title: Umberto II of Italy

text: In the belated hope of influencing public opinion ahead of a referendum on the continuation of the monarchy, Victor Emmanuel formally abdicated in favour of Umberto on 9 May 1946 and left for Egypt. Before departing for Egypt, Victor Emmanuel saw Umberto for the last time, saying farewell in a cold, emotionless way. The Catholic Church saw the continuation of the monarchy as the best way of keeping the Italian left out of power, and during the referendum campaign Catholic priests used their pulpits to warn that "all the pains of hell" were reserved for those who voted for a republic. The Catholic Church presented the referendum not as a question of republic vs. monarchy, but instead as a question of Communism vs. Catholicism, warning to vote for a republic would be to vote for the Communists. On the day before the referendum, 1 June 1946, Pope Pius XII, in a sermon on St. Peter's Square, said in what was widely seen as endorsing Umberto: "What is the problem? The problem is whether one or the other of those nations, of those two Latin sisters [elections were taking place in France on the same day] with several thousands of years of civilisation will continue to learn against the solid rock of Christianity...or on the contrary do they want to hand over the fate of their future to the impossible omnipotence of a material state without extraterrestrial ideals, without religion, and without God. One of these two alternatives shall occur according to whether the names of the champions or the destroyers of Christian civilization emerge victorious from the urns". Umberto believed that the support from the Catholic Church would be decisive and that he would win the referendum by a narrow margin. The De Gasperi cabinet accepted Umberto as King, but refused to accept the normal appellation for Italian kings "by the Grace of God and the will of the people".


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: In northern Italy, which had been the scene of the guerrilla struggle against the Italian Social Republic and the Germans, much of the population had been radicalised by the struggle, and feelings were very much against the monarchy. Kogan wrote Victor Emmanuel's flight from Rome was "bitterly remembered" in the "Nord" as an act of cowardice and betrayal by the King who abandoned his people to the German occupation without a fight. The socialist leader Sandro Pertini warned Umberto not to campaign in Milan as otherwise he would be lynched by the Milanese working class if he should appear in that city. Republican cartoonists mercilessly mocked Umberto's physical quirks, as the American historian Anthony Di Renzo wrote that he was: "Tall, stiff, and balding, he had smooth, clean-shaven blue cheeks, thin lips, and a weak chin. Dressed in military uniform as First Marshal of the Empire, decorated with the Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, he seemed more like a majordomo than a king. On the campaign trail, Umberto was received with much more friendliness in the south of Italy than in the north. People in the "Mezzogiorno" loved their King, who on the campaign trail in Sicily showed an encyclopedic knowledge of Sicilian villages which greatly endeared him to the Sicilians. Umberto's principal arguments for retaining the monarchy were it was the best way to revive Italy as a great power; it was the only institution capable of holding Italy together by checking regional separatism; and it would uphold Catholicism against anti-clericalism. The republicans charged that Umberto had done nothing to oppose Fascism, with his major interest being his "glittering social life" in the high society of Rome and Turin, and that as a general knew that Italy was unready for war in 1940, but did not warn Mussolini against entering the war.


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: Mack Smith wrote that "some of the more extreme monarchists" expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the referendum, claiming that millions of voters, many of them pro-monarchist, were unable to vote because they had not yet been able to return to their own local areas to register. Nor had the issue of Italy's borders been settled definitively, so the voting rights of those in disputed areas had not been satisfactorily clarified. Other allegations were made about voter manipulation, and even the issue of how to interpret the votes became controversial, as it appeared that not just a majority of those validly voting but of those votes cast (including spoiled votes), was needed to reach an outcome in the event the monarchy lost by a tight margin.


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: On 2 June 1946 referendum, which saw the participation of almost 90% of voters, over 54% majority voted to make Italy a republic. The conservative, rural "Mezzogiorno" (southern Italy) region voted solidly for the monarchy while the more urbanised and industrialised "Nord" (northern Italy) voted equally firmly for a republic. In northern Italy, which had been ruled by the Italian Social Republic, the charges of homosexuality made against Umberto had an impact on the voters, causing at least some conservatives to vote for the republic. From his exile in Egypt, where King Farouk had welcomed him as a guest, Victor Emmanuel expressed no surprise at the result of the referendum as he always viewed Umberto as a failure who was unfit to be King, and claimed that the monarchists would have won the referendum if only he had not abdicated. Umberto himself had expected to win the referendum and was deeply shocked when the majority of his subjects chose a republic.


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: The republic was formally proclaimed four days later, ending Umberto's brief 34-day reign as King. Umberto at first refused to accept what he called "the outrageous illegality" of the referendum, and took his deposition badly. In his last official statement as King, Umberto refused to accept the republic, saying he was the victim of a "coup d'état" by his ministers and the referendum had been rigged against him. In response, De Gasperi, who became Acting President, replied in a press statement: "We must strive to understand the tragedy of someone who, after inheriting a military defeat and a disastrous complicity with dictatorship, tried hard in recent months to work with patience and good will towards a better future. But this final act of the thousand-year old House of Savoy must be seen as part of our national catastrophe; it is an expiation, an expiation forced upon all of us, even those who have not shared directly in the guilt of the dynasty". Some monarchists advocated using force to prevent a republic from being proclaimed, even at the risk of a civil war, but Mack Smith wrote that: "Common sense and patriotism saved Umberto from accepting such counsel". Umberto rejected the advice that he should go to Naples, proclaim a rival government with the intention of starting a civil war in which the Army would presumably side with the House of Savoy, under the grounds that "My House united Italy. I will not divide it". The monarchy of the House of Savoy formally ended on 12 June 1946, and Umberto left the country. Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi assumed office as Italy's interim Head of State. At about 3 pm on 13 June 1946, Umberto left the Quirinal Palace for the last time with the servants all assembled in the courtyard to see him off and many were in tears. At Ciampino Airport in Rome, as Umberto boarded the aeroplane that was to take him to Lisbon, a "carabiniere" grabbed him by the hand and said: "Your Majesty, we will never forget you!"


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: King Umberto II lived for 37 years in exile, in Cascais, on the Portuguese Riviera. He never set foot in his native land again; the 1948 constitution of the Italian Republic not only forbade amending the constitution to restore the monarchy, but until 2002 barred all male heirs to the defunct Italian throne from ever returning to Italian soil. Female members of the Savoy family were not barred, except queens consort. Relations between Umberto and Queen Marie José grew more strained during their exile, and in effect their marriage broke up, with Marie José moving to Switzerland while Umberto remained in Portugal, though, as Catholics, the couple never filed for divorce.


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: At the time when Umberto was dying, in 1983, President Sandro Pertini wanted the Italian Parliament to allow Umberto to return to his native country. Umberto died in Geneva and was interred in Hautecombe Abbey, for centuries the burial place of the members of the House of Savoy.


title: Umberto II of Italy

text: At birth, Umberto was granted the traditional title of Prince of Piedmont. This was formalised by Royal Decree on 29 September 1904.


title: Sadie Frost

text: Sadie Liza Frost (née Vaughan; born 19 June 1965) is an English actress, producer and fashion designer, who ran fashion label Frost French (until its closure in 2011) and a film production company (Blonde to Black Pictures).


title: Sadie Frost

text: Frost was born in Islington, north London, in 1965 to psychedelic artist David Vaughan, who worked for the Beatles, and his then-16-year-old muse, actress Mary Davidson.


title: Sadie Frost

text: She has described her childhood as a "chaotic but positive experience". She spent much of her youth in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, after her parents separated. Her parents had six relationships between them, which gave her ten siblings, including fellow actresses Holly Davidson and Jade Davidson; primary school teacher Jessi Frost; brothers called Gabriel Jupiter and Tobias Vaughan; and a sister named Sunshine Purple Tara Velvet.


title: Sadie Frost

text: Frost appeared in a Jelly Tots advertisement in 1968 at age three and appeared with Morecambe and Wise in 1970 at age five. She attained a scholarship to the Italia Conti Academy, but after an early eating disorder, she gave up acting at 13 and attended Hampstead School instead.


title: Sadie Frost

text: As an actress, Frost has performed in "Press Gang" and "Casualty". Her first film role was in "Empire State" (1987), although her most memorable film appearance was as the beautiful, ill-fated Lucy Westenra in Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992). She earned her living mainly through appearing in music videos, including for Pulp's song "Common People", Planet Perfecto featuring Grace's "Not Over Yet '99", and various productions for Spandau Ballet, where she met first husband Gary Kemp. Frost and Kemp appeared together in the film "The Krays" (1990). They appeared in two more films together. One of these films, "Magic Hunter" (1994), required them to participate in a love scene, although they were separated at the time.


title: Sadie Frost

text: Frost took a role opposite Jude Law in Paul W. S. Anderson's directorial debut "Shopping". After marrying Law and having three children with him, she cut down on her acting commitments in the late 1990s, and moved into producing and co-founding the production company Natural Nylon.


