated with Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Pharrell Williams on my album 'Hard Candy' and rappers M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj on 'MDNA.'",
            "I moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2017, which inspired my 2019 album 'Madame X.'",
            "I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.",
            "I took on acting roles in films such as 'Desperately Seeking Susan,' 'Shanghai Surprise,' and 'Dick Tracy.'",
            "The subject of the film 'W.E.' juxtaposed the historical romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII with the fictional story of a woman in the 1990s researching Simpson's life.",
            "My notable spouses included Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie, and I adopted four children from Malawi.",
            "I performed the song 'Beautiful Stranger,'.",
            "My immense popularity in the 1980s and '90s allowed me to achieve levels of power and control nearly unprecedented for a woman in the entertainment industry.",
            "I had scored 21 top ten hits in the United States and sold some 70 million albums internationally.",
            "My album 'Music' is known for my experimentation in electronica.",
            "The focus of my 2015 album 'Rebel Heart' was an ode to my career."
        ], 
        "gender": "F" 
         },
    "Mark Zuckerberg":{
        "knowledge": "Zuckerberg, (born May 14, 1984, White Plains, New York, U.S.), American computer programmer who was cofounder and CEO (2004– ) of Facebook, a social networking website. After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University in 2002. On February 4, 2004, he launched thefacebook dot com (renamed Facebook in 2005), a directory in which fellow Harvard students entered their own information and photos into a template that he had devised. Within two weeks half of the student body had signed up. Zuckerberg’s roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, helped him add features and make the site available to other campuses across the country. Facebook quickly became popular as registered users could create profiles, upload photos and other media, and keep in touch with friends. It differed from other social networking sites, however, in its emphasis on real names (and e-mail addresses), or “trusted connections.” It also laid particular emphasis on networking, with information disseminated not only to each individual’s network of friends but also to friends of friends—what Zuckerberg called the “social graph.” In the summer of 2004 the trio moved their headquarters to Palo Alto, California, where Zuckerberg talked venture capitalist Peter Thiel into giving them seed money. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on the fledgling company, of which he became CEO and president. In May 2005 Facebook received its first major infusion of venture capital ($12.7 million). Four months later Facebook opened to registration by high-school students. Meanwhile, foreign colleges and universities also began to sign up, and by September 2006 anyone with an e-mail address could join a regional network based on where he or she lived. About that time Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo!, but in 2007 Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft in which the software company paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook; two years later Digital Sky Technologies purchased a 1.96 percent share for $200 million. In 2008 Zuckerberg’s new worth was estimated at about $1.5 billion. After Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) of stock in 2012, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at more than $19 billion. In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms. The name change reflected an emphasis on the “metaverse”, in which users would interact in virtual reality environments.",
        "questions": [
            "When and where were you born?",
            "Where did you attend school before enrolling at Harvard University?",
            "What was the original name of Facebook when it was launched in 2004?",
            "Who were your roommates and what role did they play in the development of Facebook?",
            "What was the distinctive feature of Facebook in terms of user information?",
            "In which city did you move the headquarters of Facebook in the summer of 2004?",
            "How did you secure initial funding for Facebook?",
            "Why did you decide to drop out of Harvard?",
            "How much venture capital did Facebook receive in May 2005?",
            "When did Facebook open registration to high-school students?",
            "How did Facebook expand its user base to include regional networks?",
            "Which company made a $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007?",
            "What was your estimated net worth in 2008?",
            "How did your net worth change after Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) in 2012?",
            "In October 2021, Facebook announced a name change to Meta Platforms. What was the reason behind this name change?",
            "What term did you use to describe the emphasis on virtual reality environments?",
            "Can you describe the concept of the 'social graph' that Facebook emphasized?",
            "What could registered Facebook users do in the beginning?",
            "How quickly did half of the student body at Harvard sign up for Facebook when it was launched?",
            "Who made an offer to buy Facebook for $1 billion in the mid-2000s?"
        ],
        "answers": [
            "I was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, U.S.",
            "I attended Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Harvard University.",
            "The original name of Facebook when it was launched in 2004 was 'thefacebook dot com.'",
            "My roommates were Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, and they helped me add features and make Facebook available to other campuses across the country.",
            "The distinctive feature of Facebook was its emphasis on real names and e-mail addresses.",
            "I moved the headquarters of Facebook to Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 2004.",
            "I talked venture capitalist Peter Thiel into giving me seed money to fund Facebook.",
            "I dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on my fledgling company.",
            "Facebook received $12.7 million in its first major infusion of venture capital in May 2005.",
            "Facebook opened registration to high-school students four months after its launch.",
            "Facebook expanded its user base to include regional networks, allowing anyone with an email address to join a network based on their location.",
            "In 2007, Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook.",
            "My estimated net worth in 2008 was about $1.5 billion.",
            "After Facebook's IPO in 2012, my net worth was estimated at more than $19 billion.",
            "Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms with an emphasis on the 'metaverse.'",
            "I used the term 'metaverse' to describe the emphasis on virtual reality environments.",
            "The 'social graph' in Facebook referred to the network of friends and friends of friends through which information was disseminated.",
            "They could create profiles, upload photos and other media, and keep in touch with friends.",
            "Half of the student body at Harvard signed up for Facebook within two weeks of its launch.",
            "Yahoo! made the offer."
        ], 
        "gender": "M" 
        }
}