title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The party's historical archives are hosted today by the Swiss Social Archives which was in 1906 by Paul Pflüger. At a 1912 party conference in Neuenburg, the question of women's suffrage was debated for the first time. The SP accepted a proposal which committed the party to take any opportunity to "agitate for the introduction of women's suffrage."


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: Although Switzerland remained neutral in the First World War, it did not avoid the spiralling economic crisis that accompanied it. The resulting social tension was unleashed in 1918 by the labour unions and the SP who organised the Landesstreik. The goal of the strike was a fundamental reorganisation of society. The Federal Council issued an ultimatum to the strikers and allowed the military occupation of central points. In this way the strike was ended after four days. Political action was quickly taken to conciliate the strikers with the introduction of a 48-hour working week and a popular initiative on proportional elections to the National Council in the 1918 Swiss referendums which passed on 13 October 1918. In the 1919 Swiss federal election, the SP doubled its mandate from 20 to 41 members.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: With the third party platform, which was adopted in 1920, disagreement within the party grew ever greater. In particular the fact that the platform called for the foundation of a dictatorship of the proletariat during the transitional phase from a capitalist class-based society to a socialist commune sparked violent dispute within the party. In 1921, the party decided not to join the Communist International. The left-wing of the party then split from the SP and founded the Communist Party of Switzerland. In 1926, the SP joined the Labour and Socialist International and continued to be a member of until 1940.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: With increasing power in parliament, the party now also demanded membership of the government, but their candidate in 1929 was not elected to the Federal Council. On the other hand, the party managed to enter the executive at a cantonal level in 1933. Geneva was the first canton to have a socialist government, with Léon Nicole as president. In the fourth party platform, promulgated in 1935, the SP rejected the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but supporting the creation of a socialist society on "free and consensual foundations" remained the party's goal.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In the 1943 Swiss federal election, the SP achieved the greatest electoral success in its history and became the largest parliamentary group. Ernst Nobs was the first member of SP to be elected to the Federal Council. With introduction of the , a further demand dating back to the time of the Landesstreik was achieved. After the failure of an SP referendum on economic reforms in 1953, the SP member of the Federal Council, Max Weber and the General secretary David Farbstein resigned. The SP remained in opposition until the introduction of the "Magic formula" in 1959, which gave it two seats on the Federal Council. Since that time the SP has been a member of the grand coalition which governs Switzerland. In 1959, the fifth party platform was also agreed in which the party committed itself to reformist socialism on "democratic foundations".


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In the 1970s and 1980s, the SP gained new followers from the new social movements that arose from the protests of 1968, but lost part of their traditional voter base in the working class. This change led to fierce internal disputes and led to a decline in electoral success. After serious losses in the 1987 Swiss federal election, the SP was only the third-largest party in the National Council. This resulted in the foundation of a breakaway Democratic-Social Party, which was not a success.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The sixth party platform was promulgated in 1982. This presented the party as a modern people's party that supported democratic socialism and had social justice as its highest goal. In 1983, the SP nominated Lilian Uchtenhagen as their candidate for the Federal Council, the first time that a woman had been a candidate. The parliamentary majority elected Otto Stich instead. Part of the party demanded that the SP withdraw from the governing coalition as a result of this, but this was rejected by a party conference. Ten years later in March 1993, Ruth Dreifuss was elected as the first SD woman to serve in the Federal Council. On that occasion too, the United Federal Assembly did not choose the official candidate of the SP (Christiane Brunner), but the unofficial candidate Dreifuss (the ).


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In 1990, the SP party conference accepted Switzerland's accession to the International Monetary Fund with clear conditions and elected the Valais canton councillor, Peter Bodenmann, as party president. At the 1992 party conference in Genf, the SP decided to support accession to the European Economic Area as a first step towards membership of the European Economic Community and endorsed a drug policy involving the decriminalisation of drug consumption, controlled sale of drugs for medicinal purposes, and eventual legalisation of drugs. The following year, the SP supported the national people's initiative "for a reasonable drug policy" which envisioned the legalisation of cannabis. The SP supported the 1994 national initiative "for the protection of the Alps" which sought a substantial shift of transport of goods through the Alps from road to rail. After Otto Stich's resignation from the Federal Council in 1995, the Federal Councillor Moritz Leuenberger was elected as his successor. In the 1995 Swiss federal election, the SP made a substantial recovery and was once again the largest party in the Federal Council.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In June 1997, the party conference chose Zurich city councillor, Ursula Koch as party president (the first woman to hold the role), rather than the favourite . In the 1999 Swiss federal election, Koch was also elected to the Federal Council. She resigned as party president and Federal councillor in 2000, due to internal party pressure. Her successor was Christiane Brunner, who led the party until 2004.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In the 2007 Swiss federal election, the SP suffered massive losses, falling to 19.5% of the vote, with only 43 seats in the National Council. In the following federal elections (2011 and 2015), their electoral support remained at the same level. In the Council of States, where the SP traditionally have had only a few seats, the party was able to increase its representation over the 2000s and now hold 12 out of 46 seats. In 2017, the party withdrew from the Socialist International and joined the Progressive Alliance.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The SP is composed of around 900 sections across Switzerland, which exists at cantonal and municipal levels. Each of the 32,000 party members are registered in a local section and thus are members of both the cantonal and national parties. Local sections elect delegates to attend the regular party members' conferences; these delegates are entitled to vote in cantonal party conferences.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: Each of the 26 cantonal sections (Valais is divided into two sections, namely "Oberwallis" and "Valais Romand") elect delegates for national party conferences. The number of delegates for each canton is equivalent to the number of seats that the canton has in the National Assembly.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The SP has a youth party called the Young Socialists Switzerland (JUSO/JS). The JS are independent of the SP in political terms but are supported by it financially and institutionally. Within the SP, the JS are seen as equivalent to a cantonal section and so they are entitled to send some delegates to party conferences. The current president of the JS is Tamara Funiciello, who is simultaneously Deputy President of the SP. There is also a separate, smaller SP youth party called Junge SP in the Olten region.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The SP supports classical social-democratic policies, as well as some democratic socialist ones. To that rule, the SP stands for a government offering strong public services. The SP is against far-reaching economic liberalism and is in favor of social progressivism, environmental policy with climate change mitigation, for an open foreign policy and a national security policy based on pacifism.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In economic, financial, and social welfare policy, the SP rejects policies of economic liberalisation such as deregulation, lowering taxes for high-income citizens, and decreases in government spending on social insurance. The SP also opposes raising the retirement age. In addition, the SP is a proponent of increasing welfare spending in some areas such as for a publicly financed maternity leave, universal health care and a flexible retirement age. In tax policy the SP opposes the notion of lowering taxes for high-income citizens. By campaigning for the harmonisation of all tax rates in Switzerland, the SP seeks more redistribution. The SP is skeptical toward the privatization of state enterprises. Nonetheless, the SP also promotes more competition in the areas of agriculture and parallel imports.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In social policy, the SP is committed to social equity and an open society. The SP aims at making working conditions for women in families easier by promoting more external childcare centers and more opportunities for part-time jobs. It also aims at reinforcing sexual equality in terms of eliminating wage differences based on gender, supports civil union for homosexuals and takes an easier stance toward abortions. The SP also rejects strengthening restrictions on asylum seekers and immigrants. The party supports the integration of immigrants by which the immigrants are assigned to immigration procedures immediately after entering the country. The SP has a liberal stance toward drugs and is in favor of publicly regulated heroin consumption and the legalization of cannabis. Nevertheless, the SP supports the smoking ban in restaurants and bars.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In foreign policy, the SP promotes further participation by Switzerland in international organizations. It supports immediate entry of Switzerland into the European Union. The SP also stands for a less strict neutrality of Switzerland, and supports increased international efforts on the part of Switzerland in the areas of peace and human rights. However, the SP supports keeping the military neutrality and opposes entry into NATO. Its pacifist stance is also reflected in its military policy as the SP supports reducing the number of Swiss militia while making the military apparatus more professional and scrapping conscription. Another demand of the SP is to end the tradition of gun ownership, using severe and recent examples of abuse in terms of murder as proof.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: The SP has common environmentalist policies with the Green Party of Switzerland which are reflected in the expansion of ecotax reforms and increased state support for energy saving measures and renewable energies. The SP is against the construction of new roads where possible and instead proposes to shift the transportation of goods from the roads to the railways and the introduction of a cap and trade and traffic management system when it comes to transportation across the Swiss Alps. Furthermore, the SP stands for an expansion of the public transportation system network and opposes nuclear power.