title: Sadie Frost

text: In 1999, Frost co-founded the fashion label Frost French with her friend Jemima French. The label started in lingerie and expanded into clothing collections. Frost French won "Elle"s Designers of the Year Award 2004. In 2004, she wrote, presented, and produced a short-lived series "What Sadie did next..." for E4, and in 2005 appeared in "Eating with...Sadie Frost" on BBC2. In March 2006, Frost flew to South Africa to part-fund an orphanage for the "Homes of Hope" project. In 2009, she made her West End debut in "Touched ... For the Very First Time", a new one-woman show by Zoë Lewis, directed by Douglas Rintoul and produced by Imogen Lloyd Webber.


title: Sadie Frost

text: In January 2010, Frost starred in the play "Fool for Love" alongside Carl Barat, formerly of The Libertines. The play showed at the Riverside Studios theatre.


title: Sadie Frost

text: In 1981, when 16 and dancing in a music video, Frost met Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp. They married shortly before her 23rd birthday, on 7 May 1988. Their son, Finlay, was born in 1990. Frost and Kemp were married for seven years and divorced on 19 August 1995.


title: Sadie Frost

text: Frost met Jude Law during the work on the 1994 film "Shopping". They married in September 1997 and have three children: son Rafferty (born 1996), daughter Iris (born 2000), and son Rudy (born 2002). Frost and Law divorced on 29 October 2003. Frost named model Kate Moss as Iris's godmother and BBC Radio 1 DJ Nick Grimshaw as Rudy's godfather.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Vicente Fernández Gómez (17 February 1940 – 12 December 2021) was a Mexican singer, songwriter, actor, and film producer. Nicknamed "Chente" (short for Vicente), "El Charro de Huentitán" (The Charro from Huentitán), "El Ídolo de México" (The Idol of Mexico), and "El Rey de la Música Ranchera" (The King of Ranchera Music), Fernández started his career as a busker, and went on to become a cultural icon, having recorded more than 100 albums and contributing to more than 30 films. His repertoire consisted of rancheras and other Mexican classics.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández's work earned him four Grammy Awards, nine Latin Grammy Awards, fourteen Lo Nuestro Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making him one of the best-selling regional Mexican artists of all time. In 2016, Fernández retired from performing live, although he continued to record and publish music.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Vicente Fernández was born on 17 February 1940 in the village of Huentitán El Alto, Jalisco, the son of a rancher and a housewife. When he was between 6 and 7 years old, he used to go with his mother to see movies starring Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete and, as he himself once recalled, he told his mother that "when I grow up I'm going to be like them". Thereafter he had a taste for music and at the age of 8 he was given a guitar, which he learned to play at the same time he began to study folk music.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández's family found it difficult to support themselves by selling milk from the cows on their ranch, so after Fernández finished elementary school he and his family moved to Tijuana. Once a teenager, Fernández began working various jobs, including as a bricklayer, painter, and cabinetmaker. During his working day he sang, so many construction companies asked to have him as a worker. After these jobs he was hired to work as a cashier in his uncle's restaurant. At the age of 14 he started singing in restaurants and at weddings, joining several mariachi groups such as Mariachi Amanecer de Pepe Mendoza and Mariachi de José Luis Aguilar. It was then when, in Jalisco, he participated in the radio program "Amanecer Tapatío", and began to be recognized locally. At the age of 21 he appeared on the television show "La calandria musical". It was his first paid show.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: On 27 December 1963 he married Maria del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor, with whom he had his first son, Vicente, who was born premature and had to be incubated at home because Fernández could not pay the hospital. That year, his 47-year-old mother died of cancer.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1965 he moved to Mexico City to seek a future in the world of music. His first attempts with the record companies were unsuccessful, because it was the time of stardom for the singer Javier Solís. There he arranged to sing in a program of the radio network XEX-AM, which at that time was the most important in the country. A few days after the premature death of Solís in April 1966, Fernández received his first offers for albums. His first contract was with CBS Records of Mexico, the recording label in the Mexican department of CBS Records International, for whom he recorded albums such as "Soy de Abajo", "Ni en Defensa Propia", and "Palabra de rey". Some of Fernández's songs such as "Tu Camino y El Mío" and "Perdóname" were very successful.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández had to wait a decade to consolidate his career. With the death in 1973 of José Alfredo Jiménez, one of the great icons of rancheras, Fernández became a reference point in the music industry. His next album was "La voz que estabas esperando" and the following albums, titled "El rey", "El hijo del pueblo", and "Para recordar", sold millions of copies.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1976, with the song "Volver Volver", written in 1972 by Fernando Z. Maldonado, his fame was catapulted throughout the country and the American continent based on the sales of this recording. That song came to be covered by more than twenty singers, including Chavela Vargas, Ry Cooder, and Nana Mouskouri.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In the 1980s the style of Fernández's songs changed from bolero ranchero to a ranchera focused on migration. In fact, the song "Los Mandados" was a reference to those Mexicans migrating to the United States and reproduced macho and patriotic stereotypes. These were the years in which he built his ranch "Los 3 Potrillos", which would end up being his music production center. In 1983 he released his album "15 Grandes con el Numero Uno", which was the first to exceed one million copies sold. In 1984 he gave a concert at the Plaza de Toros México, which was attended by 54,000 people.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1987 he launched his first tour outside the United States and Mexico when he traveled to Bolivia and Colombia.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The U.S. press in 1991 was already talking about Fernández as the "Mexican Sinatra" and he released ranchera classics such as "Las clásicas de José Alfredo Jiménez" (1990), "Lástima que seas ajena" (1993), "Aunque me duela el alma" (1995), "Mujeres divinas", "Acá entre nos", "Me voy a quitar de en medio" (1998), and "La mentira" (1998), which all became classics.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1998 his elder son Vicente Jr. was kidnapped by the "Mocha Dedos", who demanded 5 million dollars as ransom. After Fernández Sr. paid $3.2 million dollars to free him Vicente Jr. was abandoned outside the family ranch 121 days later with two of his fingers having been amputated. Fernández did all this without going to the police; both he and his other son Alejandro continued to perform concerts to maintain the appearance of normalcy to the public. In 2008 the kidnappers were sentenced to 50 years in prison.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 2001 he launched the "Lazos Invincibles" tour, together with his son Alejandro. In 2006 Vicente Fernandez released the album "La tragedia del vaquero", which was certified platinum in the United States.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: He won a Latin Grammy again in 2008 with the album "Para Siempre" which was released in 2007. In 2008 he released "Primera Fila", which was certified double platinum in Mexico, platinum in Central America, platinum in Colombia, and double platinum plus gold in the United States. The album remained seven consecutive weeks at number one on "Billboard", and led him to win another Latin Grammy for Best Ranchero Album.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The concert he performed at the Zócalo in Mexico City on 14 February 2009 broke attendance records, with almost 220,000 people gathered to hear him. That same year he released the album "Necesito de ti", which won a Grammy and a Latin Grammy the following year. In September 2010 the album "El Hombre Que Más Te Amó" was released, produced by Vicente himself, for which he won a Latin Grammy again. He released "Otra vez", also produced by him, in November 2011.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Fernández was one of the 50 Latin singers who participated in the charity song "Somos El Mundo 25 Por Haiti", a cover version of "We Are the World".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández started off the opening ceremony of the 2011 Pan American Games, hosted by Guadalajara, and sang "México Lindo y Querido" and "Guadalajara"; later in the ceremony he sang the Mexican national anthem before the parade of the athletes' delegations. In October 2011, taking advantage of his U.S. tour, he signed a three-year agreement with Budweiser for the second time to promote scholarships for Hispanic American students through the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: On 8 February 2012, he announced in a press conference, surprisingly, his intention to retire from the stage, but he specified that he would continue recording albums and that it was not due to health reasons but because it was time to enjoy his work. Two months later, in the middle of a farewell tour throughout the country and Latin America, he released the album "Los 2 Vicentes", together with his son Vicente Jr.; the album included the theme song of the telenovela "Amor bravío".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: That same year he recorded, together with Tony Bennett, "Return to me" at his ranch in Guadalajara for Bennett's album "Viva Duets", in which Bennett sang in Spanish. In a later interview, Bennett said that Fernández had been "his favorite". In 2012 he also released the album "Hoy" and won again a Latin Grammy Award in the 2013 edition. This was followed by the albums "Mano a mano, tangos a la manera de Vicente Fernández", in 2014 (for which he won his second Grammy for Best Regional Mexican Album and was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Best Ranchera Album), and "Muriendo de amor", in 2015.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: On 28 November 2013 Fernández presented his book entitled "Pero sigo siendo el rey" in which he collects anecdotes and more than two hundred unpublished photographs about his professional career.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The farewell concert, titled "Un azteca en el Azteca" ("An Aztec in the Aztec"), took place on 16 April 2016 at the Estadio Azteca, in front of more than 80,000 people; admission was free. He sang more than 40 songs over more than four hours, the longest concert of his professional career. He only had one special guest, his son Alejandro. The concert was collected on an album, with the same name, for which Fernández won the Grammy Award for Best Regional Mexican Music Album in 2017.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Despite retiring from the stage, he continued recording albums and songs, such as the album "Más romántico que nunca" in 2018 and "A mis 80s" in 2020, which earned him his ninth Latin Grammy Award for best ranchera album in 2021.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In his 50-year career he sold more than 65 million records and recorded more than 80 albums and more than 300 songs.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernandez's debut in the movies was in 1971 with the film "Tacos al carbón". He starred in his first film in "La ley del monte" in 1976. During the 20 years he dedicated to acting, he starred in 30 films, 18 of which were under the direction of Rafael Villaseñor Kuri, and shared the stage with nationally renowned actors such as Blanca Guerra, Sara García, Fernando Soto, Resortes, and Lucía Méndez. In films such as "Por tu maldito amor", "La ley del monte", "El hijo del pueblo", and "Mi querido viejo", he introduced his music, so the title of the film reflected the title of the song introduced. His main role was that of the stereotypical Mexican "macho" and "gallant" man.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: As a film producer he debuted in 1974 with the film "El hijo del pueblo". His last film was "Mi querido viejo", in 1991, and thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to music.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández sparked controversy after statements he made during an interview in May 2019 regarding his health. Fernández stated that he had been interned at a hospital in Houston, United States to undergo a liver surgery, but he decided to reject a transplant because he did not "want to sleep with [his] wife while having the liver of another man, who could have been a homosexual or a drug user".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In January 2021, Fernández sparked another controversy after placing his hand on a fan's breast while taking a picture with her family. A few days later, Fernández issued an apology to the woman's family, stating that "I admit that I was wrong, I don't know if I was joking, maybe it was a joke [...] I don't know. I do not remember, there were many people (with whom I took photos), sincerely I offer an apology".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In February 2021, Fernández was accused of sexual assault by a singer named Lupita Castro. Castro alleged that the incident had happened 40 years prior, when she was 17, and that she had kept her silence because of his influence and because of his threats of violence against her. Castro refused to go to court against Fernández.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández married María del Refugio Abarca "Cuquita" on 27 December 1963, the sister of a close friend of his whom he met in his hometown. Three children were born from the marriage, Vicente Jr., Gerardo, and Alejandro and a fourth daughter, Alejandra, is his niece, whom they adopted. From their children they had 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren. Throughout his life he was accused by several persons of being unfaithful, which he always rejected.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: With his sons Alejandro and Vicente Jr, both singers, Vicente went on stage to sing with them on several occasions. The last time he went on stage was to sing with his son Alejandro, and to promote the musical career of one of his grandsons, Alex, in 2019.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernandez suffered from cancer on two occasions: in 2002 he overcame prostate cancer and in 2012 he had a tumor removed from his liver. In 2013 he suffered a thrombosis that caused him to lose his voice temporarily and in 2015 he underwent surgery to remove abdominal hernias. He had chosen to refuse a liver transplant in 2012. In 2021 he was admitted to the hospital for two days to be treated for a urinary tract infection and was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández was long associated with the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000 and again between 2012 and 2018. Fernández was one of the many performers who participated in the "Solidaridad" campaign during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the 1980s, and has also performed at PRI rallies, attended PRI events or met with politicians from that party; on one occasion, he performed the song "Estos celos" for then-President Enrique Peña Nieto (a PRI member) during an official celebration.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: He was invited at the U.S. 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia to sing the famous "Cielito lindo".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: On 16 April 2016, at the end of his farewell concert, he cried out that he would "spit on" the then Republican Party primary candidate for the U.S. presidential election Donald Trump for his anti-immigration speech. Fernández, later that year, expressed his support for Hillary Clinton with a song titled "El Corrido de Hillary Clinton". Following the last debate between Clinton and Trump, Clinton invited Fernández to the celebration at the Craig Ranch Regional Park Amphitheater, Las Vegas, U.S.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández was hospitalized in serious condition after falling at his ranch in Guadalajara on 6 August 2021. He had injured his cervical spine and was placed on a ventilator under the intensive care unit. Two weeks later he was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome and began treatment on 13 August. His son Vicente confirmed to the press that it was a disease that had nothing to do with the fall he suffered. On 26 October 2021, he left intensive care following an improvement in his clinical condition. On 30 November 2021, he was again admitted to intensive care following a complication of his health caused by pneumonia. On 11 December, his son again reported in an interview that his father was sedated due to a worsening of his condition.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández died of complications from his injuries on 12 December 2021, at the age of 81. President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador mourned his death with a tweet in which he recognized Fernández as the "symbol of the ranchera song of our time, known and recognized in Mexico and abroad". The Colombian president, Iván Duque, said "his departure hurts us and his legacy will be alive forever", the U.S President, Joe Biden, said that "the world of music has lost an icon". Also on Twitter, leaders including the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the Mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, the former President of Colombia Álvaro Uribe, and of Bolivia Evo Morales as well as numerous Mexican and Latin American entertainment personalities offered their condolences. Former U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recognized Fernandez as "a musical icon and a good man". He died on the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, to whom Fernández had a great devotion.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández's body was transferred from the funeral home to the Arena VFG, which the artist had donated to his city of Guadalajara, where his family and at least six thousand fans were already waiting for him. Songs including "El Rey" and "Acá Entre Nos" were performed by his Mariachi Azteca. There the coffin with his remains was placed, in the middle of the stage that was turned into an altar with a large crucifix presiding over the scene and on one side an image of the Our Lady of Guadalupe accompanied the coffin. On the coffin, which was surrounded by a sea of white flowers, rested his favorite sombrero.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The following day the Catholic funeral took place at the same arena. The ceremony was alternated by songs of his most famous rancheras and ended with "Volver volver", as he had wished, live. Afterwards, his body was taken to his ranch, where he was buried in a mausoleum.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1990, Fernández released the album "Vicente Fernandez y las clásicas de José Alfredo Jiménez", a tribute to Mexico's famous songwriter from Guanajuato known as The "God of Ranchera Music" José Alfredo Jiménez, who was also his main musical influence. The album earned him "Billboard" and Univision's Latin Music Award for Mexican Regional Male Artist of the Year, which he won five times from 1989 to 1993.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 1998, Fernández was inducted into "Billboard"s Latin Music Hall of Fame. On 11 November 1998 his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 2002, the Latin Recording Academy recognized Fernández as Person of the Year. That year he celebrated his 35th anniversary in the entertainment industry, a career in which he sold more than 50 million records and was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame. He has 51 albums listed on the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for gold, platinum, and multiplatinum-selling records.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: Fernández also has an arena in Guadalajara named in his honor built in 2005 by his company, and a star placed with his hand prints and name at the Paseo de las Luminarias in Mexico City. Governor of New Mexico, U.S Bill Richardson on 16 July 2008, declared 12 June as Vicente Fernández Day in the state. In 2010, Fernández was awarded his first Grammy Award for Best Regional Mexican Album for his record "Necesito de Tí".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: In 2012, Chicago gave Fernández the key to the city and renamed the Little Village neighborhood's West 26th Street in his honor. In addition, the city celebrates "Vicente Fernandez Week" from 20 to 27 October.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: On 6 October 2019 in Guadalajara Fernández unveiled a statue created in his honor at the "Plaza de los Mariachis".


