title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The law outlawed closed shops which were contractual agreements that required an employer to hire only labor union members. Union shops, still permitted, require new recruits to join the union within a certain amount of time. The National Labor Relations Board and the courts have added other restrictions on the power of unions to enforce union security clauses and have required them to make extensive financial disclosures to all members as part of their duty of fair representation. On the other hand, Congress repealed the provisions requiring a vote by workers to authorize a union shop a few years after the passage of the Act when it became apparent that workers were approving them in virtually every case.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The amendments also authorized individual states to outlaw union security clauses (such as the union shop) entirely in their jurisdictions by passing right-to-work laws. A right-to-work law, under Section 14B of Taft–Hartley, prevents unions from negotiating contracts or legally binding documents requiring companies to fire workers who refuse to join the union. Currently all of the states in the Deep South and a number of states in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountains regions have right-to-work laws (with six states—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—going one step further and enshrining right-to-work laws in their states' constitutions).


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The amendments required unions and employers to give 80 days' notice to each other and to certain state and federal mediation bodies before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action in pursuit of a new collective bargaining agreement; it did not, on the other hand, impose any "cooling-off period" after a contract expired. The Act also authorized the President to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, a reaction to the national coal miners' strikes called by the United Mine Workers of America in the 1940s. Presidents have used that power less and less frequently in each succeeding decade. President George W. Bush invoked the law in connection with the employer lockout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union during negotiations with West Coast shipping and stevedoring companies in 2002.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The amendments required union leaders to file affidavits with the United States Department of Labor declaring that they were not supporters of the Communist Party and had no relationship with any organization seeking the "overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means" as a condition to participating in NLRB proceedings. Just over a year after Taft–Hartley passed, 81,000 union officers from nearly 120 unions had filed the required affidavits. This provision was at first upheld in the 1950 Supreme Court decision "American Communications Ass'n v. Douds", but in 1965, the Supreme Court held that this provision was an unconstitutional bill of attainder.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The amendments expressly excluded supervisors from coverage under the act, and allowed employers to terminate supervisors engaging in union activities or those not supporting the employer's stance. The amendments maintained coverage under the act for professional employees, but provided for special procedures before they may be included in the same bargaining unit as non-professional employees.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The Act revised the Wagner Act's requirement of employer neutrality, to allow employers to deliver anti-union messages in the workplace. These changes confirmed an earlier Supreme Court ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition to unions, so long as they did not threaten employees with reprisals for their union activities nor offer any incentives to employees as an alternative to unionizing. The amendments also gave employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its employees, and allow employees to petition either to decertify their union, or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing collective bargaining agreement.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The amendments gave the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board discretionary power to seek injunctions against either employers or unions that violated the Act. The law made pursuit of such injunctions mandatory, rather than discretionary, in the case of secondary boycotts by unions. The amendments also established the General Counsel’s autonomy within the administrative framework of the NLRB. Congress also gave employers the right to sue unions for damages caused by a secondary boycott, but gave the General Counsel exclusive power to seek injunctive relief against such activities.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The act provided for federal court jurisdiction to enforce collective bargaining agreements. Although Congress passed this section to empower federal courts to hold unions liable in damages for strikes violating a no-strike clause, this part of the act has instead served as the springboard for creation of a "federal common law" of collective bargaining agreements, which favored arbitration over litigation or strikes as the preferred means of resolving labor disputes.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: The Congress that passed the Taft–Hartley Amendments considered repealing the Norris–La Guardia Act to the extent necessary to permit courts to issue injunctions against strikes violating a no-strike clause, but chose not to do so. The Supreme Court nonetheless held several decades later that the act implicitly gave the courts the power to enjoin such strikes over subjects that would be subject to final and binding arbitration under a collective bargaining agreement.


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: Finally, the act imposed a number of procedural and substantive standards that unions and employers must meet before they may use employer funds to provide pensions and other employee benefit to unionized employees. Congress has since passed more extensive protections for workers and employee benefit plans as part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act ("ERISA").


title: Taft–Hartley Act

text: Union leaders in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) vigorously campaigned for Truman in the 1948 election based upon a (never fulfilled) promise to repeal Taft–Hartley. Truman won, but a union-backed effort in Ohio to defeat Taft in 1950 failed in what one author described as "a shattering demonstration of labor's political weaknesses". Despite his opposition to the law, Truman relied upon it in twelve instances during his presidency.


title: Dead Boys

text: The Dead Boys are an American punk rock band from Cleveland, Ohio, United States. The band was among the first wave of punk, and regarded by many as one of the rowdiest and most violent groups of the era. They were formed by vocalist Stiv Bators, rhythm guitarist Jimmy Zero, bassist Jeff Magnum, lead guitarist Cheetah Chrome, and drummer Johnny Blitz in 1975, with the later two having splintered from the band Rocket From The Tombs. The original Dead Boys released two studio albums, "Young Loud and Snotty", and "We Have Come for Your Children".


title: Dead Boys

text: The Dead Boys were initially active from 1975 to 1980, briefly reuniting a few times in the mid-1980s, and then later again in 2004 and 2005 for the first time without Bators, who had died in 1990. In September 2017, Chrome and Blitz reunited the band with a new line-up for a 40th anniversary tour along with a new album, "", a re-recording of their debut album. The new lineup includes vocalist Jake Hout, guitarist Jason "Ginchy" Kottwitz and bassist Ricky Rat, alongside Chrome and Blitz.


title: Dead Boys

text: Chrome and Blitz joined Cleveland proto-punk band Rocket From The Tombs in late 1974. Chrome invited his friend Steve Bators on stage to sing a few songs at a show in August 1975. This caused most of the other band members to walk off stage and they broke up. Shortly thereafter Bators, Chrome and Blitz recruited Magnum and Zero to form Frankenstein who recorded demos in October but they broke up in January 1976. When the band members relocated to New York City in July 1976, they adopted the Dead Boys moniker which came from a line in the RFTT song "Down in Flames".


title: Dead Boys

text: Moving to New York City at the encouragement of Joey Ramone, the Ramones' lead singer, the Dead Boys quickly gained notoriety for their outrageous live performances. Lewd gestures and profanity were the norm. On more than one occasion, lead singer Stiv Bators slashed his stomach with his mic stand. Such antics reportedly discouraged the development of a mainstream rock following, despite the relative breadth of their material beyond pure punk. They frequently played at the rock club CBGB (the band was briefly managed by club owner Hilly Kristal) and in 1977 they released their debut album, "Young, Loud and Snotty", produced by Genya Ravan. Their song "Sonic Reducer" is often regarded as one of the classics of the punk genre, with AllMusic calling it "one of punk's great anthems."


title: Dead Boys

text: Their second album, "We Have Come for Your Children", produced by Felix Pappalardi, was recorded in Miami in early 1978 and released later that year. Sire Records pressured the group to change their look and sound to appeal more to the U.S. mainstream (which had yet to embrace punk on the level seen in the UK) and this contributed to Dead Boys breaking up in 1979.


title: Dead Boys

text: Shortly after returning from Miami Johnny Blitz and a group of his friends got into an altercation on Second Avenue in Manhattan which led to Blitz being stabbed in the chest 5 times. While he was recovering in the hospital a benefit was held for him, at which the Dead Boys performed without him, with John Belushi and former New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan filling in for him on drums.


title: Dead Boys

text: Several 1979 performances were featured in the 1980 film, "D.O.A.". A few months after the breakup the band had to reunite to record a live album and thus fulfill their contractual obligations. To exact revenge on the label, Bators purposely sang off mic and the resulting recording was unusable. When the material eventually surfaced on Bomp! Records, Bators had re-recorded the vocals in a studio. They booked a 1979 - 80 tour but Magnum, then Chrome, Blitz and finally Zero left leaving Bators as the only original member. He recorded his first solo album with the final (until later reunions) Dead Boys lineup.


title: Dead Boys

text: in 1979 Bators recorded some singles, including a cover of "It's Cold Outside" by the Choir and a solo album, "Disconnected", for BOMP! Records. Bators later joined the Wanders with former members of Sham 69 and shortly thereafter formed Lords of the New Church with Brian James from The Damned and Dave Tregunna from Sham 69. They released several albums on IRS Records, including the keyboard-laden hit single "Open Your Eyes" and a cover of "Like a Virgin".


title: Dead Boys

text: After the Dead Boys dissolved, Cheetah Chrome played around New York City (mostly at Max's Kansas City) doing shows with The Stilettos, as well as his own band Cheetah Chrome and the Casualties. He recorded a single for ORK Records, "Still Wanna Die" / "Take Me Home", recorded with Atlantic Records co-founder Herb Abramson. Shortly thereafter, he played on Ronnie Spector's debut solo album "Siren". He appeared on several recordings during the 1980s, and rejoined the Dead Boys for their ill-fated reunions of the late 1980s.


title: Dead Boys

text: In 2003, after the release of "The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs", Chrome reformed Rocket from the Tombs with David Thomas, Craig Bell, with Steve Mehlman (Pere Ubu) on drums and Richard Lloyd (Television) replacing the late Peter Laughner. This reincarnation of the group toured in 2003 and 2006.


title: Dead Boys

text: In Summer 2003, they entered the studio to record some of the band's old material for the first time. The recordings were released as "Rocket Redux". In 2005, the members of Rocket from the Tombs flew to Germany to headline one night (Buzzcocks headlined the other) of the International Punk Kongress in Kassel; then, in 2006, they reconvened in Cleveland, Ohio to write material for a new record. This material became the single "I Sell Soul"/"Romeo and Juliet", released in 2010, and the full-length album "Barfly", released in 2011.