title: Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

text: In 2003, the party held 52 mandates out of 200 in the National Council (lower chamber of the Swiss parliament); 9 out of 46 in the Council of States (upper chamber) and 2 out of 7 mandates in the Federal Council (executive body). By 2005, it held 23.8% of the seats in the Cantonal governments and 23.2% in the Cantonal parliaments (index BADAC, weighted with the population and number of seats). At the 2015 Swiss federal election, the party won 18.8% of the popular vote and 43 out of 200 seats in the National Council.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: A counter-battery radar (alternatively weapon tracking radar or COBRA) is a radar system that detects artillery projectiles fired by one or more guns, howitzers, mortars or rocket launchers and, from their trajectories, locates the position on the ground of the weapon that fired it. Such radars are a subclass of the wider class of target acquisition radars.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Early counter-battery radars were generally used against mortars, whose lofted trajectories were highly symmetrical and allowed easy calculation of the launcher's location. Starting in the 1970s, digital computers with improved calculation capabilities allowed more complex trajectories of long-range artillery to also be determined. Normally, these radars would be attached to friendly artillery units or their support units, allowing them to quickly arrange counter-battery fire.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: With the aid of modern communications systems, the information from a single radar can be rapidly disseminated over long distances. This allows the radar to notify multiple batteries as well as provide early warning to the friendly targets. Modern radar can locate hostile batteries up to about away depending on the radar's capabilities and the terrain and weather. Some counter-battery radars can also be used to track the fire of friendly artillery and calculate corrections to adjust its fire onto a particular place, but this is usually a secondary mission objective.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Radar is the most recently developed means of locating hostile artillery. The emergence of indirect fire in World War I saw the development of sound ranging, flash spotting and air reconnaissance, both visual and photographic. Radars, like sound ranging and flash spotting, require hostile guns, etc., to fire before they can be located.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: The first radars were developed for anti-aircraft purposes just before World War II. These were soon followed by fire control radars for ships and coastal artillery batteries. The latter could observe the splashes of water from missing shots, enabling corrections to be plotted. Generally, the shells could not be seen directly by the radar, as they were too small and rounded to make a strong return, and travelled too quickly for the mechanical antennas of the era to follow.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Radar operators in light anti-aircraft batteries close to the front line found they were able to track mortar bombs. This was likely helped by the fins of the bomb producing a partial corner cube that strongly reflected the signal. These accidental intercepts led to their dedicated use in this role, with special secondary instruments if necessary, and development of radars designed for mortar locating. Dedicated mortar-locating radars were common starting in the 1960s and were used until around 2000.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Locating mortars was relatively easy because of their high, arcing, trajectory. At times, just after firing and just before impact, the trajectory is almost linear. If a radar observes the shell at two points in time just after launch, the line between those points can be extended to the ground and provides a highly accurate position of the mortar, more than enough for counter-battery artillery to hit it with ease. Better radars were also able to detect howitzers when firing at high angles (elevations greater than 45°), although such use was quite rare.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Low angle trajectories normally used by guns, howitzers and rockets were more difficult. Purely ballistic low-angle trajectories are lopsided, being relatively parabolic for the start of the flight but becoming much more curved near the end. This is further modified by otherwise minor effects like wind, air pressure differences and aerodynamic effects, which have time to add up to a noticeable effect on long-range fire but can be ignored for short-range systems like mortars. These effects are minimized immediately after launch, but the low angle makes it difficult to see the rounds during this time, in contrast to a mortar which climbs above the horizon almost immediately. Adding to the problem is the fact that traditional artillery shells make for difficult radar targets.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: By the early 1970s, radar systems capable of locating guns appeared possible, and many European members of NATO embarked on the joint Project Zenda. This was short-lived for unclear reasons, but the US embarked on its Firefinder program and Hughes Aircraft Company developed the necessary algorithms, although it took two or three years of difficult work.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: The next step forward was European when in 1986 France, West Germany and UK agreed the 'List of Military Requirements' for a new counter-battery radar. The distinguishing feature was that instead of just locating individual guns, etc., the radar would be able to locate many simultaneously and group them into batteries with a centre point, dimensions and attitude of the long axis of the battery. This radar eventually reached service as Euro-ART's COBRA (COunter Battery RAdar) AESA system. 29 COBRA systems were produced and delivered in a roll-out which was completed in Aug. 2007 (12 to Germany – out of which two were re-sold to Turkey, 10 to France and 7 to the UK). Three additional systems were ordered in Feb. 2009 by the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces. Simultaneous with the development of COBRA, Norway and Sweden developed a smaller, more mobile counter-battery radar known as ARTHUR. It was taken into service in 1999 and is today used by 7 NATO countries and The Republic Of South Korea. New versions of ARTHUR have twice the accuracy of the original.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a new need for a small counter-mortar radar for use in forward operating bases, providing 360° coverage and requiring a minimal crew. In another back to the future step it has also proved possible to add counter-battery software to battlefield airspace surveillance radars.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: The basic technique is to track a projectile for sufficient time to record a segment of the trajectory. This is usually done automatically, but some early and not so early radars required the operator to manually track the projectile. Once a trajectory segment is captured it can then be processed to determine its point of origin on the ground. Before digital terrain databases this involved manual iteration with a paper map to check the altitude at the coordinates, change the location altitude and recompute the coordinates until a satisfactory location was found.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: An additional problem was detecting the projectile in flight in the first place. The conical shaped beam of a traditional radar had to be pointing in the right direction, but in order to have sufficient power and accuracy for this the beam's angle was limited, typically to about 25°, which made finding a projectile quite difficult. One technique was to deploy listening posts that told the radar operator roughly where to point the beam; in some cases the radar was not switched on until this point to make it less vulnerable to electronic counter-measures (ECM). However, conventional radar beams were not notably effective.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Since a parabola is defined by just three points, tracking a long segment of the trajectory was not notably efficient. The Royal Radar Establishment in the UK developed a different approach for their Green Archer system. Instead of a conical beam, the radar signal was produced in the form of a fan, about 40° wide and 1° high. A Foster scanner modified the signal to cause it to focus on a horizontal location that rapidly scanned back and forth. This allowed it to comprehensively scan a small "slice" of the sky. The operator would watch for mortar bombs to pass through the slice, locating its range with pulse timing, its horizontal location by the location of the Foster scanner at that instant, and its vertical location from the known angle of the thin beam. The operator would then flick the antenna to a second angle facing higher into the air, and wait for the signal to appear there. This produced the necessary two points that could be processed by an analogue computer. A similar system was the US AN/MPQ-4, although this was a somewhat later design and somewhat more automated as a result.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: However, once phased array radars compact enough for field use and with reasonable digital computing power appeared they offered a better solution. A phased array radar has many transmitter/receiver modules which use differential tuning to rapidly scan up to a 90° arc without moving the antenna. They can detect and track anything in their field of view, providing they have sufficient computing power. They can filter out the targets of no interest ("e.g.", aircraft) and depending on their capability track a useful proportion of the rest.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Counter-battery radars used to be mostly X band because this offers the greatest accuracy for the small radar targets. However, in the radars produced today, C band and S band are common. The Ku band has also been used. Projectile detection ranges are governed by the radar cross section (RCS) of the projectiles. Typical RCS are:


title: Counter-battery radar

text: The best modern radars can detect howitzer shells at around and rockets/mortars at . Of course, the trajectory has to be high enough to be seen by the radar at these ranges, and since the best locating results for guns and rockets are achieved with a reasonable length of trajectory segment close to the gun, long range detection does not guarantee good locating results. The accuracy of location is typically given by a circular error probable (CEP) (the circle around the target in which 50% of locations will fall) expressed as a percentage of range. Modern radars typically give CEPs around 0.3–0.4% of range. However, with these figures long range accuracy may be insufficient to satisfy the Rules of Engagement for counter-battery fire in counter insurgency operations.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Radars typically have a crew of 4–8 soldiers, although only one is needed to actually operate the radar. Older types were mostly trailer mounted with a separate generator, so it took 15–30 minutes to bring into action and needed a larger crew. However, self-propelled ones have been used since the 1960s. To produce accurate locations radars have to know their own precise coordinates and be precisely oriented. Until about 1980 this relied on conventional artillery survey, although gyroscopic orientation from the mid-1960s helped. Modern radars have an integral inertial navigation system, often aided by GPS.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Radars can detect projectiles at considerable distances, and larger projectiles give stronger reflected signals (RCS). Detection ranges depend on capturing at least several seconds of a trajectory and can be limited by the radar horizon and the height of the trajectory. For non-parabolic trajectories, it is also important to capture a trajectory as close as possible to its source in order to obtain the necessary accuracy.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Action on locating hostile artillery depends on policy and circumstances. In some armies, radars may have authority to send target details to counter-battery fire units and order them to fire, in others they may merely report data to an HQ that then takes action. Modern radars usually record the target as well as the firing position of hostile artillery. This is usually for intelligence purposes because it is seldom possible to give the target sufficient warning time in a battlefield environment, even with data communications. However, there are exceptions. The new Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar (LCMR – AN/TPQ 48) is crewed by two soldiers and designed to be deployed inside forward positions, in these circumstances it can immediately alert adjacent troops as well as pass target data to mortars close by for counter-fire. Similarly the new GA10 (Ground Alerter 10) radar was qualified and successfully deployed by the French land forces in 2020 in several different FOBs worldwide.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Radars are vulnerable and high-value targets; they are easy to detect and locate if the enemy has the necessary ELINT/ESM capability. The consequences of this detection are likely to be attack by artillery fire or aircraft (including anti-radiation missiles) or electronic countermeasures. The usual measures against detection are using a radar horizon to screen from ground-based detection, minimising transmission time and using alerting arrangements to tell the radar when hostile artillery is active. Deploying radars singly and moving frequently reduces exposure to attack.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: However, in low-threat environments, such as the Balkans in the 1990s, they may transmit continuously and deploy in clusters to provide all-around surveillance.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: In other circumstances, particularly counter-insurgency, where ground attack with direct fire or short range indirect fire is the main threat, radars deploy in defended localities but do not need to move, unless they need to cover a different area.