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States. Fernández received four awards from fourteen nominations.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: A Mis 80's is a 2022 Grammy Award winning album under Best Regional Mexican Music Album category by Vicente Fernández.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The Latin Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences of the United States. Fernández received eight awards from fourteen nominations and also earned the Latin Recording Academy for Person of the Year.


title: Vicente Fernández

text: The Lo Nuestro Awards is an awards show honoring the best of Latin music, presented by television network Univision. Fernández received fourteen


title: Western culture

text: Western culture, also known as Western civilization, Occidental culture, or Western society, is the heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, artifacts and technologies of the Western world. The term applies beyond Europe to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to Europe by immigration, colonization or influence. Western culture is most strongly influenced by Greco-Roman culture, Germanic culture, and Christian culture.


title: Western culture

text: The expansion of Greek culture into the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean led to a synthesis between Greek and Near-Eastern cultures, and major advances in literature, engineering, and science, and provided the culture for the expansion of early Christianity and the Greek New Testament. This period overlapped with and was followed by Rome, which made key contributions in law, government, engineering and political organization.


title: Western culture

text: Western culture is characterized by a host of artistic, philosophic, literary and legal themes and traditions. Christianity, primarily the Roman Catholic Church, and later Protestantism has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization since at least the 4th century, as did Judaism. A cornerstone of Western thought, beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, is the idea of rationalism in various spheres of life developed by Hellenistic philosophy, scholasticism and humanism. Empiricism later gave rise to the scientific method, the scientific revolution, and the Age of Enlightenment.