title: Dead Boys

text: In early 2010, Chrome formed a short lived band called Batusis with Syl Sylvain of the New York Dolls. They recorded at least 10 songs but released only four on an EP. In September 2010 "Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy's Tale from the Front Lines of Punk Rock" was published. At the end of a week-long Rocket from the Tomb tour in December 2011, Chrome announced to the band that he had decided to stop touring extensively after 2012. He currently works for Plowboy Records in Nashville, TN, mainly in production and promotion.


title: Dead Boys

text: The Dead Boys reformed for several gigs in the 1980s. They re-released their first album as "Younger, Louder and Snottier" in 1989, mastered from a cassette tape of rough mixes, attributed to a young Bob Clearmountain, a studio assistant at the time.


title: Dead Boys

text: In June 1990, Bators died in France due to injuries sustained after having been hit by a taxi. In September 2004, the remaining members of the band re-formed for a one-off gig in Cleveland. In 2005, they played a benefit show for CBGB and another reunion show on Halloween.


title: Dead Boys

text: On April 25, 2017, Chrome and Blitz played six shows in Canada as a tribute to the 40th anniversary of "Young, Loud and Snotty". The band played the record in its entirety. Chrome and Blitz then announced in 2017 that the band would go on a full reunion tour.


title: Dead Boys

text: On September 8, 2017, "" was released. The album is a re-recording of their debut album and the first album by the Dead Boys in 39 years. Along with Chrome and Blitz, the tour and album will feature Jason "Ginchy" Kottwitz (Bulemics, Sylvain Sylvain and the Sylvains, Cheetah Chrome solo band) on guitar, Ricky Rat (Trash Brats) on bass and vocalist Jake Hout from zombie-themed Dead Boys tribute band the Undead Boys.


title: Dead Boys

text: Chrome said of the tour "With the 40th anniversary of the Dead Boys on the horizon and a solid band that could interpret and deliver the performance and sound needed to maintain the authenticity of the Dead Boys, I reached out to Johnny Blitz about an anniversary tour and he said yes and we began the journey of what would become Still Snotty. I've been singing the Dead Boys songs myself for 20 years because I couldn't find another singer I trusted enough to hand it to. The first gig with Jake, it was like, 'You got it, man!' I think Stiv would be very proud of our choice." A photobook, "Dead Boys 1977: The Lost Photographs of Dave Treat", was also released on September 29, 2017.


title: Dead Boys

text: In 2013, an American-made motion picture titled "CBGB" was released to theaters. Bators is portrayed by actor Justin Bartha, best known for his roles in "The Hangover" films and the "National Treasure" films, while Rupert Grint, best known for his work in the "Harry Potter" film series as Ron Weasley, plays Cheetah Chrome. Chrome also makes a cameo appearance in the film.


title: Dead Boys

text: The Dead Boys only have three official full-length studio releases, however many labels have released rough material and outtakes in the years following their initial 1979 breakup.


title: INXS discography

text: The discography of INXS, an Australian rock band, consists of 12 studio albums, 70 singles, 12 compilation albums, 4 live albums and 5 extended plays.


title: INXS discography

text: In 2002 in America, McDonald's and Toyota used "New Sensation" for a promo campaign; the song was also featured in the 2003 film "Shattered Glass". "What You Need" featured in a Chevy trucks advertising campaign. In Australia, "By My Side" was used by insurance company NRMA on and off for eight years. "The One Thing" is featured in "" under the fictional radio station Flash FM.


The 2016 United States presidential election in Wisconsin was held on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States presidential election. Wisconsin voters chose 10 electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting Republican Party nominee Donald Trump against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.


title: 2016 United States presidential election in Wisconsin

text: On April 5, 2016, in the presidential primaries, Wisconsin voters expressed their preferences for the Democratic and Republican Parties' respective nominees for president in an open primary; voters were allowed to vote in either party's primary regardless of their own party affiliation. Bernie Sanders prevailed in Wisconsin's Democratic primary, while Ted Cruz won Wisconsin's Republican primary.


text: In the general election, Donald Trump unexpectedly won Wisconsin by a narrow margin of 0.77%, with 47.22% of the total votes over the 46.45% of Hillary Clinton. Wisconsin was the tipping-point state of the 2016 election; that is, the closest state that both candidates needed to win in order to emerge with a victory in the election (for example, Michigan, while closer, was not necessary for a Trump victory).


text: Trump's victory in Wisconsin was attributed to underestimated support from white working-class voters, a demographic group that had previously tended to vote for the Democratic candidate.


text: By winning Wisconsin, Trump became the first Republican candidate to win the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. He also became the first Republican to win a majority in Iron County since 1920. Wisconsin weighed in for this election as 2.9% more Republican than the nation-at-large, the first time it voted to the right of the nation since 2000. Wisconsin was also one of eleven states to have voted twice for Bill Clinton, which Hillary Clinton lost. This is the only election since 1960 in which the Democratic nominee won the popular vote without Wisconsin.


text: The incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, a Democrat, was first elected president in the 2008 election, running with then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Defeating the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, with 52.9% of the popular vote and 68% of the electoral vote, Obama succeeded two-term Republican President George W. Bush. Obama and Biden were reelected in the 2012 presidential election, defeating former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with 51.1% of the popular vote and 61.7% of electoral votes. Although Barack Obama's approval rating in the RealClearPolitics poll tracking average remained between 40 and 50 percent for most of his second term, it has experienced a surge in early 2016 and reached its highest point since 2012 during June of that year. Analyst Nate Cohn has noted that a strong approval rating for President Obama would equate to a strong performance for the Democratic candidate, and vice versa.


text: Following his second term, President Obama was not eligible for another reelection. In October 2015, Obama's running-mate and two-term Vice President Biden decided not to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination either. With Obama and Biden's terms expiring on January 20, 2017, the electorate was asked to elect a new president, the 45th president and 48th vice president of the United States, respectively.


text: The Democratic Party held its sixth presidential debate on February 11, 2016, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The debate was hosted by PBS NewsHour anchors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff; it aired on PBS and was simulcast by CNN. Participants were Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.


text: The Republican Party held its fourth presidential debate on November 10, 2015, in Milwaukee, at the Milwaukee Theatre. Moderated by Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo and Gerard Baker, the debate aired on the Fox Business Network and was sponsored by "The Wall Street Journal". Eight candidates including Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Rand Paul, participated in the primetime debate that was mostly focused on jobs, taxes, and the general health of the U.S. economy, as well as on domestic and international policy issues. The accompanying undercard debate featured Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Bobby Jindal who ended his campaign a week after the debate.


text: The Wisconsin Green Party held its presidential preference vote at its annual state convention in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 16.


text: Wisconsin joined the Union in May 1848 and has participated in all elections from 1848 onwards. Since 1900, Wisconsin has been won by the Democrats and Republicans the same number of times. Republican-turned-Progressive Robert M. La Follette Sr. carried the state in the 1924 presidential election.


text: The state voted for the Democratic nominee in the seven elections from 1988 to 2012, although sometimes by small margins, as it was in 1992, 2000, and 2004. There were other occasions, in contrast, when the margin of victory was substantial, such as 1996, 2008, and 2012.


text: Polls consistently showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leading by a margin of two to eight points in a four-way race. The last poll published prior to the election was by SurveyMonkey and had Hillary Clinton with a two-point lead over Donald Trump. Clinton never visited the state during the general election campaign, while Trump visited six times. On election day, Trump ended up carrying the state by less than a point, a difference of an average of five to six points from most pre-election polling. Prior to the election, many major news networks and professional and election analysts predicted the state as either lean or likely Democratic. Wisconsin's unexpected swing to Trump, along with two other Rust Belt states (Pennsylvania, Michigan), was the deciding factor in his win of 306–232 over Clinton, despite her gaining the majority of votes. Clinton referenced the loss in her memoir "What Happened": "If there's one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin. Polls showed us comfortably ahead, right up until the end. They also looked good for the Democrat running for Senate, Russ Feingold.". Interestingly, Trump did not win Wisconsin unlike the other states that he flipped by finding new voters, rather retaining more of Romney's vote, as the total votes cast in Wisconsin declined from 2012.


text: On November 25, 2016, with 90 minutes remaining on the deadline to petition for a recount to the state's electoral body, Jill Stein, 2016 presidential candidate of the Green Party of the United States, filed for a recount of the election results in Wisconsin. She signaled she intended to file for similar recounts in the subsequent days in the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. On November 26, the Clinton campaign announced that they were joining the recount effort in Wisconsin.


text: The final result of the recount confirmed Trump's victory in Wisconsin, where he gained a net 131 votes. Trump gained 837 additional votes, while Clinton gained 706 additional votes. During the recount Trump had filed a lawsuit to halt the process, but a federal judge had rejected the lawsuit.


title: Blue box

text: A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. This allowed the user, referred to as a "phreaker", to surreptitiously place long-distance calls that would be billed to another number or dismissed entirely as an incomplete call. A number of similar "color boxes" were also created to control other aspects of the phone network.


title: Blue box

text: First developed in the 1960s and used by a small phreaker community, the introduction of low-cost microelectronics in the early 1970s greatly simplified these devices to the point where they could be constructed by anyone reasonably competent with a soldering iron or breadboard construction. Soon after, models of relatively low quality were being offered fully assembled, but these generally required tinkering on the part of the user to keep operational. An exception was the robust system designed by Steve Wozniak prior to starting work on the Apple I. It was sold by Steve Jobs.


title: Blue box

text: Blue boxes stopped working as the long-distance network was increasingly digitized, replacing the call-control tones with out-of-band signaling methods in the form of common-channel signaling (CCS) carried digitally on a separate channel that is inaccessible to the telecom customer. The original technique was of limited use by the 1980s, and of almost no use today.