title: Counter-battery radar

text: Counter-battery radars operate at microwave frequencies with relatively high average energy consumption (up to the tens of kilowatts). The area immediately forward of the radar array for high energy radars is dangerous to human health. The intense radar waves of systems like the AN/TPQ-36 can also detonate electrically fused ammunition at short ranges.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Hayley Dee Westenra (born 10 April 1987) is a New Zealand classical crossover singer and songwriter. Her first internationally released album, "Pure", reached number one on the UK classical charts in 2003 and has sold more than two million copies worldwide, making it one of the fastest selling albums in her country's history.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra has sung in English, Māori, Irish, Welsh, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Latin, Japanese, Standard Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, and Taiwanese Hokkien.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her parents, Gerald and Jill Westenra, have two younger offspring, Sophie and Isaac. Sophie is an academic and teaches law at Oxford. Westenra's grandmother Shirley Ireland was a singer, and her grandfather was a pianist who also played the piano accordion. She has Irish, Dutch and English heritage.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: She began performing at age six in the Christmas play at her school, Fendalton Open Air School. After the show, a teacher said she was "pitch perfect" and encouraged Westenra to learn how to play a musical instrument; soon after she learned to read music and play the violin, piano, guitar, and recorder. She then began voice lessons and discovered a passion for musical theatre. By age 11, she had performed more than 40 times on stage, and was often given male parts. Westenra attended Cobham Intermediate School in 1998 and 1999, where a performing arts building was later named in her honour.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: At the age of 12, Westenra entered a professional recording studio to record "Walking in the Air", a demo album originally created for friends and family, with 70 copies made; they soon made 1000 more copies, and attracted attention from a journalist with Canterbury Television, who asked Westenra to appear on air. Gray Bartlett, the director of a concert promotion company, saw the show and shortly after, she was offered a recording deal with Universal Records New Zealand. On that label, Westenra, who in the meantime was attending Burnside High School, released a self-titled album of show tunes and light classical songs, as well as "My Gift to You", a CD of Christmas music. Following the success of her albums, she was offered and later received lessons from Malvina Major.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra attracted worldwide attention when she signed with Decca Records and recorded "Pure", a CD of classical, light pop, and traditional Māori songs. "Pure" became the fastest-selling international debut album in the history of the UK classical chart, with 19,068 copies purchased in its first week alone, quickly reached No. 1 on the British charts, and entered the UK Album Chart at number 8. Over two million copies of "Pure" have been sold to date. In New Zealand, "Pure" has been certified 12 times platinum, making her the best-selling artist, regardless of genre, in the country's history. In 2004 Westenra recorded the end-title song for the Disney movie "Mulan II". They also featured her in the national Radio Disney music education tour for middle-school students. Later that year, she was featured in the song "Bridal Ballad" recorded for the movie "The Merchant of Venice".


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra was the 2004 Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards winner of "Highest Selling New Zealand Album" and "International Achievement Award". On 20 February 2004, Prime Minister Helen Clark awarded her for being the first New Zealand artist to receive the tenfold platinum status in the New Zealand market, where she held the number one artist position for 18 weeks. She has won two Japanese Grammies for her work (Song of the Year, "Amazing Grace" and Album of the Year, "Pure"). Her version of "Amazing Grace" was used as the theme song for the popular Japanese drama, "Shiroi Kyotō" (The White Tower). Westenra met the cast of the series during a promotional tour of Japan in October 2003.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Also in 2004, she began her world tour of New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the UK and the US, performing in a concert in November for Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Charles, Prince of Wales, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush. In her autobiography, she remembered feeling more nervous in an audition where she sight read to Andrew Lloyd Webber an unreleased piece that he had written.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: After her world tour, Westenra recorded a live DVD, "Hayley Westenra: Live from New Zealand", featuring duets with baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes and soprano Sophie Westenra in St. James Theatre. David Horn, the producer of her live TV special, which aired on the PBS program "Great Performances", said, "Her singing is so gorgeous, it's reminiscent of the great boy-soprano sound of Anglican church choirs." She joined the Boston Pops Orchestra as guest soloist for their Christmas tour at the end of 2004.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 5 September 2006, Westenra was named as one of the ten outstanding young people in the world by the Junior Chamber International, becoming the first New Zealander so honoured. On 13 November 2006, she participated in the dedication of the New Zealand War Memorial in London, performing "God Save the Queen" and "God Defend New Zealand", the national anthems of the UK and New Zealand. Three of Westenra's great-uncles served in World War II; one was killed.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In August 2006, Westenra joined Celtic Woman and is featured on their second major DVD/CD album, "", which was released 30 January 2007 and immediately hit the "Billboard" Top 200 music chart at number four. She toured with the group in the United States in 2007, with scheduled appearances in 88 venues across the country; the tour ended in June. During this time, Westenra alternated with Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, who had recently returned from maternity leave, to maintain a five-member line-up.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra's third international album, "Treasure", was released on 26 February 2007 in the UK. All the songs on this CD were chosen by Westenra, who gave her record company "no say in the matter." She said, "I basically didn't let them in on what I was recording until the last minute so they had no choice. I didn't give them much room to disagree."


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Tracks on this album include "E Pari Ra", "One Fine Day", "Let Me Lie", "Danny Boy", and "Abide with Me". Westenra co-wrote four of the fifteen tracks, and the album also features singer Humphrey Berney. The US/Australia/NZ edition followed in March under the name "Celtic Treasure". Westenra dedicated the album to her grandmother, Shirley Ireland. Inside the sleeve of the British edition, she wrote: "I come from a musical family, and one with a real sense of history. My forefathers were on the maiden voyage from Ireland to Christchurch, New Zealand in 1850 – there's even a commemoration plaque in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, which bears the name Westenra. My grandmother used to sit me on her knee and sing songs like "Danny Boy" from as early as I can remember. A singer herself in her earlier years, she has always been a never-ending source of songs. It's this legacy of music that she's been passing down to me since my childhood, and it's many of these beautiful old songs that I've explored here on my album."


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On the day before St. Patrick's Day 2007, she performed as part of Celtic Woman for President George W. Bush at the White House. She had plans to present the president with a petition to place a mandatory carbon cap on the United States. The goal of the petition was compliance with the commitment made by President Bill Clinton in previous years to follow the Kyoto Protocol.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Also in 2007, Westenra's vocals were featured in the soundtracks of the movie "Flood" and the television series, "Jekyll", composed by Debbie Wiseman, in the UK. In November 2007, Westenra successfully staged a Japan "Treasure" concert tour in Fukuoka, Sapporo, Tokyo, Sendai, Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, Hiroshima.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In early 2008, Westenra provided guest vocals for the Mike Oldfield album "Music of the Spheres", performing the vocal on the track "On My Heart" and its reprise. Westenra and Oldfield performed "On My Heart" live on the British ITV daytime TV program "The Alan Titchmarsh Show" on 18 March 2008.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 1 October 2008, Westenra recorded solo vocals on the CD "Different Voice", composed and conducted by Debbie Wiseman and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with narration by Stephen Fry and lyrics written by Don Black. On 30 November 2008, Westenra was presented by Elaine Paige with the Variety Club Showbiz Awards 2008 Classical Performer of the Year for raising money to help sick, disabled and disadvantaged children and young people.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In the spring and summer of 2010, Westenra began working with film composer Ennio Morricone for a collaboration on her album "Paradiso". The album featured new songs written by Morricone, as well as some of his best known film compositions of the last 50 years. Westenra recorded the album with Morricone's orchestra in Rome during the summer 2010.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 30 October 2010, Westenra staged a recital at the Shanghai Grand Theatre with international backing musicians in an East Asian concert tour.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On Memorial Day, 29 May 2011, Westenra was invited to perform for the annual PBS special, the "National Memorial Day Concert" live in Washington, D.C. She performed the song "Pie Jesu" following the emotional story of a woman who had never met her father, who died in the Vietnam War, but got to know him many years later through a soldier who had fought alongside him. On 22 July, Westenra was among artists performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra in an American West-themed show on the BBC radio concert programme "Friday Night Is Music Night".