title: Western culture

text: Western culture continued to develop with the Christianization of European society during the Middle Ages, the reforms triggered by the medieval renaissances, the influence of the Islamic world via Al-Andalus and Sicily (including the transfer of technology from the East, and Latin translations of Arabic texts on science and philosophy by Greek and Hellenic-influenced Islamic philosophers), and the Italian Renaissance as Greek scholars fleeing the fall of the Byzantine Empire after the Muslim conquest of Constantinople brought classical traditions and philosophy. This major change for non-western countries and their people saw a development in modernization into those non-western countries. Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the modern university, the modern hospital system, scientific economics, and natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law). Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide and polygamy. European culture developed with a complex range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism, mysticism and Christian and secular humanism. Rational thinking developed through a long age of change and formation, with the experiments of the Enlightenment and breakthroughs in the sciences. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism, individualism, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements) and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration.


title: Western culture

text: The West as a geographical area is unclear and undefined. More often the ideology of a state's inhabitants is what will be used to categorize it as a Western society. There is some disagreement about what nations should or should not be included in the category and at what times. Many parts of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire are considered to be distinct from the west and eastern by most scholars, since the Byzantine empire was primarily influenced by eastern practices due to its proximity and cultural similarity to Iran and Arabia, thus lacking features seen as "Western". The traditions of scholarship around Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid had been forgotten in the West and were rediscovered by Italians during the Renaissance from scholars fleeing the collapse of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Thus, the culture identified with East and West itself interchanges with time and place (from the ancient world to the modern). Geographically, the "West" of today would include Europe (especially the states that collectively form the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Switzerland) together with extra-European territories belonging to the English-speaking world, the Hispanidad, the Lusosphere, the Francophonie and the Russian-speaking world in the wider context. Since the context is highly biased and context-dependent, there is no agreed definition of what the "West" is.


title: Western culture

text: It is difficult to determine which individuals fit into which category and the East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary. Globalism has spread Western ideas so widely that almost all modern cultures are, to some extent, influenced by aspects of Western culture. Stereotypical views of "the West" have been labeled Occidentalism, paralleling Orientalism—the term for the 19th-century stereotyped views of "the East".


title: Western culture

text: It has been disputed by some philosophers whether Western culture can be considered a historically sound, unified body of thought. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that many of the fundamental influences on Western culture, such as those of Greek philosophy are also shared by the Islamic world to a certain extent. Appiah argues that the origin of the Western and European identity can be traced back to the Muslim invasion of Iberia where Christians would form a common Christian or European identity. Contemporary Latin chronicles from Spain described the victors in the Frankish victory over the Umayyads at the Battle of Tours as Europeans according to Appiah, denoting a shared sense of identity.


title: Western culture

text: As Europeans discovered the smaller world, old concepts adapted. The area that had formerly been considered the Orient ("the East") became the Near East as the interests of the European powers interfered with Meiji Japan and Qing China for the first time in the 19th century. Thus the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 occurred in the Far East while the troubles surrounding the decline of the Ottoman Empire simultaneously occurred in the Near East. The term Middle East in the mid-19th century included the territory east of the Ottoman Empire, but West of China—Greater Persia and Greater India—is now used synonymously with "Near East" in most languages.


title: Western culture

text: The earliest civilizations which influenced the development of Western culture were those of Mesopotamia; the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran: the cradle of civilization. Ancient Egypt similarly had a strong influence on Western culture.


title: Western culture

text: The Greeks contrasted themselves with both their Eastern neighbours (such as the Trojans in "Iliad") as well as their Northern neighbours (who they considered barbarians). Concepts of what is "the West" arose out of legacies of the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. Later, ideas of the West were formed by the concepts of Latin Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire. What is thought of as Western thought today originates primarily from Greco-Roman and Germanic influences, and includes the ideals of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, as well as Christian culture.


title: Western culture

text: While the concept of a "West" did not exist until the emergence of the Roman Republic, the roots of the concept can be traced back to Ancient Greece. Since Homeric literature (the Trojan Wars), through the accounts of the Persian Wars of Greeks against Persians by Herodotus, and right up until the time of Alexander the Great, there was a paradigm of a contrast between Greeks and other civilizations. Greeks felt they were the most civilized and saw themselves (in the formulation of Aristotle) as something between the advanced civilizations of the Near East (who they viewed as soft and slavish) and the wild barbarians of most of Europe to the north. During this period writers like Herodotus and Xenophon would highlight the importance of freedom in the Ancient Greek world, as opposed to the perceived slavery of the so-called barbaric world.


title: Western culture

text: Alexander's conquests led to the emergence of a Hellenistic civilization, representing a synthesis of Greek and Near-Eastern cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The Near-Eastern civilizations of Ancient Egypt and the Levant, which came under Greek rule, became part of the Hellenistic world. The most important Hellenistic centre of learning was Ptolemaic Egypt, which attracted Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, Phoenician and even Indian scholars. Hellenistic science, philosophy, architecture, literature and art later provided a foundation embraced and built upon by the Roman Empire as it swept up Europe and the Mediterranean world, including the Hellenistic world in its conquests in the 1st century BCE.


title: Western culture

text: Following the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic world, the concept of a "West" arose, as there was a cultural divide between the Greek East and Latin West. The Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire consisted of Western Europe and Northwest Africa, while the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire (later the Byzantine Empire) consisted of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Egypt and Levant. The "Greek" East was generally wealthier and more advanced than the "Latin" West. With the exception of Italia, the wealthiest provinces of the Roman Empire were in the East, particularly Roman Egypt which was the wealthiest Roman province outside of Italia. Nevertheless, the Celts in the West created some significant literature in the ancient world whenever they were given the opportunity (an example being the poet Caecilius Statius), and they developed a large amount of scientific knowledge themselves (as seen in their Coligny Calendar).


title: Western culture

text: For about five hundred years, the Roman Empire maintained the Greek East and consolidated a Latin West, but an east–west division remained, reflected in many cultural norms of the two areas, including language. Eventually, the empire became increasingly split into a Western and Eastern part, reviving old ideas of a contrast between an advanced East, and a rugged West.


title: Western culture

text: From the time of Alexander the Great (the Hellenistic period), Greek civilization came in contact with Jewish civilization. Christianity would eventually emerge from the syncretism of Hellenic culture, Roman culture, and Second Temple Judaism, gradually spreading across the Roman Empire and eclipsing its antecedents and influences. The rise of Christianity reshaped much of the Greco-Roman tradition and culture; the Christianised culture would be the basis for the development of Western civilization after the fall of Rome (which resulted from increasing pressure from barbarians outside Roman culture). Roman culture also mixed with Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic cultures, which slowly became integrated into Western culture: starting mainly with their acceptance of Christianity.


title: Western culture

text: The Medieval West referred specifically to the Catholic "Latin" West, also called "Frankish" during Charlemagne's reign, in contrast to the Orthodox East, where Greek remained the language of the Byzantine Empire.


title: Western culture

text: After the fall of Rome, much of Greco-Roman art, literature, science and even technology were all but lost in the western part of the old empire. However, this would become the center of a new West. Europe fell into political anarchy, with many warring kingdoms and principalities. Under the Frankish kings, it eventually, and partially, reunified, and the anarchy evolved into feudalism.


title: Western culture

text: Much of the basis of the post-Roman cultural world had been set before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, mainly through the integration and reshaping of Roman ideas through Christian thought. The Greek and Roman paganism gradually was replaced by Christianity, first with its legalisation with the Edict of Milan and then the Edict of Thessalonica which made it the State church of the Roman Empire. Roman Catholic Christianity, served as a unifying force in Christian parts of Europe, and in some respects replaced or competed with the secular authorities. The Jewish Christian tradition out of which it had emerged was all but extinguished, and antisemitism became increasingly entrenched or even integral to Christendom. Much of art and literature, law, education, and politics were preserved in the teachings of the Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church founded many cathedrals, monasteries and seminaries, some of which continue to exist today.


title: Western culture

text: After the fall of the Roman Empire, many of the classical Greek texts were translated into Arabic and preserved in the medieval Islamic world. The Greek classics along with Arabic science, philosophy and technology were transmitted to Western Europe and translated into Latin, sparking the Renaissance of the 12th century and 13th century.


title: Western culture

text: Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the first modern universities. The Catholic Church established a hospital system in Medieval Europe that vastly improved upon the Roman "valetudinaria" and Greek healing temples. These hospitals were established to cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age," according to the historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse. Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide and polygamy. Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and democracy as a leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the twentieth century, referring to the Scholastics, wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics."


title: Western culture

text: In a broader sense, the Middle Ages, with its fertile encounter between Greek philosophical reasoning and Levantine monotheism was not confined to the West but also stretched into the old East. The philosophy and science of Classical Greece were largely forgotten in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, other than in isolated monastic enclaves (notably in Ireland, which had become Christian but was never conquered by Rome). The learning of Classical Antiquity was better preserved in the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire. Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis Roman civil law code was created in the East in his capital of Constantinople, and that city maintained trade and intermittent political control over outposts such as Venice in the West for centuries. Classical Greek learning was also subsumed, preserved, and elaborated in the rising Eastern world, which gradually supplanted Roman-Byzantine control as a dominant cultural-political force. Thus, much of the learning of classical antiquity was slowly reintroduced to European civilization in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.