title: Blue box

text: Local calling had been increasingly automated through the first half of the 20th century, but long-distance calling still required operator intervention. Automation was deemed essential by AT&T. By the 1940s they had developed a system that used audible tones played over the long-distance lines to control network connections. Tone pairs, referred to as multi-frequency (MF) signals, were assigned to the digits used for telephone numbers. A different, single tone, referred to as single frequency (SF), was used as a line status signal.


title: Blue box

text: This new system allowed the telephone network to be increasingly automated by deploying the dialers and tone generators on an as-required basis, starting with the busier exchanges. Bell Labs was happy to advertise their success in creating this system, and repeatedly revealed details of its inner workings. In the February 1950 issue of Popular Electronics, they published an advertisement, "Playing a Tune for a Telephone Number", which showed the musical notes for the digits on a staff and described the telephone operator's pushbuttons as a "musical keyboard". Two keys on a piano would need to be pushed simultaneously to play the tones for each digit. The illustration did not include the tone pairs for the special control signals KP and ST, although in the picture the operator's finger is on the KP key and the ST key is visible. In the 1950s, AT&T released a public relations film, "Speeding Speech", which described the operation of the system. In the film, the tone sequence for sending a complete telephone number is heard through a loudspeaker as a technician presses the keys for dialing.


title: Blue box

text: In November 1954, the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled "In-Band Single-Frequency Signaling", which described the signaling scheme used for starting and ending telephone calls for the purpose of routing over trunk lines. In November 1960, an article in the Bell System Technical Journal provided an overview of the technical details of signaling systems, and disclosed the frequencies of the signals.


title: Blue box

text: The system was relatively complex for 1950s technology. It had to accurately decode the frequencies and ignore any signals where that frequency might be accidentally created; music playing in the background might randomly contain the SF tones and the system had to filter these out. To do this, the signaling unit compared the signal power from a bandpass filter centered on 2600 Hz to signal power in other parts of the audio band, and only triggered if the tone was the most prominent signal. The originating end of the call would play the tone into the trunk line when the call ended, and trigger the remote end to end the call. After a short time, the originating end reduced the tone level and continued to send tone as long as it received on hook status from its local equipment.


title: Blue box

text: Before the technical details were published, many users discovered unintentionally, and to their annoyance, that a 2600 Hz tone played into the caller's handset would cause a long-distance call to disconnect. The 2600 Hz tone might be present if the caller were whistling into the telephone microphone while waiting for the called party to answer. Upon detecting the tone from the caller's end, the receiving signaling unit sent an on hook status to the connected equipment, which disconnected the call from that point forward, as if the caller had hung up.


title: Blue box

text: Among the earliest to discover this effect was Joe Engressia, known as "Joybubbles", who accidentally discovered it at the age of seven by whistling. He became fascinated with the phone network, and over the next decade had built up a considerable base of knowledge about the system and how to place calls using the control tones. He and other phone phreaks, such as "Bill from New York" and "The Glitch", trained themselves to whistle 2600 Hz to reset a trunk line. They also learned how to route telephone calls by


title: Blue box

text: At one point in the 1960s, packages of the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal included a free gift: a small whistle that, by coincidence, generated a 2600 Hz tone when one of the whistle's two holes was covered. The phreaker John Draper adopted his nickname "Captain Crunch" from this whistle.


title: Blue box

text: The "toll free" 800 service was launched in 1967 and gave the hackers easy numbers to call. The user would generally choose a number in the target area and then use it as above. Even if billing information were generated, it would be to a 1-800 number and thus free of charge. As before, the remote system would notice a call going to the ultimate non-free number, but could not match the other end.


title: Blue box

text: It was technically possible to generate the tones with the technology available at the time the system was first deployed. A piano or electronic organ had keys that were close enough in frequency to work. With tuning, they could even be made dead on frequency. For dialing the phone number, the user would press 2 keys at a time. An experienced pianist might have found the key combinations awkward to play. But a blank player piano roll could have been punched to operate the required keys and dial a phone number. Another strategy would have been to purchase doorbells, remove the plungers, and mount them on a frame that could be set over the piano keyboard. Twelve DPDT pushbuttons, labelled KP, ST and the 10 digits, would operate pairs of plungers to play the phone company tones, after the E7 piano key had been pressed and released.


title: Blue box

text: At the time, there were consumer devices for recording on wire or blank phonograph records, so the piano did not have to be near the phone. Consumer tape recorders came later and made the recording process easier. Small, battery powered, tape recorders allowed the tones to be played back almost anywhere.


title: Blue box

text: It was possible to construct an electronic blue box with 1940s vacuum tube technology, but the device would have been relatively large and power hungry. Just as it did for radios, shrinking them from the size of toasters to the size of cigarette packages and allowing them to be powered by small batteries, transistor technology made a small, battery powered, electronic blue box practical.


title: Blue box

text: AT&T security captured its first blue box in about 1962, but it probably was not the first one built.


title: Blue box

text: A typical blue box had 13 pushbuttons. One button would be for the 2600 Hz tone, pressed and released to disconnect the outgoing connection and then connect a digit receiver. There would be a KP button, to be pressed next, 10 buttons for telephone number digits, and the ST button to be pressed last. The blue box may have had 7 oscillators, 6 for the 2 out of 6 digit code and one for the 2600 Hz tone, or 2 oscillators with switchable frequencies.


title: Blue box

text: The blue box was thought to be a sophisticated electronic device and sold on the black market for a typical $800–1,000 or as much as $3,500. Actually, designing and building one was within the capabilities of many electronics students and engineers with knowledge of the required tones, using published designs for electronic oscillators, amplifiers and switch matrixes, and assembled with readily available parts. Furthermore, it was possible to generate the required tones using consumer products or lab test equipment. The tones could be recorded on small, battery powered, cassette recorders for playback anywhere.


title: Blue box

text: To reduce call set up time, telephone numbers were transmitted from machine to machine in a "speed dial" format, about 1.5 seconds for a 10 digit number, including KP and ST. To catch the cheaters, AT&T could have connected monitors to digit receivers that were not being used for operator dialed calls and logged calls dialed at manual speed. So, some hackers went to the extra trouble of building blue boxes that stored telephone numbers and played the tones with the same timing as the machines.


title: Blue box

text: The widespread ability to blue box, once limited to just a few isolated individuals exploring the telephone network, developed into a subculture. Famous phone phreaks such as "Captain Crunch", Mark Bernay, and Al Bernay used blue boxes to explore the various 'hidden codes' that were not dialable with a standard telephone.


title: Blue box

text: Some of the more famous pranksters were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computer. On one occasion, Wozniak dialed Vatican City and identified himself as Henry Kissinger (imitating Kissinger's German accent) and asked to speak to the Pope (who was sleeping at the time). Wozniak said in 1986:


title: Blue box

text: Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."


title: Blue box

text: Blue boxing hit the mainstream media when an article by Ron Rosenbaum titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" was published in the October 1971 issue of "Esquire" magazine. Suddenly, many more people wanted to get into the phone phreaking culture spawned by the blue box, and it furthered the fame of Captain Crunch.


title: Blue box

text: Two major amateur radio magazines ('73' and "CQ') published articles on the telephone system in the mid-1970s. CQ Magazine published details on phone phreaking, including the tone frequencies and several working blue box schematics in 1974. The June 1975 issue of '73' featured an article describing the rudiments of the long-distance signaling network, how to construct red and blue boxes, and put them into operation. Around the same time, do-it-yourself kits were available to build one's own blue box.


title: Blue box

text: In November 1988, the CCITT (now known as ITU-T) published recommendation Q.140 for the Signaling System No. 5, which caused a resurgence of blue boxing incidents in a new generation of users.


title: Blue box

text: During the early 1990s, blue boxing became popular with the international warez scene, especially in Europe. The software was made to facilitate blue boxing using a computer to generate the signaling tones and play them into the phone. For the PC there were BlueBEEP, TLO, and others, and blue boxes for other platforms such as Amiga were available as well.


title: Blue box

text: Local plain old telephone service works by watching the voltage on the telephone lines between the telephone company's exchange office and the customer's telephone. When the phone is on-hook ("hung up") the approximately 48 volt electricity from the exchange flows to the phone and is looped back without passing through the handset. When the user picks up the handset, the current has to flow through the speaker and microphone in it, causing the voltage to drop to under 10 V. This sudden drop in voltage signals the user has picked up the phone.


title: Blue box

text: Originally, all calls were routed manually by an operator who would look for small light bulbs that would illuminate when the user picked up the phone. They would connect a handset to the line, ask the user who they were calling, and then connect a cable between two phone jacks to complete the call. If the user was placing a long-distance call, the local operator would first talk to an operator at the remote exchange using one of the trunk lines between the two locations. When the local operator heard the remote customer come on the line, they would connect their local customer to the same trunk line to complete the call.


title: Blue box

text: The calling process began to be automated from the earliest days of the telephone system. Increasingly sophisticated electromechanical systems would use the changes in voltage to start the connection process. The rotary dial was introduced around 1904 to operate these switches; the dial rapidly connects and disconnects the line, a process known as pulse dialing. In common systems, these periodic changes in voltage caused a stepper motor to rotate one position for each digit, and longer delays to switch from one rotary switch to another. When enough digits had been decoded, typically seven in North America, connections between each rotor would select a single line, the customer being dialed.


title: Blue box

text: The concept of using voltages to complete the call worked well for the local exchange where the distance between the customer and exchange office might be on the order of a few kilometers. Over longer distances, the capacitance of the lines filter out any rapid changes in voltage and dialing flashes do not reach the remote office in clean form. Through this period, long-distance calls still required operator intervention. As telephone use grew, long-distance calling in particular, telephone companies were increasingly interested in automating this type of connection.