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 23 October 2011, Westenra performed the New Zealand national anthem "God Defend New Zealand" at Eden Park in Auckland before the final of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and also performed the traditional New Zealand song "Now Is the Hour" to bring the event to a close.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In October 2011, "Songs of Praise" broadcast "Whispers in a Dream" and "Amazing Grace" performed by Westenra in Salisbury Cathedral. On 31 October 2011, Westenra was featured on André Rieu's classical music album "And the Waltz Goes On" with the vocal track "Dreaming of New Zealand".


title: Hayley Westenra

text: To promote "Paradiso", Westenra embarked on the Paradiso Homecoming Tour from 17 September 2011 to 8 March 2012. On 12 March 2012, Westenra attended a reception for celebrating the achievements of inspirational women today the event held by the Duchess of Cornwall to mark Commonwealth Day. On 22 April 2012, Westenra staged a debut concert at the Koncerthuset in Copenhagen and on 14 June, Westenra staged a concert with RTÉ Concert Orchestra and David Brophy at National Concert Hall in Dublin.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In April 2013, Westenra staged a Far East tour in Taipei, Tainan, Kaohsiung and performed with Chinese tenor DinYi in Beijing. On 30 November and 1 December 2013, Westenra staged a concert with City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir and the Hong Kong Treble Choir in Hong Kong.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 24 August 2003, Westenra performed on the stage with opera tenor José Carreras and Bryn Terfel in front of the capacity crowd of 10,000 people from Faenol Festival in Wales.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 28 July 2004, Westenra joined American tenor James Doing and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra on the latter's annual Concerts on the Square in Madison, capital city of Wisconsin. The concert was broadcast by Wisconsin Public Television. On 18 December 2005, she made an appearance on Kurt Browning's programme "Gotta Skate", in which she performed with Andrea Bocelli.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In 2006 as a part of the Canterbury Festival (27 Oct), Westenra performed a concert with tenor Alfie Boe in Canterbury Cathedral. On 6 May 2007, Westenra was invited to the Crystal Cathedral as a guest performing "Abide with Me" on the Hour of Power, an American Christian television program. She had performed there twice before, the first time singing "Amazing Grace" and the second time "I Say Grace".


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 28 July 2007, she starred in Woburn LIVE 2007, where she performed a selection of the music of "West Side Story" with the other recording artists, including Vittorio Grigolo, from the 2007 release. On 7 August, Westenra performed solo and duet with Malvina Major at St James's Church, Piccadilly among ChristChurch Cathedral Choir 2008 UK Tour.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 17 August 2008, Westenra participated in the tribute concert "Lyrics by Don Black", which was held at the London Palladium and featured performances of Black's songs by a selection of guest artists. She sang the duet "Amigos Para Siempre", the score of which was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with Jonathan Ansell. The evening, hosted by Michael Parkinson, was recorded by on the BBC Radio 2 program "Friday Night Is Music Night" and broadcast on 22 August 2008. On 8 November, Westenra performed at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, singing "River of Dreams", duet "Today Won't Come Again", written by Geoff Stevens and Don Black, with English tenor Jonathan Ansell, and accompanied Ansell on "Here's to the Heroes", by Black and John Barry, when returning soldiers proceeded into the auditorium. The Annual Festival of Remembrance was broadcast by the BBC.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 7 November 2009, Westenra performed again at the Festival of Remembrance, singing "We'll Meet Again" at the Royal Albert Hall, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and Vera Lynn, who had made the song famous during World War II. In December 2009, Westenra performed with Faryl Smith and Camilla Kerslake in a special service for British troops serving in Afghanistan from St Clements Church, London. On 13 November 2010, Westenra performed for a third time at the Festival of Remembrance, singing "For the Fallen", a poem by Laurence Binyon set to music by Karl Jenkins. It is featured on the special 10th anniversary edition of Karl Jenkins' "The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace". In April 2011, Westenra was invited as a guest performer to Mario Frangoulis TV concert in Greek. On May, Westenra was a guest performer on Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli's The Magic of Love Asian concert tour; Westenra and Bocelli had previously collaborated on Westenra's album "Odyssey" and live performances. On 9 July 2011, Westenra was invited as a guest performer to Joseph Calleja's annual concert in Malta.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 20 September 2011, Westenra sang Laurence Binyon's "For The Fallen" on the service of the 90th anniversary of the Royal British Legion held at Westminster Abbey in the presence of The Princess Royal, Church of England members and family of Royal Marines. On 5 December, Westenra performed solo "Whispers in a Dream" and duet with Rolando on the "Royal Variety Performance" in the presence of the Princess Royal.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 16 March 2012, Westenra was invited to perform and make the presentation to the winner of the Korean live TV show "Operastar". On 28 April 2012, Westenra performed with Chinese tenor Din Yi and Nie Jian Hua on the 2nd Beijing International Film Festival symphony concert at Olympic Green accompanying by Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In May 2012, Westenra was featured with Laura Wright and Alfie Boe on the souvenir album "Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band" in celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. On 21 June, Westenra performed at Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis' Boston Symphony Hall concert accompanying by Boston Pops Orchestra.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: She took her first acting role on the US programme "American Dreams" ("Charade"), where she played guitar and sang "Who Painted the Moon Black?"


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 27 July 2011, Westenra was announced as the voice of UK broadcaster ITV's coverage of that year's Rugby World Cup, with her special version of "World in Union".


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra is active in contributing to charities around the world. On 26 November 2003, Westenra performed "Pokarekare Ana" and "Amazing Grace" on the 75th anniversary of the Royal Variety Performance show in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on behalf of the Entertainment Artistes' Benevolent Fund.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: Westenra is the second youngest UNICEF Ambassador to date, behind Selena Gomez. In 2005, Westenra visited Ghana to publicise her project, "Bikes for Ghana", and actively helped with fundraising to purchase bicycles for young girls, allowing them to get to their schools from outlying surrounding areas.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In 2006, a new Hybrid Tea Rose was named in honour of Westenra to raise charity funds for UNICEF. The Hayley Westenra Rose won the 2010 Rose of the Year Award and also the best Hybrid Tea Rose Award. In June 2006, she appeared at a fundraiser for UK charity Act Against Bullying. On 24 February 2007, Westenra took part in the HemiHelp "Children Helping Children" concert at Cadogan Hall, Sloane Square, London in front of 900 people, including the charity's patron Princess Alexandra. On 8 June 2007, Westenra performed in a fundraising concert for Bikes for Ghana at the Victoria Hall in Stoke-on-Trent.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 4 September 2008, Westenra became a patron of Royal New Zealand Air Force. Also in September, Westenra sang for the British Armed Forces in Basra, Iraq, where she helped to launch the Poppy Appeal. In October, Westenra and tenor Jonathan Ansell took to the streets to sell poppies at Waterloo Station to support the Royal British Legion. She has also been the ambassador for Save the Children in Hong Kong. More recently, she took part in a breast cancer awareness campaign in New Zealand. One of the other charities that she helps is the Women's Environmental Network. Another major charity she supports is the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy, which provides help for children who are disabled.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 7 September 2009, she joined the Dame Vera Lynn Trust, a charity for children with cerebral palsy, as a vice-president. On 22 October, the original Second World War Forces Sweetheart Dame Vera Lynn was joined by Westenra in launching the Poppy Appeal for 2009 with a fundraising goal of £31 million.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 3 March 2011, Westenra, whose hometown is Christchurch, sang the national anthem "God Defend New Zealand" at a vigil service for the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake at Westminster Cathedral, attended by about 5,000 New Zealanders. On 18 March, Westenra performed "Amazing Grace" in the national Christchurch memorial service at Hagley Park in Christchurch. On 27 March, Westenra was invited to read aloud a testimony as part of the Christchurch memorial service at Westminster Abbey.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: During her Paradiso Homecoming Tour from 17 September 2011 to 8 March 2012, Westenra raised charity attention to her UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador appeal and the Christchurch Earthquake Relief fund to help Christchurch rebuild.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: On 24 August 2012, Westenra staged a concert in the Gŵyl Gobaith Music Festival in Wales to support for charities Cancer Research UK, Wales Air Ambulance, CLIC Sargent and HeadtoHeart. In Christmastime 2012, Westenra was featured on the album "Starship Christmas Album" along with Justin Bieber and others, to support Starship Children's Health. On 30 November, Westenra lent her support to Kate Winslet's Golden Hat Foundation for a concert in Carnegie Hall.