title: Western culture

text: The rediscovery of the Justinian Code in Western Europe early in the 10th century rekindled a passion for the discipline of law, which crossed many of the re-forming boundaries between East and West. In the Catholic or Frankish west, Roman law became the foundation on which all legal concepts and systems were based. Its influence is found in all Western legal systems, although in different manners and to different extents. The study of canon law, the legal system of the Catholic Church, fused with that of Roman law to form the basis of the refounding of Western legal scholarship. During the Reformation and Enlightenment, the ideas of civil rights, equality before the law, procedural justice, and democracy as the ideal form of society began to be institutionalized as principles forming the basis of modern Western culture, particularly in Protestant regions.


title: Western culture

text: In the 14th century, starting from Italy and then spreading throughout Europe, there was a massive artistic, architectural, scientific and philosophical revival, as a result of the Christian revival of Greek philosophy, and the long Christian medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities. This period is commonly referred to as the Renaissance. In the following century, this process was further enhanced by an exodus of Greek Christian priests and scholars to Italian cities such as Florence and Venice after the end of the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople.


title: Western culture

text: From Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and onwards, while Eastern Europe was shaped by the Eastern Orthodox Church, Southern and Central Europe were increasingly stabilized by the Catholic Church which, as Roman imperial governance faded from view, was the only consistent force in Western Europe. In 1054 came the Great Schism that, following the Greek East and Latin West divide, separated Europe into religious and cultural regions present to this day. Until the Age of Enlightenment, Christian culture took over as the predominant force in Western civilization, guiding the course of philosophy, art, and science for many years. Movements in art and philosophy, such as the Humanist movement of the Renaissance and the Scholastic movement of the High Middle Ages, were motivated by a drive to connect Catholicism with Greek and Arab thought imported by Christian pilgrims. However, due to the division in Western Christianity caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, religious influence—especially the temporal power of the Pope—began to wane.


title: Western culture

text: From the late 15th century to the 17th century, Western culture began to spread to other parts of the world through explorers and missionaries during the Age of Discovery, and by imperialists from the 17th century to the early 20th century. During the Great Divergence, a term coined by Samuel Huntington the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization of the time, eclipsing Qing China, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. The process was accompanied and reinforced by the Age of Discovery and continued into the modern period. Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including lack of government intervention, geography, colonialism, and customary traditions.


title: Western culture

text: The Age of Discovery faded into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, during which cultural and intellectual forces in European society emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority. It challenged the authority of institutions that were deeply rooted in society, such as the Catholic Church; there was much talk of ways to reform society with toleration, science and skepticism.


title: Western culture

text: Philosophers of the Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire (1694–1778), David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, who influenced society by publishing widely read works. Upon learning about enlightened views, some rulers met with intellectuals and tried to apply their reforms, such as allowing for toleration, or accepting multiple religions, in what became known as enlightened absolutism. New ideas and beliefs spread around Europe and were fostered by an increase in literacy due to a departure from solely religious texts. Publications include "Encyclopédie" (1751–72) that was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. The "Dictionnaire philosophique" (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764) and "Letters on the English" (1733) written by Voltaire spread the ideals of the Enlightenment.


title: Western culture

text: Coinciding with the Age of Enlightenment was the scientific revolution, spearheaded by Newton. This included the emergence of modern science, during which developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and transformed views of society and nature. While its dates are disputed, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus's "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres") is often cited as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution, and its completion is attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Newton's 1687 "Principia".


title: Western culture

text: The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. These transitions began in Great Britain and spread to Western Europe and North America within a few decades.


title: Western culture

text: The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries. The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes. GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies. Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals, plants and fire.


title: Western culture

text: The First Industrial Revolution evolved into the Second Industrial Revolution in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic progress continued with the increasing adoption of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats, and ships), the large-scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of machinery in steam-powered factories.


title: Western culture

text: Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism, individualism, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements) and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration. Western culture has been heavily influenced by the Renaissance, the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.


title: Western culture

text: In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in the European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years, and also elsewhere. Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians.


title: Western culture

text: The West went through a series of great cultural and social changes between 1945 and 1980. The emergent mass media (film, radio, television and recorded music) created a global culture that could ignore national frontiers. Literacy became almost universal, encouraging the growth of books, magazines and newspapers. The influence of cinema and radio remained, while televisions became near essentials in every home.


title: Western culture

text: By the mid-20th century, Western culture was exported worldwide, and the development and growth of international transport and telecommunication (such as transatlantic cable and the radiotelephone) played a decisive role in modern globalization. The West has contributed a great many technological, political, philosophical, artistic and religious aspects to modern international culture: having been a crucible of Catholicism, Protestantism, democracy, industrialisation; the first major civilisation to seek to abolish slavery during the 19th century, the first to enfranchise women (beginning in Australasia at the end of the 19th century) and the first to put to use such technologies as steam, electric and nuclear power. The West invented cinema, television, the personal computer and the Internet; developed sports such as soccer, cricket, golf, tennis, rugby, basketball, and volleyball; and transported humans to an astronomical object for the first time with the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon Landing.


title: Western culture

text: While dance, music, visual art, story-telling, and architecture are human universals, they are expressed in the West in certain characteristic ways.


title: Western culture

text: In Western dance, music, plays and other arts, the performers are only very infrequently masked. There are essentially no taboos against depicting a god, or other religious figures, in a representational fashion.


title: Western culture

text: In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church, and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor.


title: Western culture

text: The symphony, concerto, sonata, opera, and oratorio have their origins in Italy. Many musical instruments developed in the West have come to see widespread use all over the world; among them are the guitar, violin, piano, pipe organ, saxophone, trombone, clarinet, accordion, and the theremin. In turn, it has been claimed that some European instruments have roots in earlier Eastern instruments that were adopted from the medieval Islamic world. The solo piano, symphony orchestra, and the string quartet are also significant musical innovations of the West.


title: Western culture

text: Jan van Eyck, among other renaissance painters, made great advances in oil painting, and perspective drawings and paintings had their earliest practitioners in Florence. In art, the Celtic knot is a very distinctive Western repeated motif. Depictions of the nude human male and female in photography, painting, and sculpture are frequently considered to have special artistic merit. Realistic portraiture is especially valued.


title: Western culture

text: Photography and the motion picture as both a technology and basis for entirely new art forms were also developed in the West.


title: Western culture

text: The ballet is a distinctively Western form of performance dance. The ballroom dance is an important Western variety of dance for the elite. The polka, the square dance, the flamenco, and the Irish step dance are very well known Western forms of folk dance.


title: Western culture

text: Greek and Roman theatre are considered the antecedents of modern theatre, and forms such as medieval theatre, Passion Plays, morality plays, and commedia dell'arte are considered highly influential. Elizabethan theatre, with playwrights including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, is considered one of the most formative and important eras for modern drama.


title: Western culture

text: The soap opera, a popular culture dramatic form, originated in the United States first on radio in the 1930s, then a couple of decades later on television. The music video was also developed in the West in the middle of the 20th century. Musical theatre was developed in the West in the 19th and 20th Centuries, from music hall, comic opera, and Vaudeville; with significant contributions from the Jewish diaspora, African-Americans, and other marginalized peoples.


title: Western culture

text: While epic literary works in verse such as the Mahabharata and Homer's Iliad are ancient and occurred worldwide, the prose novel as a distinct form of storytelling, with developed, consistent human characters and, typically, some connected overall plot (although both of these characteristics have sometimes been modified and played with in later times), was popularized by the West in the 17th and 18th centuries. Of course, extended prose fiction had existed much earlier; both novels of adventure and romance in the Hellenistic world and in Heian Japan. Both Petronius' "Satyricon" (c. 60 CE) and the "Tale of Genji" by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 1000 CE) have been cited as the world's first major novel but they had a very limited long-term impact on literary writing beyond their own day until much more recent times.


title: Western culture

text: The novel, which made its appearance in the 18th century, is an essentially European creation. Chinese and Japanese literature contain some works that may be thought of as novels, but only the European novel is couched in terms of a personal analysis of personal dilemmas.


title: Western culture

text: As in its artistic tradition, European literature pays deep tribute to human suffering. Tragedy, from its ritually and mythologically inspired Greek origins to modern forms where struggle and downfall are often rooted in psychological or social, rather than mythical, motives, is also widely considered a specifically European creation and can be seen as a forerunner of some aspects of both the novel and of classical opera.


title: Western culture

text: The validity of reason was postulated in both Christian philosophy and the Greco-Roman classics. Christianity laid a stress on the inward aspects of actions and on motives, notions that were foreign to the ancient world. This subjectivity, which grew out of the Christian belief that man could achieve a personal union with God, resisted all challenges and made itself the fulcrum on which all literary exposition turned, including the 20th–21st century novels.