title: Blue box

text: To address this need, the Bell System adopted a second system on the circuits that connected the exchanges. When the user dialed a long-distance number, indicated in North America by dialing a "1" at the beginning of the number, the call was switched to a separate system known as a "tandem". The tandem would then buffer the remaining digits and decode the number to see which remote exchange was being dialed, generally using the area code for this purpose. They would then look for a free trunk line between the two exchanges; if none were available the tandem would play the reorder signal (the "fast busy") to tell the user to try the call again later.


title: Blue box

text: The basic protocol for finding a free line worked by playing a 2600 Hz tone into the line whenever it was not being used. The tandems at both ends of a given trunk line did this. When the tandem determined which remote exchange was being called it scanned the trunk lines between the two exchanges looking for the tone. When it heard the tone on one of the lines, it knew that line was free to use. They would then select that line and drop the 2600 Hz tone from their end. The remote tandem would hear the tone stop, drop their tone, and then play a "supervision flash", making a "ka-cheep" sound, to indicate they had noticed the signal. The line was now free on both ends to connect a call.


title: Blue box

text: Pulse dialing still had the problem that sending the dialed number to the remote exchange would not work due to the capacitance of the network. The tandems solved this by buffering the phone number and then converting each digit into a series of two tones, the multi-frequency signaling system, or "MF". Once the local tandem had found a free line and connected to it, it then relayed the rest of the phone number over the line using the tone dialing method. The remote tandem then decoded the tones and turned them back into pulses on the local exchange. To indicate the start and end of a series of MF digits, special MF tones, KP and ST, were used.


title: Blue box

text: When the call was complete and one of the parties hung up the phone, that exchange would notice the change in voltage and begin playing the 2600 Hz tone into the trunk line. The other end of the connection would hear the tone and cause their local call to hang up as well, and then began playing the tone into their end as well to mark the line free on both ends.


title: Blue box

text: The blue box consisted of a set of audio oscillators, a telephone keypad, an audio amplifier and speaker. The operation of a blue box was simple: First, the user placed a long-distance telephone call, often to a number that was in the target area. Usually, this initial call would be to a 1-800 number or some other non-supervising telephone number like directory assistance. Using a toll-free number ensured that the phone being used for access would not be billed.


title: Blue box

text: When the call began to ring, the caller would hold the speaker over the microphone in the handset and use the blue box to send the 2600 Hz tone (or 2600+2400 Hz on many international trunks followed by a 2400 Hz tone). Hearing this tone, the remote office believes the user hung up before the call completed, and disconnects the call on their exchange. As always, it then begins playing 2600 to mark the line free. However, this does not disconnect the call locally, only physically hanging up the phone will do that. So, in this case, the user is left on a live line, one that is connected via a long-distance trunk line to a target exchange.


title: Blue box

text: The user now stops playing the tone. The remote exchange interprets this loss of tone to mean the exchange's tandem is attempting to place another call. It responds by dropping its tone and then playing the flash to indicate it is ready to accept routing tones. Once the far end sends the supervision flash, the user uses the blue box to send a "Key Pulse" or "KP", the tone that starts a routing digit sequence, followed by either a telephone number or one of the numerous special codes that were used internally by the telephone company, then finished with a "Start" tone, "ST". At this point, the far end of the connection would route the call the way it was told, while the user's local exchange would presume the call was still ringing at the original number.


title: Blue box

text: Blue boxing remained rare until the early 1970s when the required systems began to drop in cost and the concept began to be more widely known. At the time, phreakers felt there was nothing Bell Telephone could do to stop blue boxing because it would require Bell to upgrade all their hardware.


title: Blue box

text: For the immediate term, Bell responded with a number of blue box detection and law enforcement countermeasures. Armed with records of all long-distance calls made, kept by both mechanical switching systems and newer electronic switching systems, including calls to toll-free telephone numbers which did not appear on customer bills, telephone security employees began examining those records looking for suspicious patterns of activity. For instance, at the time, calls to long-distance information, while answered, deliberately did not return the electrical "off hook" signal indicating that they had been answered. When an information call was diverted to another number that answered, the billing equipment would log that event. Billing computers processing the logs and would generate lists of calls to information that were answered. In the early days, the lists were probably intended to detect equipment malfunctions, but the follow up investigation did lead to blue box users. After the toll free "800" service was inaugurated, the billing computers were also programmed to generate lists of lengthy calls to toll free numbers. While many of these calls were legitimate, telephone security employees would examine the lists for irregularities and follow up.


title: Blue box

text: In this case, filters could be installed on those lines to block the blue box. Bell also would wiretap the affected lines. In one 1975 case, the Pacific Telephone Company targeted one defendant's line with the following equipment:


title: Blue box

text: The ultimate solution to the blue box vulnerability was to do what the phreakers thought impossible and upgrade the entire network. This process occurred in stages, some of which were already well underway in the early 1970s.


title: Blue box

text: The T1 system was developed beginning in 1957 and began to be deployed around 1962. It digitized the voice signals so that they could be more efficiently carried in high-density connections between exchanges, carrying 24 lines on a single 4-wire connection. Depending on the network layout, the user might no longer be connected directly to a tandem, but instead to a local office that forwarded the signal over a T1 to a more distant exchange that did have the tandem. Simply due to the way the system worked, the supervisory signals had to be filtered out in order for the digitization of the analog signal to work. Recall that the 2600 Hz tone was not dropped from the trunk until the line was connected all the way and would be mixed with other tones like the ringing or busy signal; when used over a T1 this tone mixed with other signals and caused a problem known as "quantization noise" that distorted the sound. These tones were thus filtered down on either side of the T1 connection. Thus it was difficult to blue box in such an environment, although successes are known.


title: Blue box

text: But blue boxing was eventually eliminated entirely for unrelated reasons. In the existing tandem-based network, completing a call required several stages communicating over the trunk line, even if the remote user never answered the call. As this process might take on the order of 10 to 15 seconds, the total wasted time across all of the trunk lines could be used to carry additional calls. To improve line usage, Bell began the development of the Number One Electronic Switching System (1ESS). This system performed all the calling and line supervision using a separate private line between the two offices. Using this system, when a long-distance call was placed the trunk line was not initially used. Instead, the local office sent a message containing the called number to the remote exchange using this separate channel. The remote office would then attempt to complete the call, and indicate this to the original office using the same private line. Only if the remote user answered would the systems attempt to find a free trunk line and connect, thereby reducing the use of the trunk lines to the absolute minimum.


title: Blue box

text: This change also meant the signaling system was available internally to the network on this separate line. There was no connection between the user lines and this signaling line, so there was no route by which the users could influence the dialing. The same rapid reduction in prices that made the blue box possible also led to the rapid reduction in cost of the ESS systems. First applied only to their busiest connections, by the 1980s, the latest 4ESS models and similar machines from other companies were deployed to almost all major exchanges, leaving only corners of the network still connected using tandems. Blue boxing worked if one connected to such an exchange, but could only be used end-to-end if the entire network between the two endpoints consisted only of tandems, which became increasingly rare and disappeared by the late 1980s.


title: Blue box

text: Analog long-distance transmission systems remained more cost effective for the long haul circuits until, at least, the 1970s. Even then, there was a huge installed base of analog circuits, and it made better economic sense to keep using them. It was not until competitor Sprint built its all digital, "quiet", network, where "you could actually hear a pin drop", that AT&T took a multi-billion dollar write-off and upgraded its long-distance network to digital technology.


title: Blue box

text: The phreaking community that had emerged during the blue box era evolved into other endeavors and there currently exists a commercially published hacking magazine, titled "", a reference to the 2600 Hz tone that was once central to so much of telephone hacking.


title: Blue box

text: Each multifrequency tone consists of two frequencies chosen from a set of six, shown in the table on the left. The Touch Tone encoding is shown by the table on the right:


title: Blue box

text: Normally, the tone durations for passing numbers from machine to machine in a "speed dialing" format are on for 60 ms, with 60 ms of silence between digits. The 'KP' and 'KP2' tones are sent for 100 ms. KP2 (ST2 in the R1 standard) was used for dialing internal Bell System telephone numbers. However, actual tone durations can vary slightly depending on location, switch type, and the machine status.


title: Blue box

text: For operators, technicians, and blue box phone phreakers, the tone durations would be set by how long the buttons were held down and, for silence, how long before manually pressing the next button.


title: Blue box

text: A blue box could have been constructed which would send the tones with machine to machine timing, with the number either stored in digital memory or a matrix of switches. In the switch matrix, there might be 10 rows for digits, each with 5 switches. Two switches would be moved to on, selecting the 2 tones. (KP and ST would be hard wired.) The 5 switches could be labelled 0, 1, 2, 4, and 7, with the user selecting pairs of switches adding to each digit, with special case 4 plus 7 for digit 0.


title: Blue box

text: Alternatively, the tones could be recorded on magnetic tape, which would be cut into pieces and spliced together, using a commercial splicer for accurate alignment. If the phreaker matched machine dialing and recorded at 7.5 ips (inches per second), the splices for tone and silence would be about 1/2-inch long., with KP 3/4-inch long. For more manageable splicing lengths, the phreaker could use a 15 ips tape recorder, which was less common, and double those lengths. For those without a 15 ips machine but having 2 tape recorders, the tones could be recorded an octave low at 7.5 ips, the pieces spliced together would be were double those lengths. The spliced tape would be re-recorded from a 7.5 ips machine to a 3.75 ips machine. The resulting recording could be played back at 7.5 ips. An interval of 2600 Hz, to disconnect the trunk, followed by an interval of silence, to give enough time for a digit receiver to connect, would be added to precede KP.