title: Hayley Westenra

text: In 2013, Westenra married French-born Arnaud Sabard, who worked as a sound engineer during her tours. They have since divorced. She became engaged to guitarist Chris Gaelan McFarland in Los Angeles in 2019.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Hannah Mary Rothschild (born 22 May 1962) is a British author, businesswoman, philanthropist and documentary filmmaker. In addition to screenplays and journalism, she has published a biography and two novels. She serves on charitable and financial boards. In August 2015, she became the first female to chair the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery in London.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Hannah Mary Rothschild was born on 22 May 1962. She is the eldest child of Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, and his wife, Serena Dunn Rothschild. Through her father, she is a member of the Rothschild banking family. She was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, Marlborough College and she read Modern History at St Hilda's College, Oxford.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Rothschild's career started as a researcher in the BBC's Music and Arts department in the mid-1980s and quickly graduated to directing films for "Saturday Review", "Arena" and "Omnibus" and initiating and making programmes for the series "The Great Picture Chase" and "Relative Values". Later she set up an independent film company with Jake Auerbach (Rothschild Auerbach Ltd.) making documentaries for the BBC and others including profiles of Frank Auerbach, Walter Sickert, R. B. Kitaj. In 1997, Rothschild joined London Films Ltd as Head of Drama and set up the television series "The Scarlet Pimpernel" starring Richard E. Grant. She returned to filmmaking and directed three films for the BBC's "Storyville" series and HBO. In 2008, following a radio programme on the same subject, Rothschild produced and directed "The Jazz Baroness" (2008), about her great-aunt Pannonica de Koenigswarter's exploits in and support of New York's jazz world. This was followed by "Hi Society" (2009), a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Nicky Haslam, the interior designer, author and society darling. "Mandelson: The Real PM?" (2010) followed the UK's former Business Secretary Peter Mandelson in the run-up to the 2010 general election.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Inspired by the "Storyville" programme, Rothchild wrote a biography of her great aunt, "The Baroness: The Search for Nica the Rebellious Rothschild", which was published by Virago in 2012. It was described as "Riveting, touching and insightful" by "The Daily Telegraph". A few years earlier, a radio documentary profile of Nica, "The Jazz Baroness", was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 12 February 2008. Her documentaries and shorts have aired on the BBC, HBO, PBS and others and been screened and won awards at Telluride, Tribecca, London, Sheffield film festivals. She has written screenplays for Working Title and Ridley Scott. She also wrote a history of Channel 4's films and filmmakers; contributed to anthologies including Corfu, the Garden Isle ; and "Virago at 40".


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Rothchild's first novel "The Improbability of Love" was published in May 2015. The story follows a female protagonist who comes across a lost Watteau and becomes embroiled in the dealings of the art world's elite. "The Guardian" said "her depiction of the rarefied art world is gripping". The book was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize and was joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. It has been translated into more than twenty languages and was chosen as one of Waterstones "Books of the Year".


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Her third book, a novel "The House of Trelawney" () was published in February 2020 by Bloomsbury and Knopf. It follows the lives and fortunes of three generations of a dysfunctional Cornish aristocratic family through the crash of 2008. Described by Amanda Craig in "The Guardian" as "Irresistible fun" and by Lynn Barber in "The Daily Telegraph" as a "gripping family saga". "Her style has been compared to comic writers such as Waugh and Mitford, which are apt in terms of both style and milieu, but comparisons can also be made to Austen and Dickens, as she shares their ability to create comic characters and to then put those characters in situations that allows the author to make satirical/social commentary." The book has been nominated for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for 2020.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Rothschild has lectured on art and literature at the Getty Institute, Courtauld, the Royal Academy, the Hay Festival and written for many publications, including "The Times", "The New York Times", "The Observer", "The Guardian", "Daily Telegraph", "Vanity Fair", "Vogue", "The Spectator" and "Harper's Bazaar", "Financial Times", "Elle", "Washington Post" and others.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: She became a trustee of London's National Gallery in 2009 after applying to an advert in "The Guardian". In 2013, she became the liaison trustee for the Tate Gallery. In August 2015, she became the first woman to chair the National Gallery's board. In 2017, her term was extended by four years; however she later resigned from the position in June 2019 citing a wish to devote more time to writing and to her family's wide-ranging activities and philanthropic concerns. She will remain Chair of the American Friends of the National Gallery, a post she's held since August 2015.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: She took over from her father Jacob as chair of Yad Hanadiv in July 2018. Yad Hanadiv is a charity Yad Hanadiv is dedicated to creating resources for advancing Israel as a healthy, vibrant, democratic society and equal opportunity for the benefit of all its inhabitants. It built the Knesset, the Supreme Court and in 2022 will complete the New National Library of Israel.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: She is a trustee of The Rothschild Foundation, a registered charity, whose activities include preserving Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire on behalf of its owner, the National Trust.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Rothschild was formerly a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and the ICA. She was the co-founder of the charity Artists on Film.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: Rothschild originated the Illuminated River project to light Central London's bridges transforming the Thames at night "from a snake of darkness into a ribbon of light." An international jury, chaired by Rothschild chose American artist Leo Villareal and in July 2019 the first five of fifteen bridges were lit.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: In 1994, she married American filmmaker William Lord Brookfield and had three daughters, but they later divorced.


title: Hannah Mary Rothschild

text: In the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the arts and to charity.


title: Kent School

text: Kent School is a private, co-educational, college preparatory boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, United States. Frederick Herbert Sill established the school in 1906. It is affiliated with the Episcopal Church of the United States.


title: Kent School

text: Kent School follows a trimester system, where a school year is divided into three terms—fall, winter, and spring. Classes are held from Monday to Saturday. Wednesdays and Saturdays are half days where classes run from 8:30-11:45am. The remaining days hold classes from 8:30am-2:50pm. Classes are held in a two week rotating block system. This is done to allow classes that would not have met on Wednesdays and Saturdays an opportunity to meet the following week during the full academic days.


title: Kent School

text: The school refers to students by form instead of grades—as is customary in the United States. 9th grade is 3rd form and 12th grade is 6th form. 3rd and 4th formers are referred to as underformers and 5th and 6th are referred to as upperformers. Students who stay a fifth year are referred to as PGs (i.e. Post Graduate). PGs are often transfer students from other schools for a variety of reasons.


title: Kent School

text: Many courses are year-long, while others last only one or two terms. Courses are denoted as major or minor. Minor courses count for only half as much credit as major course. Most students take four courses each trimester; the course load limit is five. Four year students are required to take courses in English, Mathematics, Modern or Ancient Languages, Laboratory Sciences, Visual or Performing Arts, and Theology.


title: Kent School

text: Kent School does not rank students. The school using a six-point system to calculate grades. There is no formal method of converting a six-point grade into a traditional four-point GPA. Students may also receive an E or a U next to their grade to their teacher's discretion. The former refers to 'excellent' and the latter 'unsatisfactory'. Students also receive written feedback from each teacher and coach denoted Comments on their semesterly grades.


title: Kent School

text: Kent offers 22 interscholastic sports with 50 interscholastic teams from the 3rds, Junior Varsity, and Varsity levels. More than three-quarters of the student body participates in interscholastic sport. An activity Kent is a member of the Founders League, a competitive athletic league composed of NEPSAC schools. Its mascot is the Lion although it once was the Fighting Episcopalian. Despite Hotchkiss School's location in the same county, Kent's rival is The Loomis Chaffee School and the two schools have a day dedicated to competing against each other, historically called Loomis Day.


title: Kent School

text: The Kent School Boat Club was begun at Kent in 1922 with the encouragement of Father Sill. Sill was the coxswain of the Columbia crew which won the first ever Poughkeepsie Regatta.