title: Western culture

text: Western literature encompasses literary traditions of Europe, as well as Northern America and Latin America.


title: Western culture

text: Important Western architectural motifs include the Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic orders of Greek architecture, and the Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, and Victorian styles, which are still widely recognized and used in contemporary Western architecture. Much of Western architecture emphasizes repetition of simple motifs, straight lines and expansive, undecorated planes. A modern ubiquitous architectural form that emphasizes this characteristic is the skyscraper, their modern equivalent first developed in New York and Chicago. The predecessor of the skyscraper can be found in the medieval towers erected in Bologna.


title: Western culture

text: Western foodways were, until recently, considered to have their roots in the cuisines of Classical Rome and Greece, but the influence of Arab and Near Eastern cuisine on the West has become a topic of research in recent decades. The Crusaders, known mostly for fighting over holy land, settled in the Levant and acclimated to the local culture and cuisine. Fulcher of Chartres said "For we who were occidentals have now become orientals." These cultural experiences, carried back to France by notables like Eleanor of Aquitaine influenced Western European foodways. Many Oriental ingredients were relatively new to the Western lands. Sugar, almonds, pistachios, rosewater, and dried citrus fruits were all novelties to the Crusaders who encountered them in Saracen lands. Pepper, ginger and cinnamon were the most widely used spices of the European courts and noble households. By the end of the Middle Ages cloves, nutmeg, mastic, galingale and other imported spices had become part of the Western cuisine.


title: Western culture

text: Saracen influence can be seen in medieval cookbooks. Some recipes retain their Arabic names in Italian translations of the "Liber de Coquina". Known as "bruet Sarassinois" in the cuisine of North France, the concept of sweet and sour sauce is attested to in Greek tradition when Anthimus finishes his stew with vinegar and honey. Saracens combined sweet ingredients like date-juice and honey with pomegranate, lemons and citrus juices, or other sour ingredients. The technique of browning pieces of meat and simmering in liquid with vegetables is used in many recipes from the Baghdad cookery book. The same technique appears in the late-13th century "Viandier". Fried pieces of beef simmered in wine with sugar and cloves was called "bruet of Sarcynesse" in English.


title: Western culture

text: A notable feature of Western culture is its strong emphasis and focus on innovation and invention through science and technology, and its ability to generate new processes, materials and material artifacts with its roots dating back to the Ancient Greeks. The scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses" was fashioned by the 17th-century Italian Galileo Galilei, with roots in the work of medieval scholars such as the 11th-century Iraqi physicist Ibn al-Haytham and the 13th-century English friar Roger Bacon.


title: Western culture

text: By the will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel the Nobel Prizes were established in 1895. The prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine were first awarded in 1901. The percentage of ethnically European Nobel prize winners during the first and second halves of the 20th century were respectively 98 and 94 percent.


title: Western culture

text: The West is credited with the development of the steam engine and adapting its use into factories, and for the generation of electric power. The electrical motor, dynamo, transformer, electric light, and most of the familiar electrical appliances, were inventions of the West. The Otto and the Diesel internal combustion engines are products whose genesis and early development were in the West. Nuclear power stations are derived from the first atomic pile constructed in Chicago in 1942.


title: Western culture

text: Communication devices and systems including the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, communications and navigation satellites, mobile phone, and the Internet were all invented by Westerners. The pencil, ballpoint pen, Cathode ray tube, liquid-crystal display, light-emitting diode, camera, photocopier, laser printer, ink jet printer, plasma display screen and World Wide Web were also invented in the West.


title: Western culture

text: Ubiquitous materials including aluminum, clear glass, synthetic rubber, synthetic diamond and the plastics polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride and polystyrene were discovered and developed or invented in the West. Iron and steel ships, bridges and skyscrapers first appeared in the West. Nitrogen fixation and petrochemicals were invented by Westerners. Most of the elements were discovered and named in the West, as well as the contemporary atomic theories to explain them.


title: Western culture

text: The transistor, integrated circuit, memory chip, first programming language and computer were all first seen in the West. The ship's chronometer, the screw propeller, the locomotive, bicycle, automobile, and airplane were all invented in the West. Eyeglasses, the telescope, the microscope and electron microscope, all the varieties of chromatography, protein and DNA sequencing, computerised tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, x-rays, and light, ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, were all first developed and applied in Western laboratories, hospitals and factories.


title: Western culture

text: In medicine, the pure antibiotics were created in the West. The method of preventing Rh disease, the treatment of diabetes, and the germ theory of disease were discovered by Westerners. The eradication of smallpox, was led by a Westerner, Donald Henderson. Radiography, computed tomography, positron emission tomography and medical ultrasonography are important diagnostic tools developed in the West. Other important diagnostic tools of clinical chemistry, including the methods of spectrophotometry, electrophoresis and immunoassay, were first devised by Westerners. So were the stethoscope, the electrocardiograph, and the endoscope. Vitamins, hormonal contraception, hormones, insulin, beta blockers and ACE inhibitors, along with a host of other medically proven drugs, were first used to treat disease in the West. The double-blind study and evidence-based medicine are critical scientific techniques widely used in the West for medical purposes.


title: Western culture

text: In mathematics, calculus, statistics, logic, vectors, tensors and complex analysis, group theory, abstract algebra and topology were developed by Westerners. In biology, evolution, chromosomes, DNA, genetics and the methods of molecular biology are creations of the West. In physics, the science of mechanics and quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics were all developed by Westerners. The discoveries and inventions by Westerners in electromagnetism include Coulomb's law (1785), the first battery (1800), the unity of electricity and magnetism (1820), Biot–Savart law (1820), Ohm's Law (1827), and Maxwell's equations (1871). The atom, nucleus, electron, neutron and proton were all unveiled by Westerners.


title: Western culture

text: The world's most widely adopted system of measurement, the International System of Units, derived from the metric system, was first developed in France and evolved through contributions from various Westerners.


title: Western culture

text: In business, economics, and finance, double entry bookkeeping, credit cards, and the charge card were all first used in the West.


title: Western culture

text: Westerners are also known for their explorations of the globe and outer space. The first expedition to circumnavigate the Earth (1522) was by Westerners, as well as the first journey to the South Pole (1911), and the first Moon landing (1969). The landing of robots on Mars (2004 and 2012) and on an asteroid (2001), the "Voyager 2" explorations of the outer planets (Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989), "Voyager 1"s passage into interstellar space (2013), and "New Horizons" flyby of Pluto (2015) were significant recent Western achievements.


title: Western culture

text: The roots of modern-day Western mass media can be traced back to the late 15th century, when printing presses began to operate throughout wealthy European cities. The emergence of news media in the 17th century has to be seen in close connection with the spread of the printing press, from which the publishing press derives its name.


title: Western culture

text: In the 16th century, a decrease in the preeminence of Latin in its literary use, along with the impact of economic change, the discoveries arising from trade and travel, navigation to the New World, science and arts and the development of increasingly rapid communications through print led to a rising corpus of vernacular media content in European society.


title: Western culture

text: After the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957, satellite transmission technology was dramatically realised, with the United States launching Telstar in 1962 linking live media broadcasts from the UK to the US. The first digital broadcast satellite (DBS) system began transmitting in US in 1975.


title: Western culture

text: Beginning in the 1990s, the Internet has contributed to a tremendous increase in the accessibility of Western media content. Departing from media offered in bundled content packages (magazines, CDs, television and radio slots), the Internet has primarily offered unbundled content items (articles, audio and video files).


title: Western culture

text: The native religions of Europe were polytheistic but not homogenous – however, they were similar insofar as they were predominantly Indo-European in origin. Roman religion was similar to but not the same as Hellenic religion – likewise for indigenous Germanic polytheism, Celtic polytheism and Slavic polytheism. Before this time many Europeans from the north, especially Scandinavians, remained polytheistic, though southern Europe was predominantly Christian from the 5th century onwards.


title: Western culture

text: Western culture at some level is influenced by the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. These cultures had a number of similarities, such as a common emphasis on the individual, but they also embody fundamentally conflicting worldviews. For example, in Judaism and Christianity, God is the ultimate authority, while Greco-Roman tradition considers the ultimate authority to be reason. Christian attempts to reconcile these frameworks were responsible for the preservation of Greek philosophy. Historically, Europe has been the center and cradle of Christian civilization.


title: Western culture

text: Religion has waned in Europe, where people who are agnostic or atheist make up about 18% of the European population today. In particular, over half of the populations of the Czech Republic (79% of the population was agnostic, atheist or irreligious), the United Kingdom (52%), Germany (25–33%), France (30–35%) and the Netherlands (39–44%) are agnostic or atheist.


title: Western culture

text: However, per another survey by Pew Research Center from 2011, Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world where 70–84% are Christians, According to this survey, 76% of Europeans described themselves as Christians, and about 86% of the Americas' population identified themselves as Christians, (90% in Latin America and 77% in North America). 73% in Oceania self-identify as Christian, and 76% in South Africa are Christian.