title: Blue box

text: This set of MF tones was originally devised for Bell System long-distance operators placing calls manually, as well as machine to machine dialing, and predates the DTMF "Touch-Tone" system used by subscribers. The leading 1 for customer dialed long-distance calls was not dialed. For operators, the line was muted during dialing, but, for customer telephones, it was only muted while a key was pressed. The Touch Tone frequencies were chosen to minimize the risk of customer talking while dialing, or background sounds, being registered as a digit or digits and resulting in a wrong number. Muting guarded against that happening during operator dialing, so the MF system did not have to be, and was not, so robust. The tones have a simple 200 Hz spacing. For Touch Tone, harmonic relationships and intermodulation products were taken into account in the choice of tones.


title: Blue box

text: Some of the special codes a person could get onto are in the chart below. "NPA" is a telephone company term for 'area code'.


title: Blue box

text: Many of these appear to have been originally three-digit codes, dialed without the leading area code, and the format of destination numbers dialed to the international senders has changed at various points as the ability to call additional nations was added.


title: Blue box

text: Not all NPAs had all functions. As some NPAs contained multiple cities, an additional routing code was sometimes placed after the area code. For instance, 519+044+121 may reach the Windsor inward operator and 519+034+121 the London inward operator distant, but in the same area code.


title: Blue box

text: Another signaling system widely used on international circuits (except those terminating in North America) was CCITT Signaling System No. 4 (friendly named 'SS4').


title: Blue box

text: This was also an in-band system but, instead of using multifrequency signals for digits, it used four 35 ms pulses of tone, separated by 35 ms of silence, to represent digits in four-bit binary code, with 2400 Hz as a '0' and 2040 Hz as a '1'. The supervisory signals used the same two frequencies, but each supervisory signal started with both tones together (for 150 ms) followed, without a gap, by a long (350 ms) or short (100 ms) period of a single tone of 2400 Hz or 2040 Hz. Phreaks in Europe built System 4 blue boxes that generated these signals. Because System 4 was used only on international circuits, the use of these blue boxes was more specialized.


title: Blue box

text: Typically, a phreak would gain access to international dialing at low or zero cost by some other means, make a dialed call to a country that was available via direct dialing, and then use the System 4 blue box to clear down the international connection and make a call to a destination that was available only via operator service. Thus, the System 4 blue box was used primarily as a way of setting up calls to hard-to-reach operator-only destinations.


title: Blue box

text: A typical System 4 blue box had a keypad (for sending four-bit digit signals) plus four buttons for the four supervisory signals (clear-forward, seize-terminal, seize-transit, and transfer-to-operator). After some experimentation, nimble-fingered phreaks found that all they needed was two buttons, one for each frequency. With practice, it was possible to manually generate all the signals with sufficient timing precision, including the digit signals. This made it possible to make the blue box quite small.


title: Blue box

text: A refinement added to some System 4 blue boxes was an anti-acknowledgment-echo guard tone. Because the connection between the telephone and the telephone network is two-wire, but the signaling on the international circuit operates on a four-wire basis (totally separate send and receive paths), signal-acknowledgment tones (single pulses of one of the two frequencies from the far end of the circuit after receipt of each digit) tended to be reflected at the four-wire/two-wire conversion point. Although these reflected signals were relatively faint, they were sometimes loud enough for the digit-receiving circuits at the far end to treat them as the first bit of the next digit, messing up the phreak's transmitted digits.


title: Blue box

text: What the improved blue box did was to continuously transmit a tone of some other frequency (e.g., 600 Hz) as a guard tone whenever it was not sending a System 4 signal. This guard tone drowned out the echoed acknowledgment signals so that only the blue box-transmitted digits were heard by the digit-receiving circuits at the far end.


title: All India Football Federation

text: The All India Football Federation (AIFF) is the national governing body of football in India. It is a member of FIFA, the international governing body of football and affiliated to Asian Football Confederation.


title: All India Football Federation

text: It is affiliated to Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports of Government of India and a member of South Asian Football Federation. AIFF's teams India men's and women's football teams represents India in men's and women's international football tournaments, friendlies respectively.


title: All India Football Federation

text: The AIFF manage, sanctions, conducts, schedules and runs all national level football tournaments and leagues in India, including major tournaments Indian Super League, I-League and Super Cup. The federation also indirectly manages local football competitions through its


title: All India Football Federation

text: AIFF's Beach soccer and Futsal sport commitees oversees development of Beach soccer and Futsal sport in India.


title: All India Football Federation

text: Before the formation of the All India Football Federation (AIFF), the "de facto" ruling body for association football in India were the Indian Football Association (IFA). The IFA was founded in 1893 and ran the game in the Bengal region. The federation was mainly governed by Englishmen and served as the most powerful football body in the country during the early 20th century.


title: All India Football Federation

text: Efforts to form a countrywide football federation were started in 1935 by the IFA when the federation, as well as seven other associations, met at a conference but no consensus could be reached. After differences in opinions and other conflicts were resolved, a meeting was conducted in March 1937 which would serve to be the beginning of the start of the AIFF. The AIFF was officially founded on 23 June 1937 after representatives from six regional football associations met at the Army Headquarters in Shimla. Namely, the six regional football associations were the IFA, Army Sports Control Board, United Provinces, the North West India Football Association, the Bihar Football Association, and Delhi Soccer Association.


title: All India Football Federation

text: After the launch of the national football federation, the idea of an India national football team did not gain much momentum until after India gain independence in 1947. Select Indian teams did participate in tours of Australia, Burma, Afghanistan, and South Africa but none were officially part of the national team. In 1948, one year after independence and 11 since forming as a football association, the AIFF gained affiliation with FIFA, the governing body for football around the world. Later that year, the national team was officially formed and participated in their first official tournament, the 1948 Summer Olympics.


title: All India Football Federation

text: In 1950, the national team automatically qualified for the 1950 FIFA World Cup which was to be held in Brazil after all the teams in India's qualification group withdrew. However, prior to the tournament, India themselves withdrew from the World Cup with the AIFF citing the reason as due to lack of funding. Other reasons given for India's withdrawal included the players playing mainly barefooted and that the AIFF valued the Summer Olympics tournament more than the FIFA World Cup at the time. In 1952, during the Olympics in Finland, India was defeated in the first round by Yugoslavia 10–1. This defeat made the AIFF make it mandatory for players on the national team to wear football boots. In 1954, the AIFF played an active role in promoting football in Asia when they were one of the founding members of the Asian Football Confederation. India took part in four straight Olympic football tournaments between 1948 and 1960 but have failed to qualify since. In 1985, India started to participate in World Cup qualifiers again but have failed to make it to the tournament.


title: All India Football Federation

text: In 1977, the AIFF started the Federation Cup which was the first club based national tournament in the country. The Santosh Trophy, the national tournament for state teams, was started in 1941.


title: All India Football Federation

text: In 1996, the AIFF began the first national league in the country, the semi-professional National Football League. Before this, most clubs played in state leagues or select nationwide tournaments.


title: All India Football Federation

text: In 2006, the AIFF reformatted the league as the I-League in an effort to professionalise the game. However, during the following seasons, the league suffered from a lack of popularity due to poor marketing.


title: All India Football Federation

text: In September 2006, the AIFF signed a 10-year television and media contract with Zee Sports. The deal would make Zee broadcast the National Football League, later the I-League, and other tournaments organised by the AIFF and selected India's international matches. However, in October 2010, the deal between the AIFF and Zee Sports was terminated after differences between both parties related to payment and marketing of football in India.


title: All India Football Federation

text: On 9 December 2010, it was announced that the AIFF had signed a new 15-year, ₹700 crore deal with Reliance Industries and the International Management Group.


title: All India Football Federation

text: Politicians are highly involved in AIFF. From 1988 to 2009, Congress party's Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi was president of AIFF. After him his fellow, Congress party's politician Praful Patel became president and run it from 2009- 2022. He was removed from the position by Supreme Court of India in May 2022 and appointed 3 member commitee to run AIFF. In their decision Judge remarked that the present state of this organisation is not in the intrest of proper governence. Patel remained president of the AIFF for 16 years, without any tenure limit. He held the position in 3 terms. As per AIFF, some people dictate Indian football who serve themselves in the expenses of football sport and players. According to The Telegraph newspaper's article, there is rampant and open corruption in the All India Football Federation (AIFF) and due to lots of sponsor do not want to sponsor AIFF or associated with it. And Players, coaches and officials related to football feels that the AIFF's attitude and management of this organisation have to be change, otherwise football will not improve in India.


title: All India Football Federation

text: As of 6 October 2021, since 2020 AIFF avoided elections to new president and office holders. Praful Patel is president of AIFF since 2009 and holded president's post even after his legal presidency period ended.


title: All India Football Federation

text: Multiple times, FIFA have accused AIFF of outside influence in it. On 15 August 2022, FIFA suspended the federation for violating its statutes on third-party interference. India was stripped off its hosting rights for international football tournaments, including the 2022 FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup scheduled for October 2022. The Suspension was lifted on 27 August 2022. As a result, 2022 FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup scheduled for October 2022 were held as planned.


title: All India Football Federation

text: Indian men's national football team never played in FIFA World Cup yet but India did qualifiy for the 1950 FIFA World Cup which was held in Brazil. In the 1950 FIFA World Cup qualification the fellow teams in India's qualification group withdrew due to various reasons and India by default qualified for the 1950 world cup. But Indian team did not participate and withdrew their name. For years some people believed that India withdrew or didn't participated because FIFA did not allowed Indians to play barefoot. But according to author and sports journalist Jaydeep Basu it is completely wrong, India did not participate because AIFF did not had faith in it's then players that they had calibre to compete against top teams of the world and use to consider Olympics more important tournament than FIFA World Cup and it was a historic blunder done by them.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: Tour of Duty is an American military drama television series based on events in the Vietnam War, broadcast on CBS. The series ran for three seasons, from September 24, 1987, to April 28, 1990, for a total of 58 one-hour episodes. The show was created by Steve Duncan and L. Travis Clark and produced by Zev Braun.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The show follows an American infantry platoon on a tour of duty during the Vietnam War. It was the first television series to regularly show Americans in combat in South Vietnam and was one of several similarly themed series to be produced in the wake of the acclaimed Oliver Stone film "Platoon" (1986).