title: Kent School

text: Kent competed for the Thames Challenge Cup in 1933 with the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who sent a letter to Sill offering his "good wishes for a successful trip" and commenting on how "the presence of a crew of American school boys will be helpful in strengthening the ties between good sportsmen of the two countries." That year, Kent won the Thames Challenge Cup. The Times in Britain wrote, "Kent School were almost certainly the best crew that ever rowed in the Thames Cup." Kent competed at Henley 32 times and won 5 times, most recently in 1972. The school was featured twice in "Life" magazine, once in May, 1937 and again in June, 1948. Stuart Auchincloss '48 was featured on the cover of the latter publication. Kent Boys Crew also won the New England Championship Regatta 25 times since 1947.


title: Kent School

text: The girls team began in 1973. They won Henley in 2002 and two National Championships in 1986 and 1987. They have also won the New England Championship Regatta seven different times, including four of the first five times, it competed for it.


title: Kent School

text: In 2006, Kent Boys Crew won the New England championship and became the first American crew to challenge for the recently established Prince Albert Challenge Cup at Henley. In 2010, Kent Boys Crew won the New England points trophy and placed 1st at Youth Nationals. The team traveled to Henley and were the runners-up for the Princess Elizabeth Cup, losing to Eton College.


title: Kent School

text: Football at Kent competes in the Housatonic Valley League. In the past 17 years, the team has earned seven league championships and two New England Championships.


title: Kent School

text: In 2021–22, the Kent Boy's squash team won its first boys national title after a 4–3 final against three-time defending champions Brunswick.


title: Kent School

text: The TV animated series "Family Guy", about a dysfunctional Rhode Island family, premiered in January 1999 and was created by Seth MacFarlane, a 1991 graduate of Kent School. The school's headmaster, Richardson W. Schell, wrote to a number of companies urging them against advertising with the TV show, which he described as "obnoxious". MacFarlane's parents, who worked at the school, resigned in protest.


title: Kent School

text: In 2017, "The New York Times" reported on a lawsuit alleging that Kent School failed to report alleged sexual misconduct by a faculty member toward a 15-year-old student in 1987 and 1988. The report came on the heels of "The Boston Globe"'s "Spotlight" team revealing decades of alleged sexual abuse at numerous New England prep schools and alleged retaliation for student complaints. The reporters noted faculty alleged as abusers being relocated to different schools, including Kent.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Bradford Gates Rutter (born January 31, 1978) is an American game show contestant, TV host, producer, and actor. With over $5.1 million in winnings, he is currently the 2nd highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, behind Ken Jennings, and still the highest-earning contestant (primarily from special tournament events) on the U.S. syndicated game show "Jeopardy!" (with over $5 million).


title: Brad Rutter

text: Until the "Greatest of All Time Tournament" in 2020, Rutter had never lost a "Jeopardy!" match against a human opponent (though he twice trailed at the end of the first game of a two-day tournament match before coming back to win). This streak consisted of his original 5-day run in 2000 (after which he retired undefeated) as well as 17 matches in five tournaments (including one as part of a team)—all of which he won. Rutter finished third in the match—both his first defeat overall and the first time he finished behind a human opponent.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter is a 1995 graduate of Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, Pennsylvania, where he was on the quiz bowl team. The team won second place at the 1994 Texaco Star National Academic Championship. He is one of the 19 people to have been named to the National Academic Championship Hall of Fame in its 25-year history. At the 2005 Manheim Township High School graduation ceremony, he announced the start of a scholarship fund in memory of his late high-school quiz bowl coach, Anne Clouser.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter described himself as a slacker in school and a Johns Hopkins dropout (while there, he studied English). Before his success on "Jeopardy!", he worked at the Lancaster Coconuts record store.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter first appeared on "Jeopardy!" on October 30, 2000, when the rules stipulated that a contestant who won five consecutive days retired undefeated and was guaranteed a spot in the Tournament of Champions. Rutter retired as an undefeated five-day champion, with $55,102 in winnings. He was also awarded a choice of Chevrolet cars; he picked two Chevrolet Camaros. At the time, "Jeopardy!" awarded new cars to five-day undefeated champions. The rules were changed in 2003, before Ken Jennings' run of 74 consecutive days in 2004, which made Jennings the largest overall "Jeopardy!" money winner.


title: Brad Rutter

text: As a five-day champion, Rutter was invited to the 2001 Tournament of Champions, where he defeated other five-day champions and won the $100,000 main prize. He was invited back for the 2002 Million Dollar Masters Tournament, where he won the $1,000,000 main prize and became the largest overall money winner in "Jeopardy!" history.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter returned for the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, winning the tournament and $2,115,000. After his 2005 tournament win, in which he defeated Jennings and Jerome Vered in the finals, Rutter surpassed Jennings as the highest money-winner ever on American game shows. Jennings later regained his record by 2008 after appearing on various other game shows. There is a minor discrepancy between sources as to Rutter's total "Jeopardy!" winnings stemming from the prize structure of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Players who won in the first round earned $15,000, but Rutter was among nine top winners who received a first round bye. While some analysts suggest that Rutter's money totals should include $15,000 for a first round 'win' in this tournament, the official Jeopardy.com website does not count it (when stating that Rutter's winnings were $3,255,102 after the completion of this tournament).


title: Brad Rutter

text: From February 14–16, 2011, the "Jeopardy!" IBM Challenge featured IBM's Watson facing off against Rutter and Jennings in a two-game, cumulative-total match aired over three days. It was the first ever man-versus-machine competition in "Jeopardy!"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s history. The computer program, equipped with a precisely timed mechanical "thumb", won handily, finishing with a $77,147 score, while Jennings took second place with a score of $24,000 over Rutter's $21,600 score. IBM donated its $1 million purse to two charities. Jennings and Rutter did likewise with half of their respective winnings of $300,000 and $200,000. Rutter donated $100,000 to the Lancaster County Community Foundation. Because this man-versus-machine matchup was an exhibition, Rutter's winnings and loss did not count towards official records.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter participated in the "Jeopardy!" 2014 Battle of the Decades, pitting top champions from throughout the previous 30 years of "Jeopardy!". He appeared in the 1990s week of the tournament. He won the March 7, 2014, game against Mike Dupee and Jill Bunzendahl Chimka. He then appeared in the quarterfinals of the tournament on May 7, 2014, against Dan Pawson and Mark M. Lowenthal and won the game in a lock. On May 13, 2014, he defeated Leszek Pawlowicz and Tom Cubbage in the semifinals. On May 16, 2014, he won the tournament and $1,000,000, defeating Ken Jennings and Roger Craig in the finale after the former missed the Final Jeopardy! clue. With this win, Rutter regained the record as the highest money-winner on American game shows, which Jennings had held since 2008.


title: Brad Rutter

text: In 2019, Rutter teamed with fellow "Jeopardy!" champions Larissa Kelly and Dave Madden to win the "Jeopardy!" All-Star Games. Rutter was team captain and they split the top prize of $1,000,000.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter competed in the "Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time" event in January 2020 against Jennings and James Holzhauer, and ended up winning $250,000 with a third-place finish.


title: Brad Rutter

text: He appeared on the U.S. game show "1 vs. 100" (as a member of "the Mob") on December 1, 2006, and again on December 8, 2006. He answered every question correctly and was one of only seven mob members to survive to the next show, as was Annie Duke. He would be eliminated on the December 15 episode on a question about Jewish reggae musician Matisyahu. He appeared again on February 9, 2007, and was eliminated late in a winner-takes-$250,000 "last man standing" competition, but before Ken Jennings was. Rutter was the top seed in "Grand Slam", but lost in the second round to Ogi Ogas, a former "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" contestant.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter competed in the 2010 World Quizzing Championship, where he finished 140th. He was also a contestant on the 6th episode of Million Dollar Mind Game (aired on November 27, 2011), where his team won $600,000. In May 2012, he did a pilot episode as a "Chaser" for an American version of the British game show "The Chase". Fox network ordered two pilots for consideration in its lineup. The Chaser in the other pilot was Mark Labbett, one of the five Chasers on both the British and Australian versions of the show. Despite the show not being picked up by Fox, it was later aired by GSN, with Labbett (the Beast) as the only Chaser. Rutter was one of three chasers hired in 2020 for the ABC revival of "The Chase", along with Jennings and Holzhauer.


title: Brad Rutter

text: In May 2020, Rutter appeared on a revival of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" as an in-person lifeline for celebrity contestant Catherine O'Hara. On the show, celebrities playing for charity were allowed to have an expert assist them in answering the first 10 questions—Rutter served as O'Hara's expert and helped her answer each of the 10 questions correctly. After this point, O'Hara made the decision to trade her 50:50 lifeline for the opportunity to consult Rutter once more on any of the remaining questions. She took this opportunity on the $125,000 question, which he once again helped her answer correctly. O'Hara's final total on the show was $250,000, as she chose to walk away from the $500,000 question. He was one of two "Jeopardy!" contestants to appear on the show as a lifeline, the other being Buzzy Cohen, who was a lifeline for Hannibal Burress.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Until 2009, Rutter lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he hosted "InQuizitive", a local broadcast quiz show for high school students. He has also been a reader and judge for the high school National Academic Championship. He now lives in Los Angeles where he is pursuing acting.


title: Brad Rutter

text: Rutter is a lifelong fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. He gave the Eagles a shout-out during the "Final Jeopardy!" round of the third "Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time Tournament" game in 2020, where he wagered 4,133 points (a reference to the final score of Super Bowl LII, where the Eagles won their first Super Bowl in franchise history by defeating the New England Patriots 41–33) on a question about 21st century Oscar winners.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a two-volume French cookbook written by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both from France, and Julia Child, who was from the United States. The book was written for the American market and published by Knopf in 1961 (Volume 1) and 1970 (Volume 2). The success of Volume 1 resulted in Julia Child being given her own television show, "The French Chef", one of the first cooking programs on American television. Historian David Strauss claimed in 2011 that the publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" "did more than any other event in the last half century to reshape the gourmet dining scene."