title: Western culture

text: According to new polls about religiosity in the European Union in 2012 by Eurobarometer, Christianity is the largest religion in the European Union, accounting for 72% of the EU population. Catholics are the largest Christian group, accounting for 48% of the EU citizens, while Protestants make up 12%, Eastern Orthodox make up 8% and other Christians make up 4%. Non-believers/Agnostics account for 16%, atheists account for 7%, and Muslims account for 2%.


title: Western culture

text: Throughout the Western world there are increasing numbers of people who seek to revive the indigenous religions of their European ancestors; such groups include Germanic, Roman, Hellenic, Celtic, Slavic, and polytheistic reconstructionist movements. Likewise, Wicca, New Age spirituality and other neo-pagan belief systems enjoy notable minority support in Western states.


title: Western culture

text: A wide range of sports was already established by the time of Ancient Greece and the military culture and the development of sports in Greece influenced one another considerably. Sports became such a prominent part of their culture that the Greeks created the Olympic Games, which in ancient times were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchman, instigated the modern revival of the Olympic movement. The first modern Olympic games were held at Athens in 1896.


title: Western culture

text: The Romans built immense structures such as the amphitheatres to house their festivals of sport. The Romans exhibited a passion for blood sports, such as the infamous Gladiatorial battles that pitted contestants against one another in a fight to the death. The Olympic Games revived many of the sports of Classical Antiquity—such as Greco-Roman wrestling, discus and javelin.


title: Western culture

text: The sport of bullfighting is a traditional spectacle of Spain, Portugal, southern France, and some Latin American countries. It traces its roots to prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice and is often linked to Rome, where many human-versus-animal events were held. Bullfighting spread from Spain to its American colonies, and in the 19th century to France, where it developed into a distinctive form in its own right.


title: Western culture

text: Jousting and hunting were popular sports in the European Middle Ages, and the aristocratic classes developed passions for leisure activities. A great number of popular global sports were first developed or codified in Europe. The modern game of golf originated in Scotland, where the first written record of golf is James II's banning of the game in 1457, as an unwelcome distraction to learning archery.


title: Western culture

text: The Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the 18th Century brought increased leisure time, leading to more time for citizens to attend and follow spectator sports, greater participation in athletic activities, and increased accessibility. These trends continued with the advent of mass media and global communication. The bat and ball sport of cricket was first played in England during the 16th century and was exported around the globe via the British Empire. A number of popular modern sports were devised or codified in Britain during the 19th Century and obtained global prominence—these include ping pong, modern tennis, association football, netball and rugby.


title: Western culture

text: Football remains hugely popular in Europe, but has grown from its origins to be known as the "world game". Similarly, sports such as cricket, rugby, and netball were exported around the world, particularly among countries in the Commonwealth of Nations, thus India and Australia are among the strongest cricketing states, while victory in the Rugby World Cup has been shared among New Zealand, Australia, England, and South Africa.


title: Western culture

text: Australian Rules Football, an Australian variation of football with similarities to Gaelic football and rugby, evolved in the British colony of Victoria in the mid-19th century. The United States also developed unique variations of English sports. English migrants took antecedents of baseball to America during the colonial period. The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Many games are known as "football" were being played at colleges and universities in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. American football resulted from several major divergences from rugby, most notably the rule changes instituted by Walter Camp, the "Father of American Football". Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the United States. Volleyball was created in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city directly north of Springfield, in 1895.


The 2022 United States Senate election in Nevada was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Nevada. In the election, incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto narrowly defeated her Republican challenger, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. Nevada's election results were slowed due to state law that allowed voters to submit mail-in ballots until November 12, and allowed voters to fix clerical problems in their mail-in ballots until November 14, 2022.


title: 2022 United States Senate election in Nevada

text: Cortez Masto made protecting abortion rights a central issue of her campaign. Many experts and forecasters saw Nevada as Republicans' best chance to pickup a seat in the Senate.


text: Cortez Masto flipped Washoe County, improving her 2016 margin by 1.5%, although Laxalt improved on Joe Heck's margin in rural counties, and performed slightly better in Clark County. With a margin of 0.77%, this was the closest Senate race of the 2022 election cycle.


text: Cortez Masto won urban Clark County and Washoe County, home to Las Vegas and Reno respectively. Combined, these two counties contain more than 80% of the state's total population. While her margin in Clark County fell from 11% in 2016 to 8% in this election, she flipped Washoe County, which she lost by less than 1% in 2016, with a 4% margin of victory. Laxalt won by landslide margins in Nevada's rural counties, but they are lightly populated and cast less than 16% of the total vote. In the end, Cortez Masto's victories in the state's two largest counties gave her too large a lead for Laxalt to overcome in rural Nevada. As of 2022, no Republican has won any U.S. Senate race in Nevada since 2012.


title: Despacito

text: "Despacito" (; "Slowly") is a song by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi featuring Puerto Rican rapper and singer Daddy Yankee as the lead single from Fonsi's 2019 studio album "Vida". Released on January 12, 2017, the song was written by Fonsi, Erika Ender and Daddy Yankee, and produced by Mauricio Rengifo and Andrés Torres. A remix version featuring Canadian singer Justin Bieber was released on April 17, 2017, which helped to improve the chart performance of the song in numerous countries, including various number-one positions. "Despacito" has been widely credited by music journalists as being instrumental in popularizing Spanish-language pop music in the mainstream market again.


title: Despacito

text: It is a reggaeton and Latin pop song composed in common time with lyrics about desiring a sexual relationship, performed in a smooth and romantic way. "Despacito" received generally favorable reviews from music critics, who praised the fusion between Latin and urban rhythms, its catchiness, and its text painting. It has received Latin Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Urban Fusion/Performance, and Best Short Form Music Video at the 18th Latin Grammy Awards. "Despacito" has been also ranked among the best Latin songs of all time and the best songs of 2017 by various publications, which referred to it as one of the most successful Spanish-language tracks in pop music history.


title: Despacito

text: The song topped the charts of 47 countries and reached the top 10 of six others. In the United States, it became the first song primarily in Spanish to top the "Billboard" Hot 100 since Los del Río's "Macarena" in 1996, subsequently tying the longest-reigning number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100 at the time with 16 weeks, as well as becoming the longest-running number-one on the Hot Latin Songs chart with 56 weeks. It also became the first Latin song to receive a diamond certification by the Recording Industry Association of America. The music video shows both artists performing the song in La Perla neighborhood of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and local bar La Factoría. It was the most-viewed YouTube video of all time from August 2017 to November 2020 and became the first video on the site to reach the milestones of three, four, five, six, and seven billion views. It is now the second most-viewed video on the site, with "Baby Shark" by Pinkfong being the first most-viewed.


title: Despacito

text: The lyrics of "Despacito" were written in late 2015 in Luis Fonsi's house in Miami because he wanted to record a "swinging song" for his new album after two years without releasing new music. He woke up mulling about "a song called 'Despacito'" and invited Brazilian-Panamanian singer and songwriter Erika Ender to a songwriting session. Fonsi co-wrote the song on a Gibson Emmylou Harris guitar. He originally composed it as a cumbia and pop song with lyrics written as a ballad but decided to give it an "urban injection" and sent a demo to reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee. They recorded the song at Noisematch Studios in Miami in late 2016. Daddy Yankee improvised his verse in a corner of the studio's control room while thinking about his father playing bongos and wrote the post-chorus. It was produced by Mauricio Rengifo and Andrés Torres; the former is known as a member of Colombian pop duo Cali & El Dandee and the latter is known for previously working with David Bisbal, Thalía, and Ricky Martin. It was mixed by American engineer Jaycen Joshua at Larrabee Sound Studios in North Hollywood, Los Angeles.


title: Despacito

text: Luis Fonsi does not consider it a reggaeton song but feels that "it does have a reggaeton energy and an subtle urban beat". Ender stated that the track "went through several arrangements" until Fonsi got "exactly the arrangement he wanted". Fonsi described "Despacito" as a very melodic song that can adapt well to many other music genres. Due to the sensual nature of the song, they "needed to be responsible with a good lyric" and Ender's approach to writing for Fonsi was "to take care of how to say things with a good taste". In April 2017, American singer and songwriter Nicky Jam revealed that the original version of "Despacito" featured him instead of Daddy Yankee, but had to decline due to the song's release interfering with the launch of his album "Fénix".


title: Despacito

text: Three months after the release of "Despacito", Canadian singer Justin Bieber wanted to record a remix version after hearing the song in a Colombian nightclub during a tour in South America. The following day, Luis Fonsi received a phone call from Universal Latin about the intentions for remix and authorized the label to send the track to Bieber. Bieber's manager Scooter Braun contacted his vocal producer Josh Gudwin to work on the song, who flew to Bogotá and recorded Justin Bieber's vocals at Estudios Audiovisión.