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The series won an Emmy Award in 1988 for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Drama Series, and it was nominated again in 1989 and 1990.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: "Tour of Duty" examined the issues of politics, faith, teamwork, racism, suicide, fragging, terrorism, civilian deaths, sexuality, drug abuse, and how the lives of soldiers and civilians were permanently affected by the Vietnam War.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The first season began in 1967 and followed Bravo company's second platoon located at Camp Ladybird. Second platoon was standard light infantry platoon conducting "search and destroy" missions in Vietnam, under the command of 2nd Lieutenant (1st Lieutenant from the start of season 2) Myron Goldman (Stephen Caffrey) and Staff Sergeant (later Sergeant First Class) Zeke Anderson (Terence Knox). It was filmed on location in Hawaii at Schofield Barracks.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: For the second and third seasons, the series was filmed around Los Angeles, California, to reduce the budget. The same locations, notably a small river with grass on one bank and woods on the other, were reused in a number of episodes. The old set of war comedy-drama television series "M*A*S*H" was also used for filming.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The change of location also led to a change in the show's direction. Beginning in the second season, the platoon was relocated to a base near Saigon, Camp Arnett. Production staff interviewed in "Vietnam Magazine" said this change in premise doomed the series because it shifted from being a realistic chronicle about the life of an average combat infantryman to an action/romantic/drama show. CBS wanted female characters because ABC had premiered "China Beach", a Vietnam Army nurses drama, which was aimed directly at attracting more female viewers.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: In "Tour of Duty"s third season, the remaining female character was killed off, and the platoon was transferred to a SOG unit under the command of Colonel Brewster (played by Carl Weathers). The unit conducted covert operations in Vietnam and Cambodia which included a fictional version of the raid on Son Tay Prison. The show was canceled at the end of this season due to falling ratings.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: Guest stars included Lee Majors, James Hong, Mako, Kelly Hu, Angela Bassett, Ving Rhames, Melora Hardin, Everett McGill, Olivia d'Abo, David Alan Grier, Richard Brooks, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, William Sadler, and Michael Madsen.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: In 2004-2005, Sony Pictures released all three seasons for the first time in the US, both as individual season sets and a complete series set. Due to licensing issues, all original music was replaced with sound-alike versions, much to the dismay of fans. These releases, which have also been criticized for having substandard sound and picture quality, have since been discontinued.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: In 2013, Mill Creek Entertainment acquired the US rights to various television series from the Sony Pictures library including "Tour of Duty". In 2014-2015, they re-released all three seasons on DVD, again as individual season sets and a complete series set. These releases have the same poor A/V and replacement music of the Sony issues.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: Between 2011-2013, Fabulous Films released identical DVDs in the UK and Australia, both as individual season sets and a complete series set. They have improved audio and video quality over the US issues, and retain the complete original soundtrack, including "Paint It, Black". They also contain extras including cast and crew biographies, hundreds of publicity photos and a feature-length, three-part documentary. The latter includes interviews filmed in Los Angeles in July 2011 with key cast members Terence Knox, Joshua D. Maurer, Steve Akahoshi, Tony Becker, Eric Bruskotter, Kevin Conroy, Miguel A. Núñez Jr. and Dan Gauthier, and key production crew members Zev Braun (producer) Bill L. Norton (writer/director), Steve Smith (writer/producer), Steve Duncan (creator) and Paul Sinor (military advisor).


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The complete series was also released on DVD in Germany by Koch Media between 2012-2014, both as individual season sets and complete series sets. These releases replicate the poor quality, music-replacement and extras-free US DVDs but they do reinstate the original version of "Paint It, Black" in the opening credits.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The opening theme song was an abbreviated version of The Rolling Stones hit "Paint It Black" that had featured in the end titles of the 1987 Vietnam War film "Full Metal Jacket"; this was removed for the US DVD release. The closing consisted of an instrumental, synthesized tune with a distinctive Asian sound mixed in with acoustic guitar; it was performed by Joseph Conlan, and was never released for public consumption other than in the series. That music was used as background music for most of the series. On the US DVD release, most of the Vietnam War–era popular songs were replaced by instrumental bits to cover the blank spots of music.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: All three seasons that have been released in the United Kingdom feature the complete original soundtrack, including "Paint It Black".


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The show was known for its classic American rock soundtrack including Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane. One first-season episode, "USO Down", used "live" versions of "Wooly Bully", and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" as performed by a USO band, the latter song being used also for ironic comment. The songs in this episode were retained in the DVD soundtracks. But for copyright reasons, the VHS and DVD soundtracks of the majority of episodes were replaced with soundalikes, a move which was widely protested by buyers and resulted in a significantly lower sales volume for the third-season DVD set than for the first two.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: In the Netherlands, amongst other European nations, a total number of seven albums were released, containing most of the songs featured on the show. As a result, "Paint It Black" was re-released as a single, again hitting the number 1 position in the Dutch top 40 pop charts in May 1990.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The "Tour of Duty" television series soundtrack was released by CBS on Columbia Records as four different compilation albums during 1988 and 1989. The original albums are now out of print. Their track listings are as follows:


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: In 1992, Sony Music released a compilation CD titled "The Best of 'Tour of Duty"'. It contains only twenty of the songs featured in the four original "Tour of Duty" Soundtrack albums.


title: Tour of Duty (TV series)

text: The series won an Emmy Award in 1988 for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Drama Series (for "Under Siege"), and it was nominated again in 1989 and 1990.


title: Cetus

text: Cetus () is a constellation, sometimes called 'the whale' in English. The Cetus was a sea monster in Greek mythology which both Perseus and Heracles needed to slay. Cetus is in the region of the sky that contains other water-related constellations: Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus.


title: Cetus

text: Cetus is not among the 12 true zodiac constellations in the J2000 epoch, nor classical 12-part zodiac. The ecliptic passes less than 0.25° from one of its corners. Thus the moon and planets will enter Cetus (occulting any stars as a foreground object) in 50% of their successive orbits briefly and the southern part of the sun appears in Cetus for about one day each year. Many asteroids in belts have longer phases occulting the north-western part of Cetus, those with a slightly greater inclination to the ecliptic than the moon and planets.


title: Cetus

text: As seen from Mars, the ecliptic (apparent plane of the sun and also the average plane of the planets which is almost the same) passes into it.


title: Cetus

text: Mira ("wonderful", named by Bayer: Omicron Ceti, a star of the neck of the asterism) was the first variable star to be discovered and the prototype of its class, Mira variables. Over a period of 332 days, it reaches a maximum apparent magnitude of 3 - visible to the naked eye - and dips to a minimum magnitude of 10, invisible to the unaided eye. Its seeming appearance and disappearance gave it its name. Mira pulsates with a minimum size of 400 solar diameters and a maximum size of 500 solar diameters. 420 light-years from Earth, it was discovered by David Fabricius in 1596.


title: Cetus

text: α Ceti, traditionally called Menkar ("the nose"), is a red-hued giant star of magnitude 2.5, 220 light-years from Earth. It is a wide double star; the secondary is 93 Ceti, a blue-white hued star of magnitude 5.6, 440 light-years away. β Ceti, also called Deneb Kaitos and Diphda is the brightest star in Cetus. It is an orange-hued giant star of magnitude 2.0, 96 light-years from Earth. The traditional name "Deneb Kaitos" means "the whale's tail". γ Ceti, Kaffaljidhma ("head of the whale") is a very close double star. The primary is a yellow-hued star of magnitude 3.5, 82 light-years from Earth, and the secondary is a blue-hued star of magnitude 6.6. Tau Ceti is noted for being a near Sun-like star at a distance of 11.9 light-years. It is a yellow-hued main-sequence star of magnitude 3.5.


title: Cetus

text: AA Ceti is a triple star system; the brightest member has a magnitude of 6.2. The primary and secondary are separated by 8.4 arcseconds at an angle of 304 degrees. The tertiary is not visible in telescopes. AA Ceti is an eclipsing variable star; the tertiary star passes in front of the primary and causes the system's apparent magnitude to decrease by 0.5 magnitudes. UV Ceti is an unusual binary variable star. 8.7 light-years from Earth, the system consists of two red dwarfs. Both of magnitude 13. One of the stars is a flare star, which are prone to sudden, random outbursts that last several minutes; these increase the pair's apparent brightness significantly - as high as magnitude 7.


title: Cetus

text: Cetus lies far from the galactic plane, so that many distant galaxies are visible, unobscured by dust from the Milky Way. Of these, the brightest is Messier 77 (NGC 1068), a 9th magnitude spiral galaxy near Delta Ceti. It appears face-on and has a clearly visible nucleus of magnitude 10. About 50 million light-years from Earth, M77 is also a Seyfert galaxy and thus a bright object in the radio spectrum. Recently, the galactic cluster JKCS 041 was confirmed to be the most distant cluster of galaxies yet discovered.


title: Cetus

text: The massive cD galaxy Holmberg 15A is also found in Cetus. As is spiral galaxy NGC 1042 and ultra-diffuse galaxy NGC 1052-DF2.


title: Cetus

text: IC 1613 (Caldwell 51) is an irregular dwarf galaxy near the star 26 Ceti and is a member of the Local Group.


title: Cetus

text: NGC 246 (Caldwell 56), also called the Cetus Ring, is a planetary nebula with a magnitude of 8.0, 1600 light-years from Earth. Among some amateur astronomers, NGC 246 has garnered the nickname "Pac-Man Nebula" because of the arrangement of its central stars and the surrounding star field.