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: After World War II, interest in French cuisine rose significantly in the United States. Through the late 1940s and 1950s, Americans interested in preparing French dishes had few options. "Gourmet" magazine offered French recipes to subscribers monthly, and several dozen French cookbooks were published throughout the 1950s. These recipes, however, were directly translated from French, and consequently were designed for a middle-class French audience that was familiar with French cooking techniques, had access to common French ingredients, and who often had servants cook for them.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: In the early 1950s, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, French cooking teachers who had trained at Le Cordon Bleu, sought to capitalize on the American market for French cookbooks and wrote and published a small recipe book for American audiences, "What's Cooking in France", in 1952"." By the late 1950s, Beck and Bertholle were interested in writing a comprehensive guide to French cuisine that would appeal to serious middle-class American home cooks. Beck and Bertholle wanted an English-speaking partner to help give them insight into American culture, translate their work into English, and bring it to American publishers, so they invited their friend Julia Child, who had also studied at Le Cordon Bleu, to collaborate with them on a book tentatively titled "French Cooking for the American Kitchen". The resulting cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", proved groundbreaking and has since become a standard guide for the culinary community.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Beck, Bertholle, and Child wanted to distinguish their book from others on the market by emphasizing accurate instructions and measurements in their recipes, and authenticity whenever possible. After prototyping dishes in their Paris cooking school, L'École des trois gourmandes, Child would check to make sure the ingredients were available in the average American grocery store; if they were not, she would suggest a substitution and they would begin the prototyping process again with the substituted ingredient, sometimes flying in ingredients from America to perform their tests. While Beck, Bertholle, and Child wanted all of the recipes to be as authentic as possible, they were willing to adapt to American palates and cooking techniques. Child had noted early in the process that Americans would be "scared off" by too many expensive ingredients, like black truffles, and would expect broccoli, not particularly popular in France, to be served with many meals, and adjustments were made to accommodate these tastes. American home cooks at the time were also more inclined to use appliances like garlic presses and mixers than French cooks, and so Child insisted that supplemental instructions for cooks using these appliances be included in the book alongside the normal instructions.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Volume 1 was originally published in 1961 after some early difficulties. Beck, Bertholle, and Child initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, but Houghton Mifflin grew uninterested in the project. Child recalled one editor telling her, "Americans don't want an encyclopedia, they want to cook something quick, with a mix." Beck, Bertholle, and Child refused to make requested changes to the manuscript, and Houghton Mifflin abandoned the project, writing that the book, as it stood, would be "too formidable to the American housewife." Judith Jones of Alfred A. Knopf became interested in the manuscript after it had been rejected. After spending several years in Paris, Jones had moved to New York, where she grew frustrated with the limited ingredients and recipes commonly available in the United States. Jones felt that the manuscript would offer a lifeline to middle-class women, like her, who were interested in learning how to cook French cuisine in America, and predicted that "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", "will do for French cooking here in America what Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking" did for standard [American] cooking." While Jones was enthusiastic about the book, Knopf had low expectations and invested very little into promoting it. In order to generate interest in the book, and without support from Knopf, Child appeared on several morning talk shows in 1961 to demonstrate recipes, which she later cited as the impetus for her own cooking show, The French Chef.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Volume 1 was immensely successful, and work on Volume 2 began around 1964, as a collaboration between Simone Beck and Julia Child, but not Louisette Bertholle. By the end of 1960, Beck and Child had grown frustrated with Bertholle because they felt she did not contribute enough to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" to merit co-authorship and one third of the book's proceeds, and wanted Knopf to change the byline to read "by Simone Beck and Julia Child with Louisette Bertholle." Beck argued, "it is bad for the book for her to present herself as Author, as she really does not cook well enough, or know enough," and that Bertholle should only be entitled to 10% of the profits (to Beck and Child's 45% each). Ultimately, the contract with the publisher necessitated that Bertholle be given a co-author credit, and the final profit split was 18% to Bertholle and 41% each to Beck and Child. The dispute left Bertholle extremely upset, and effectively severed the professional partnership between herself and Beck and Child.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Volume 2 expanded on certain topics of interest that had not been covered as completely as the three had planned in the first volume, particularly baking. In an otherwise laudatory review of Volume 1, Craig Claiborne wrote that Beck, Bertholle, and Child had conspicuously omitted recipes for puff pastry and croissants, making their work feel incomplete. Bread became one of the primary focuses of Volume 2, and the main source of tension between Beck and Child and their publisher, Knopf. Knopf feared that the bread recipes that Beck and Child were testing would be stolen by a competing publisher, and insisted Beck and Child cease their semi-public testing of the recipes to reduce risk, which Beck and Child agreed to reluctantly.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Child became increasingly frustrated with the project as work on Volume 2 went on. Not only was she agitated by the demands of the publisher, she was growing tired of working with Beck, who she felt was too demanding. Child was also angry that, while "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" had been a runaway success in the United States, there was virtually no demand for the book in France itself, leading her to exclaim, "French women don't know a damn thing about French cooking, although they pretend they know everything." Her experience writing Volume 2, along with her continued success on television, led Child to sever her partnership with Beck and preclude the possibility of a Volume 3, even though Beck, Bertholle, and Child had always intended the work to span five volumes.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Volume 1 covers the basics of French cooking, striking as much of a balance between the complexities of haute cuisine and the practicalities of the American home cook. Traditional favorites such as beef bourguignon, bouillabaisse, and cassoulet are featured. This volume has been through many printings and has been reissued twice with revisions: first in 1983 with updates for changes in kitchen practice (especially the food processor), and then in 2003 as a 40th anniversary edition with the history of the book in the introduction. The cookbook includes 524 recipes.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Some classic French baking is also included, but baking had already received a more thorough treatment in Volume 2, published in 1970.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Volume 1 of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" received overwhelmingly positive reviews when it was first released in 1961. In the "New York Times", Craig Claiborne wrote that the recipes in the book "are glorious, whether they are for a simple egg in aspic or for a fish souffle," and that it "is not a book for those with a superficial interest in food...but for those who take a fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine." Michael Field, writing for the "New York Review of Books", praised Beck, Bertholle, and Child for "not limiting themselves to "la haute cuisine,"" and stated that "for once, the architectural structure of the French cuisine is firmly and precisely outlined in American terms." Field's sole criticism of the book was that the authors suggested dry vermouth as a substitute for white wine, as he felt the domestic vermouth available to American home cooks, the book's target audience, was "bland and characterless." Despite being a relatively expensive cookbook, retailing for $10 in 1965 (about $90 today), "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Volume 1 did well commercially, selling over 100,000 copies in less than five years. According to Julia Child biographer Noel Riley Fitch, the publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" instantaneously changed the entire American cookbook industry, leading more cookbook publishers to place emphasis on clarity and precision, and away from the "chatty and sometimes sketchy" style that had typified American cookbooks.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: On its release in 1970, Volume 2 was also well received. Critics praised the book's comprehensiveness, but some felt that it was far too ambitious for the average home cook. Gael Greene, reviewing the book for "Life", wrote that Volume 2 was "a classic continued," and made the contents of Volume 1 look like "mud-pie stuff," while Raymond Sokolov wrote that "it is without rival, the finest gourmet cookbook for the non-chef in the history of American stomachs." The "New York Times"' review was mixed, with critic Nika Hazelton praising the book for being "elegant and accurate," but criticized it for being too interested in minutia and theory to be useful for the home cook. Learning French cooking from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", she wrote, would be akin to "learning to drive a car by having the workings of the internal combustion engine described in full detail." Similarly, Nancy Ross of "The Washington Post and Times-Herald" argued that many of the recipes in Volume 2 would be far too time-consuming, difficult, and expensive for the American home cook, pointing out that the recipe for French bread provided in the book was nineteen pages long, took seven hours to complete, and required the use of "a brick and a sheet of asbestos cement."