title: Despacito

text: Justin Bieber sang in Spanish for the first time in his career with the help of Colombian musician Juan Felipe Samper. What was most difficult for Justin Bieber was the 'ere' (ɾ) sound in words like "laberinto" (labyrinth), "paredes" (walls) and "manuscrito" (manuscript). Samper wrote the Spanish-language lyrics phonetically to ease Bieber's pronunciation, which was "perfectly" achieved in two hours. After a four-hour recording session, Gudwin sent Bieber's vocal tracks to Australian sound engineer Chris O'Ryan for vocal tuning. Gudwin concluded the remix's production in Parrot Cay, Turks and Caicos Islands with the mixing of Luis Fonsi's English-language vocals, whose lyrics were written by American songwriter Marty James. The entire process until the release date took six days. In June 2017, English musician Ed Sheeran revealed that he wanted to record a remix version of the song but lost out to Justin Bieber.


title: Despacito

text: "Despacito" is a reggaeton and Latin pop song composed in common time ( time) with a length of three minutes and forty-seven seconds and written in the key of B minor with a tempo of 89 beats per minute and a common chord progression of Bm—G—D—A. The vocals span from F# to A. Its implicit lyrics are about having a sexual relationship in a smooth and romantic way, making heavy use of allegories. However, Luis Fonsi expressed that some lines are free for interpretation.


title: Despacito

text: Mauricio Rengifo and Andrés Torres produced "Despacito" using Pro Tools and the final mix consisted of 47 tracks. The song begins with a Puerto Rican cuatro played by Christian Nieves, which is accompanied by an acoustic guitar played by Torres when Luis Fonsi starts performing. Rengifo stated that the guitar "was actually played, but then [they] chopped it and made it really digital." The producers decided to record a cuatro because they wanted "to feel very Puerto Rican and ethnic" and that it "gives the song a really unique character." Nieves played salsa-influenced melodies during the chorus and the hook, which contains "old school pop" effects based on American producer Dr. Luke. Percussion instruments guache and güira were synchronized with a hi hat in order to highlight the track's cumbia influences.


title: Despacito

text: The song uses the side-chaining production technique in order to make the chorus "more prominent," silencing the music as the kick drum hits. It also makes heavy use of text painting when the music is slowed down as the word "despacito" (slowly) is performed at the beginning of every chorus. Its percussion consists of guache, cowbell, timbales, güira, and sequenced drum patterns. The remix featuring Justin Bieber maintained the original rhythms and Luis Fonsi translated some lines to English, singing a verse in Spanglish, while Daddy Yankee's verses were kept from the original version.


title: Despacito

text: "Despacito" was made available for digital download on January 13, 2017, by Universal Music Latin. Some music publications believed the single's success was influenced by a trend of combining Latin pop and urban music. Fonsi referred to it as "the new pop" and Ender said that "everyone is making this type of fusions." Luis Fonsi also stated that two weeks after the release of the song and its music video he started receiving calls from "people who normally don't call, people who only call when something different is going on." He got calls from Ricky Martin, Juan Luis Guerra, Marc Anthony and other artists telling him that the track was a "home run."


title: Despacito

text: Sebastian Wernke-Schmiesing of "Dance-Charts" journal stated that "a simple 4/4 time, Spanish guitar sounds, a crisp bass, and the excellent vocals by Luis Fonsi and [Daddy Yankee] were enough to get a hit single from the start." Leila Cobo of "Billboard" praised its "undeniable immediate catchiness" and wrote that the song "is a clever blend of romantic Latin pop with a reggaeton beat and subtly naughty lyrics." Robert Joffred of Medium's culture blog That Good You Need highlighted the use of a steel-string guitar to play flamenco-style melodies instead of a nylon-string guitar, as well as the presence of "swung rhythms" when the word "Despacito" is sung at the beginning of the chorus He referred to the text painting as "pretty genius." Raisa Bruner of "Time" magazine described the single as "an infectious Latin melody amped up with reggaeton grooves and an irresistible dance tune."


title: Despacito

text: Spanish record producer Nahúm García stated that "the way the rhythm breaks before the chorus is genius" and that this "trick" in particular is not common in pop music. Joshua Barrie of "Irish Mirror" gave a negative opinion about the lyrics, referring to them as "quite rude and a bit creepy" and stating that "some people might find them offensive." On the other hand, an editor of Spanish music website Jenesaispop stated that "the melody is very good, the lyrics are sexy without being vulgar and above all its structure is interesting." Felix Contreras of National Public Radio praised the writing, arrangement and performances.


title: Despacito

text: The remix version featuring Justin Bieber was released on April 17, 2017, by Universal Music Latin, Republic Records, Def Jam Recordings, RBMG and School Boy Records. Its official audio video garnered 20 million views on YouTube on its first 24 hours, making it the third-highest debut for a music-related video in 2017 as of September. Caroline Soriano of "Ernstars" magazine stated that Bieber's voice "sounds appealing with the song," whose remix version make it sound "a little bit better." Mike Senior of "Sound on Sound" gave a negative review of the remix's mixing by criticizing its polarity inversion regarding the original version and Justin Bieber's louder vocal track than Daddy Yankee's. As to the original version, Senior referred to the first appearance of the "Despacito" hook line as a "masterstroke".


title: Despacito

text: In July 2017, officials from the Government of Malaysia reported that "Despacito" was being banned from airing on government-owned broadcast stations as a result of public complaints. Government ministers said that the song was considered un-Islamic and that its lyrics were "not suitable to be heard."


title: Despacito

text: "Despacito" has received various awards and nominations following its commercial success. In 2017, the original version won three awards at the 18th Latin Grammy Awards including Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Short Form Music Video, while the remix version won Best Urban Fusion/Performance. It also won Collaboration of the Year and was nominated for Video of the Year at the 45th American Music Awards. In 2018, the remix version received three nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 60th Grammy Awards. The remix also received six "Billboard" Latin Music Awards and five "Billboard" Music Awards. Erika Ender became the youngest person to be inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame and the first female Latin artist to garner a Grammy Award for Song of the Year nomination.


title: Despacito

text: "Billboard"s critics ranked the original version the fourth best song of 2017 and the fifth best Latin song of all-time, referring to it as "one of the biggest hits in Latin music history" and "one of the biggest singles of all-time." "Rolling Stone" and "Time" selected it as the seventh and third best song of 2017, respectively; the latter stating that "in a year where xenophobia reared its head worldwide, it inspires hope that the charts were dominated by such a universal, multicultural hit." "Spin" magazine ranked the remix version the 38th best song of the year, stating that "it managed to transcend genre, time, space, and even personal taste in a way that was unprecedented." It was also included among the 100 best singles of 2017 by PopSugar, "The New York Times", National Public Radio, "The Village Voice", and "The Guardian". Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee were selected as the "Stars of the Year" by "People en Español".


title: Despacito

text: "Rolling Stone"s critics ranked the track 91st in its "100 Greatest Songs of the Century So Far" list and included it among the 50 greatest Latin pop songs of all-time, describing it as "one of the most successful hits in pop music history." "Billboard" selected it among the best Latin summer songs of all-time and included it among the 100 songs that defined the 2010s decade. The song was inducted to the 2019 edition of the Guinness World Records for achieving seven milestones.


title: Despacito

text: In the United States, the single debuted at number two on "Billboard"s multi-metric Hot Latin Songs chart on February 4, 2017, becoming Fonsi's highest-charting single since "Aquí Estoy Yo" on June 13, 2009. "Despacito" reached number one on the US Hot Latin Songs chart on February 18, 2017, where it remained there for 35 consecutive weeks until October 14, 2017, when it was dethroned by "Mi Gente" by J Balvin and Willy William featuring Beyoncé the following issue. In 2018, it returned to number one in three different runs for 21 non-consecutive weeks. It is the longest-reigning number-one on Hot Latin Songs and surpassed the 41 weeks of 2014's "Bailando" by Enrique Iglesias featuring Descemer Bueno and Gente de Zona on February 17, 2018. "Despacito" became the list's second longest-charting title and was removed from the chart on March 9, 2019, after 110 weeks due to a recurrent rule.


title: Despacito

text: On the US "Billboard" Hot 100 chart, the single debuted at number 88 on February 4, 2017, becoming Fonsi's third entry and Daddy Yankee's seventh. It subsequently peaked at number 44 on April 15, 2017, before the release of the remix version featuring Justin Bieber. "Despacito" reached number one on the Hot 100 on the week ending May 27, 2017, becoming both Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's first number one on the chart and Bieber's fifth. It topped the Hot 100 for 16 consecutive weeks, tying with "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men as the longest-leading number-one single in the chart's history at the time, before being surpassed by "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus on August 3, 2019. It also became the first mostly-Spanish-language song to lead the all-genre US Digital Songs chart, as well as the first non-primarily-English-language song to top the all-format Radio Songs and Mainstream Top 40 charts. On October 21, 2017, "Despacito" and "Mi Gente" by J Balvin and Willy William featuring Beyoncé marked the first time ever that two non-primarily-English-language songs ranked within the top 10 of the Hot 100 simultaneously. The song spent 52 weeks on the Hot 100 and was removed through a recurrent rule.