title: Cetus

text: The Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) is a barred irregular galaxy discovered in 1909 by Max Wolf, located on the outer edges of the Local Group. The discovery of the nature of the galaxy was accredited to Knut Lundmark and Philibert Jacques Melotte in 1926. It is in the constellation Cetus.


title: Cetus

text: Cetus may have originally been associated with a whale, which would have had mythic status amongst Mesopotamian cultures. It is often now called the Whale, though it is most strongly associated with Cetus the sea-monster, who was slain by Perseus as he saved the princess Andromeda from Poseidon's wrath. It is in the middle of "The Sea" recognised by mythologists, a set of water-associated constellations, its other members being Eridanus, Pisces, Piscis Austrinus and Aquarius.


title: Cetus

text: Cetus has been depicted in many ways throughout its history. In the 17th century, Cetus was depicted as a "dragon fish" by Johann Bayer. Both Willem Blaeu and Andreas Cellarius depicted Cetus as a whale-like creature in the same century. However, Cetus has also been variously depicted with animal heads attached to a piscine body.


title: Cetus

text: In Chinese astronomy, the stars of Cetus are found among two areas: the Black Tortoise of the North (北方玄武, "Běi Fāng Xuán Wǔ") and the White Tiger of the West (西方白虎, "Xī Fāng Bái Hǔ").


title: Cetus

text: The Tukano and Kobeua people of the Amazon used the stars of Cetus to create a jaguar, representing the god of hurricanes and other violent storms. Lambda, Mu, Xi, Nu, Gamma, and Alpha Ceti represented its head; Omicron, Zeta, and Chi Ceti represented its body; Eta Eri, Tau Cet, and Upsilon Cet marked its legs and feet; and Theta, Eta, and Beta Ceti delineated its tail.


title: Cetus

text: In Hawaii, the constellation was called "Na Kuhi", and Mira (Omicron Ceti) may have been called "Kane".


title: Cetus

text: "Cetus" is the title of a ragtime piano composition by Tom Brier on the album "Constellations" and a 1967 electronic composition by Olly Wilson.


title: PetSmart

text: PetSmart is a privately held American chain of pet superstores, which sell pet products, services, and small pets. It is the leading North American pet company, and its direct competitor is Petco. Its indirect competitors are Amazon, Walmart, and Target. As of 2020, PetSmart has more than 1,650 stores in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Its stores sell pet food, pet supplies, pet accessories, and small pets. Stores also provide services including grooming, dog daycare, dog and cat boarding, veterinary care via in-store third-party clinics, and dog training. They also offer dog and cat adoption via in-store adoption centers facilitated by the nonprofit PetSmart Charities.


title: PetSmart

text: Founded in 1986 by Jim and Janice Dougherty, the company opened its first two stores in 1987 in Phoenix, Arizona under the name PetFood Warehouse, as warehouse-type stores that sold pet food in bulk at discount prices. Under new leadership the company changed its name to Pet Smart in 1989 and, along with expanding around the country, began a long-term shift away from visually unappealing discount warehouse stores to attractive stores that sold pet food and supplies and offered services such as grooming, adoption events, and vet visits. The company went public via an IPO in 1993, and thereafter increased its nationwide expansion and the types of goods and services it offered.


title: PetSmart

text: After opening nearly 300 stores in the U.S., in 1996 the company expanded to Canada. It also bought and renamed a pet-store chain in the UK, but the over-priced purchase was a failure financially and operationally, and PETsMART sold the UK chain at a substantial loss to another pet-store company in the UK in late 1999. The failed UK expansion brought a loss in profitability and a low point for PETsMART stock in 2000. The company's third CEO, Phil Francis, retooled the company by emphasizing employee training and customer service, overhauling operations and systems, redesigning stores for visual appeal, and marketing PETsMART as a one-stop shop for pet products and services. By 2002 the company had fully integrated its in-store, online, and catalog sales. Francis also led the opening of an average of 100 new stores per year from 2002 through 2009.


title: PetSmart

text: In 2005 the company changed its name to PetSmart and refocused its branding on "pet parents" who considered their pets part of their families. Differentiating itself by emphasizing its channel-exclusive brands and its in-store services such as grooming, dog training, day care and boarding, veterinary care, and adoption centers, the company nonetheless experienced encroaching competition from big-box stores and online e-tailers. The company was acquired by a private equity consortium led by BC Partners in March 2015. In May 2017 PetSmart purchased the online pet-products e-tailer Chewy as a largely independent subsidiary. Chewy went public in an IPO in June 2019; As of March 2021, PetSmart no longer owns Chewy and they are independently operated companies.


title: PetSmart

text: In the early 1980s, Jim and Janice Dougherty conceived the idea of a chain of discount pet-food warehouses, and, with the initial financial backing of Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, incorporated under the name Pacific Coast Distributing in 1986. In 1987 they opened their first two superstores, in the Phoenix, Arizona area, under the name PetFood Warehouse, offering pet food in large quantities for low prices, a new concept at the time. The stores welcomed customers and their pets, which was a first for the retail industry. In 1988 they opened five additional stores in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas, and PetFood Warehouse stores began working with local animal welfare groups to hold fundraising and pet adoption events.


title: PetSmart

text: By 1989 PetFood Warehouse was not yet profitable, and the board of investors removed the Doughertys from control of the company, retaining them as consultants, and in March 1989 hired retail veteran Samuel J. Parker as president and CEO in their place. Under Parker's direction, that year the company changed its name to PETsMART, pet grooming services began to be offered in some stores, and departments for birds, fish, and small pets were added. In 1990 mobile vet clinics were brought to stores to administer vaccinations. Parker also redesigned stores to be more inviting, covering cement floors with tiles, widening and brightening aisles, and adding pet accessories and supplies.


title: PetSmart

text: Parker also led expansion into new markets in the southwest and California, and in 1992 PETsMART opened its 50th store and registered a profit for the first time. In-house grooming centers, veterinary clinics, and pet adoption centers began to be included in stores to create one-stop pet stores for services and supplies, and in 1992 PETsMART introduced its own private-label premium and value brands of cat and dog foods. In-store obedience training was offered. In 1993 Parker was elected Chairman of the company in addition to being President and CEO.


title: PetSmart

text: In July 1993 the company went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker "PETM". The infusion of capital allowed CEO Parker to expand aggressively across the country, and also to acquire regional and competing companies, in an effort to become the national leader in pet stores in an increasingly competitive market. Its 100th store was opened in 1994.


title: PetSmart

text: In 1994 PETsMART Charities, Inc. – now PetSmart Charities – was formed, an independent nonprofit organization to help save the lives of homeless pets by partnering with animal shelters. PETsMART had decided not to sell dogs and cats because of the hundreds of thousands of animals that are euthanized each year. Instead, via PetSmart Charities it donates space inside its stores to local humane societies and animal shelters for them to display homeless animals that customers can adopt. PetSmart Charities also offers grant funding and donations to animal-welfare programs and organizations. As of 2020, the organization had facilitated the adoption of more than 9 million dogs and cats.


title: PetSmart

text: Also in 1994, PETsMART signed a deal with Banfield Pet Hospital clinics to include their veterinary clinics, initially called VetSmart, in PETsMART stores. PetSmart received rent and a share of the profits from the clinics, and had a 20% ownership of Banfield. By 1996 each new PETsMART store included a clinic, and by 1997 there were vet clinics in 213 North American stores.


title: PetSmart

text: PETsMART entered the mail-order catalog business in April 1995, and by 1996 had acquired the leading pet-products catalog business in North America and a major equine products catalog business. PETsMART Direct, which encompassed several catalogs, was formed in October 1996.


title: PetSmart

text: In 1996 the company opened its first eight Canadian stores, and spread to the UK by acquiring and renaming Pet City, the UK's largest pet-products chain which had 50 stores at the time. Petsmart.com was initiated as an information website. By end of year PETsMART had 320 stores.


title: PetSmart

text: Parker had retired as CEO in 1995, naming Mark Hansen as his successor CEO while Parker remained on as chairman. Years of rapid expansion eventually exacerbated the company's lack of an adequate inventory infrastructure, resulting in heavy losses being reported in early in 1997. Hansen resigned that year and Parker was brought back in to revive the company as chairman and CEO. He initiated a series of "Back to Basics" initiatives to get the company on track, and after it returned to profitability he resigned again in March 1998, whereupon board member Phil Francis became president and CEO.


title: PetSmart

text: New CEO Francis, a supermarket-chain veteran, emphasized employee training and customer service, and smaller stores with improved and more attractive design. He led PETsMART to increasingly leave behind the warehouse concept in favor of shopper experience, eventually focusing on providing shoppers with a combination of attractive prices, variety, customer service, in-store experience, and ancillary services. He also implemented major efficiencies and cost cuts in payroll, inventory, distribution, supply chain, and purchasing.


title: PetSmart

text: In 1998 PETsMART opened its 500th store, and by year's end had 423 stores in the U.S., 93 stores in the UK, and 18 in Canada.


title: PetSmart

text: Under Francis's direction, in 1999 the company launched an ad campaign promoting PETsMART as a one-stop shop for pet products and services. Medical Management International (MMI), the holding company of Banfield Pet Hospitals, managed all vet clinics in company stores by 1999, and PETsMART acquired a 36% stake in MMI. Eventually, in 2007 PetSmart sold off part of its stake in Banfield/MMI and divested the rest of the stake in 2015, and in 2018 the company began recruiting independent veterinary operators to house clinics inside its stores which did not yet have one.


title: PetSmart

text: Also in 1999, to compete with Pets.com, via a joint venture with Idealab the website Petsmart.com became an e-commerce site and a subsidiary of PETsMART. In 2000 PETsMART increased its 49.9% stake in Petsmart.com to 81%, and in January 2002 acquired the site outright for an additional $9.5 million. It fully integrated its online operations and marketing with its existing brick-and-mortar business and with its direct-marketing catalog business. In December 2000 it had also acquired the domain name Pets.com from the newly defunct e-tailer, and redirected all of its web traffic to Petsmart.com.


title: PetSmart

text: The 1996 overpriced acquisition of the British chain store Pet City and its transformation into PETsMART UK had proved disastrous financially and operationally, and in late 1999 PETsMART sold its acquisition back to a different UK pet retailer, Pets at Home, at a substantial loss.


title: PetSmart

text: Although sales went up by over 5% in 2000, the company recorded a $31 million loss for the year, and in mid 2000 its stock price hit an all-time low. In order to bolster growth, the company adopted a new vision statement, "to provide Total Lifetime Care for every pet, every parent, every time." PETsMART began remodeling all of its stores, creating a new store format that was warmer and friendlier and organized by pet type, and adding emphasis on in-store customer service; by the end of 2003, all stores had the new format. In 2000 the company also re-prioritized and expanded its in-store services such as dog training and grooming. It also acquired the pet boarding company PetsHotels Plus; afterwards, two in-store PETsMART PetsHotels were tested in 2002 in Phoenix. By the end of 2008 over 100 stores had PetsHotels offering daycare for dogs and boarding for dogs and cats, and by 2020 there were eight stand-alone PetsHotels and hotels in 207 stores.


title: PetSmart

text: In 2001 the company laid out a three-year plan to expand in-store services and products and provide high-quality customer service, and began an extensive training program for its employees, to help them identify customers' needs and provide solutions. In line with its new vision statement, a new ad campaign debuted, "All You Need for the Life of Your Pet".


title: PetSmart

text: By early 2002 PETsMART's stock had recovered, more than quadrupling from its low in mid 2000. By the end of 2002 there were Banfield Pet Hospitals in more than half of its 583 stores, PETsMART had eight distribution centers around the country, and the company embarked on a major new expansion opening an average of 100 new stores annually between 2002 and 2009.


title: PetSmart

text: In 2004 the company launched its PetPerks loyalty card program, which offered promotional discounts and customization to shoppers, allowing PETsMART to also individually promote services or products a given customer had not yet used and to determine the effectiveness of each promotion and the strongest customer brand loyalties. The company also tested its new concept, Doggie Day Camp daycare for dogs, in a store in Pasadena.


title: PetSmart

text: In 2005 PETsMART rebranded itself PetSmart and embraced a new concept and image which focused on "pet parents" and the trend of humanizing pets. It introduced a major television ad campaign appealing to pet owners who treated their pets as children or considered them family members. The rebranding emphasized the company's focus on being a petcare company which provided services as well as numerous specialty products rather than simply being a big-box discount mart. A new store format, including revamped signage and displays, easier navigation, and in-store pet training centers, accompanied the change in focus. PetSmart tightened its focus further in 2007 by exiting its equine business.


title: PetSmart

text: By the mid to late 2000s PetSmart was beginning to experience significant competition from Amazon, Walmart, and Target; Walmart had entered heavily into the pet supplies market and was also beginning to offer services such as grooming. The company's direct competitor is Petco, a nationwide big-box pet supplies retailer that was sold to private equity owners in 2006.


title: PetSmart

text: In June 2009, Bob Moran, President and Chief Operating Officer of PetSmart, became CEO, succeeding Francis, who became executive chairman of the board until 2012. Moran's vision was to slow the opening of new stores, and to focus instead on improving store productivity by pursuing the company's differentiation strategy, and on reaching its target market and improving its customer focus, especially regarding the humanization of animals.


title: PetSmart

text: In 2010 PetSmart began to launch a series of exclusive products based on partnerships with high-profile entities like GNC and Martha Stewart, leading to the GNC Pets and Martha Stewart Pets lines. These were followed by other exclusive product partnerships, including with Bret Michaels, Toys "R" Us, Marvel Comics, and Tommy Bahama and in 2017 with Ellen DeGeneres.


title: PetSmart

text: In a planned management succession, after four years at the helm of the company, Moran retired as CEO in June 2013 and was replaced by then President and COO David K. Lenhardt.


title: PetSmart

text: Although it continued to differentiate itself by stressing and broadening its in-store services such as boarding, grooming, dog training, and veterinary care, by 2014, with the increasing competition from online e-tailers PetSmart's profits began to slide, prompting activist investors to call for a buy-out of the company beginning in mid 2014.


title: PetSmart

text: The winner in the bidding war was a consortium of private equity investors led by BC Partners, which completed a leveraged buyout of PetSmart for $8.7 billion in March 2015. The company ceased trading on the NASDAQ, and Lenhardt stepped down as CEO, replaced by Michael Massey, formerly CEO of Payless ShoeSource's parent Collective Brands.


title: PetSmart

text: Massey and BC Partners replaced seven senior PetSmart managers and a significant portion of VP-level employees, and reorganized the company for quick decision-making. Massey strategically shifted pricing, recalculated inventory shipping, reduced expenses, improved profit margins, and created a 30-person sourcing team in Asia for PetSmart's hard goods.


title: PetSmart

text: This overhaul led to an initial increase in profitability, followed by declining sales in PetSmart's brick-and-mortar stores due to online competition. To combat this PetSmart purchased the still-unprofitable yet popular pet e-commerce site Chewy as a largely independent subsidiary in May 2017 for $3.35 billion. Added to its debt acquired from its 2015 leveraged buyout, this brought PetSmart's total debt load to $8 billion, which reached $8.6 billion as of February 2019.


title: PetSmart

text: PetSmart CEO Massey abruptly resigned in August 2017; pending a replacement Raymond Svider, managing partner at BC Partners, served as executive chairman and oversaw the company with its senior leadership team. In May 2018 J.K. Symancyk, previously CEO of Academy Sports + Outdoors, was appointed the new CEO. In June 2018, PetSmart transferred a 20% stake in Chewy to its BC Partners–led parent holding company, and also transferred a 16.5% holding in Chewy to a wholly owned "unrestricted subsidiary" of PetSmart; these transactions kept a substantial portion of Chewy out of reach of PetSmart's creditors.


title: PetSmart

text: Chewy went public in an IPO in June 2019. PetSmart used the proceeds of the IPO to pay down some of its debt. Chewy remains an independent subsidiary of PetSmart, and PetSmart is its majority owner.


title: PetSmart

text: At its founding in 1986, co-founders Jim and Janice Dougherty led the company along with their financial backers. In 1989, the investors removed the Doughertys and replaced them with a CEO, retail veteran Samuel J. Parker. Since 1989 the CEOs of the company have been:


title: PetSmart

text: In January 2016, PETA released details of an investigation of Holmes Farm, a major supplier of live animals to Petsmart, Petco and Pet Supplies Plus, which highlighted abusive conditions at what is described as a complex of "filthy, windowless warehouses." Small animals such as rabbits, hamsters, rats, mice and gerbils were confined to overcrowded bins and often drank from contaminated water bowls or had no water altogether. Cats, who freely roamed around the facilities, regularly jumped in and out of bins and preyed on the animals within them. PETA's investigators reported that, during their observations, injured animals never received veterinary care, but instead were piled by the dozens in "feces-smeared coolers" and then gassed to death with carbon monoxide; others were put into ziplock bags and frozen to death. Over the span of roughly three months, PETA’s investigator found hundreds of dead animals at the complex, often in habitats which contained no drinking water. In May 2016, PetSmart ceased utilizing the rodent dealer Holmes Farm, Inc. in Barto, Pennsylvania, after the dealer was cited for multiple infractions by the U.S. Department of Agriculture during an inspection. The USDA inspection of the rodent dealer had followed the undercover investigation launched in late 2015 by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).


title: PetSmart

text: In February 2016, another PETA investigation discovered rampant abuse and neglect at Mack, an Ohio reptile mill and a supplier for Petsmart, including, among other things, frogs, lizards, turtles and other animals being "crammed into filthy, crowded plastic bins stacked into shelving units like old bank statements. Living beings deprived of water for days or even weeks. Sick and injured animals denied veterinary care. Emaciated, severely dehydrated animals desperate for water. Animals cruelly killed by being gassed or frozen to death." The investigation did not find any abuse from PetSmart employees. The company released a statement saying “We are reviewing the matter internally, and if we find that our standards have not been met, we will take appropriate action immediately."


title: PetSmart

text: An undercover operation by a PETA employee who got jobs at three PetSmart stores in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee led to a raid of a PetSmart store in Nashville by authorities in March 2018. Six sick or injured small animals – a guinea pig, mice, and hamsters – were confiscated from the store and sent to a veterinary hospital after video and photos were presented by the PETA operative. Three employees of the Nashville store – the store manager, assistant store manager, and customer engagement manager – pleaded guilty to animal cruelty in June 2018 and were sentenced to 20 hours of community service and ordered to pay the veterinary bills for the animals seized by Nashville animal care and control authorities. In June 2018 PetSmart filed suit against the undercover employee, on the grounds that she failed to disclose on her job application that she was a paid PETA operative, took secret surveillance videos and photos, and withheld medical care from the animals in question, instead filming them to produce an exposé. In May 2019 PetSmart added PETA to the lawsuit as a defendant, describing it as a "militant, activist organization" that has "a long history of conducting unlawful, covert operations and infiltrations to eradicate pet ownership".


title: PetSmart

text: In September 2018 NJ Advance Media published the results of a nine-month investigation documenting 47 cases across 14 states since 2008 in which families said their dog had died during or shortly after a grooming visit to PetSmart. Thirty-two of the cases occurred after the start of 2015, the year the private-equity buyout of the company was finalized. In PetSmart's response it said "We reviewed the list of pet names that NJ Advance Media provided, and any assertion that there is a systemic problem is false and fabricated."