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: The 2009 film, "Julie & Julia", based on Child's memoir "My Life in France" and Julie Powell's memoir "Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously". The success of this film, combined with a tied-in reissue of the 40th Anniversary edition, caused it to once again become a bestseller in the United States, 48 years after its initial release.


title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

text: Critical perception of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" has generally remained positive. In 2015, "The Daily Telegraph" ranked it as the second greatest cookbook of all time, behind Fergus Henderson's "Nose to Tail Eating". In a 2012 "New York Times" piece commemorating Julia Child's 100th birthday, Julia Moskin wrote that "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" should be credited with "turning the tide" on American food culture 1961, when "trends including feminism, food technology and fast food seemed ready to wipe out home cooking." Moskin added that, "in its fundamental qualities, the book and its many successors in the Child canon aren't dated at all. Their recipes remain perfectly written and rock-solid reliable." By contrast, in 2009, food writer Regina Schrambling published a piece in Slate entitled, "Don't Buy Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"," where she argued that the book now "seems overwhelming in a Rachael Ray world," its recipes overly complicated and unsuited for modern American tastes.


title: Robert King (writer)

text: Robert King (born 1959) is an American film and television writer and producer. He is married to Michelle King, who is also his writing partner. The couple created the legal drama series "The Good Wife" (2009–16), which earned them a Writers Guild of America Award; its spin-off "The Good Fight" (2017–2022); the comedy-drama "BrainDead" (2016); and "Evil" (2019–).


title: Robert King (writer)

text: King attended Archbishop Mitty High School and Westmont College. King is of Irish and Italian descent. King met Michelle Stern in 1983 when as a senior at UCLA she worked part-time at FrontRunners athletic shoe store. The couple married in 1987. They have one daughter, Sophia. A Catholic, he often attends Mass with "The Good Fight" lead actress Christine Baranski.


title: Robert King (writer)

text: King began his career writing the television movie, "Imaginary Friends", in 1982, which starred veteran actors Peter Ustinov and Lilli Palmer, was directed by Michael Darlow. King later wrote the science fiction horror film "The Nest" (1988), and co-wrote "", "Under the Boardwalk" and "Bloodfist" (all 1989).


title: Robert King (writer)

text: King continued to write feature films throughout the 1990s, including "Full Contact", "Dragon Fire", "Clean Slate", "Speechless", "Cutthroat Island" and "Red Corner". He directed the comedy film "Principal Takes a Holiday" in 1998. He co-wrote and directed "Angels in the Infield" (2000). He co-wrote and produced "Vertical Limit". Robert and Michelle King co-created and co-produced the short-lived drama series "In Justice" in 2006.


title: Robert King (writer)

text: They co-created a second, far more successful, legal drama series, "The Good Wife", which ran for seven seasons from 2009 to 2016 on CBS. Aside from the pilot episode, they co-wrote the episodes "Stripped", "Unorthodox", "Hi", and twelve other episodes. King and the writing staff were nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series for "The Good Wife".


title: Robert King (writer)

text: Robert and Michelle King also created and produced the comedy thriller drama series "BrainDead", which aired on CBS on June 13, 2016 thru October 17, 2016 before it was cancelled. The couple then returned to their "The Good Wife" spin-off "The Good Fight" as showrunners. More recently, the King Size Productions company signed an overall deal with CBS Studios.


title: Robert King (writer)

text: King has been nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series for "The Good Wife".


title: Hofstadter's law

text: Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:


title: Hofstadter's law

text: The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as "The Mythical Man-Month" or extreme programming.


title: Hofstadter's law

text: In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of analysis. Hofstadter wrote:


title: Hofstadter's law

text: In 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue became the first to beat a human champion by defeating Garry Kasparov.


title: Rain Dogs

text: Rain Dogs is the ninth studio album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, released in September 1985 on Island Records. A loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, "Rain Dogs" is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes "Swordfishtrombones" and "Franks Wild Years".


title: Rain Dogs

text: The album, which includes appearances by guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Arion Berger in a 2002 review in "Rolling Stone" as merging "outsider influences – socialist decadence by way of Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral – into a singularly idiosyncratic American style."


title: Rain Dogs

text: The album peaked at number 29 on the UK charts and number 188 on the US "Billboard" Top 200. In 1989, it was ranked number 21 on the "Rolling Stone" list of the "100 greatest albums of the 1980s." In 2012, the album was ranked number 399 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and at number 357 in 2020.


title: Rain Dogs

text: Waits wrote the majority of the album in a two-month stint in the fall of 1984 in a basement room at the corner of Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan. According to Waits, it was, "kind of a rough area, Lower Manhattan between Canal and 14th Street, just about a block from the river ... It was a good place for me to work. Very quiet, except for the water coming through the pipes every now and then. Sort of like being in a vault."


title: Rain Dogs

text: In preparation for the album, Waits recorded street sounds and other ambient noises on a cassette recorder to get the sound of the city that would be the album's subject matter.


title: Rain Dogs

text: A wide range of instruments was employed to achieve the album's sound, including marimba, accordion, double bass, trombone, and banjo. The album is notable for its organic sound, and the natural means by which it was achieved. Waits, discussing his mistrust of then fashionable studio techniques, said, "If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, why are we wasting our time? Let's just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something (take a drum sound from another record) and make it bigger in the mix, don't worry about it.' I'd say, 'No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.


title: Rain Dogs

text: Waits also stated that "if we couldn't get the right sound out of the drum set we'd get a chest of drawers in the bathroom and bang it real hard with a two-by-four," such that "the sounds become your own."


title: Rain Dogs

text: "Rain Dogs" was the first time that Waits worked with guitarist Marc Ribot, who was impressed by Waits' unusual studio presence. Ribot said, ""Rain Dogs" was my first major label type recording, and I thought everybody made records the way Tom makes records. ... I've learned since that it's a very original and individual way of producing. As producer apart from himself as writer and singer and guitar player he brings in his ideas, but he's very open to sounds that suddenly and accidentally occur in the studio. I remember one verbal instruction being, 'Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah. Ribot also recalls how the band would not rehearse the songs before going to record; rather, Waits would play them the songs on an acoustic guitar in the studio. "He had this ratty old hollow body, and he would spell out the grooves. It wasn't a mechanical kind of recording at all. He has a very individual guitar style he sort of slaps the strings with his thumb ... He let me do what I heard, there was a lot of freedom. If it wasn't going in a direction he liked, he'd make suggestions. But there's damn few ideas I've had which haven't happened on the first or second take."


title: Rain Dogs

text: The album marks the first time Waits recorded with guitarist Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Waits said, "There was something in there that I thought he would understand. I picked out a couple of songs that I thought he would understand and he did. He's got a great voice and he's just a great spirit in the studio. He's very spontaneous, he moves like some kind of animal. I was trying to explain 'Big Black Mariah' and finally I started to move in a certain way and he said, 'Oh, why didn't you do that to begin with? Now I know what you're talking about.' It's like animal instinct."


title: Rain Dogs

text: According to Barney Hoskyns, the album's general theme of "the urban dispossessed" was inspired in part by Martin Bell's 1984 documentary "Streetwise", to which Waits had been asked to contribute music.


title: Rain Dogs

text: Though it has been remarked that the man on the cover bears a striking resemblance to Waits, the photograph is actually one of a series taken by the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen at Café Lehmitz (a café near the Hamburg red-light boulevard Reeperbahn) in the late 1960s. The man and woman depicted on the cover are called Rose and Lilly.


title: Rain Dogs

text: The album has been noted as one of the most important musically and critically in Waits' career, in particular to the new direction which he undertook from 1983's "Swordfishtrombones" onwards. AllMusic critic William Ruhlmann wrote, ""Rain Dogs" can't surprise as "Swordfishtrombones" had." Nevertheless, Ruhlman further commented that "much of the music matches the earlier album, and there is so much of it that that is enough to qualify "Rain Dogs" as one of Waits' better albums." Robert Christgau of "The Village Voice" stated that Waits "worked out a unique and identifiable lounge-lizard sound that suits his status as the poet of America's non-nine-to-fivers."


title: Rain Dogs

text: In his 1985 review for "Rolling Stone", Anthony DeCurtis gave the album a mixed review, writing: ""Rain Dogs" insists on nosing its way around the barrooms and back alleys Waits has so often visited before." However, in a more recent review in 2002, "Rolling Stone" critic Arion Berger praised the album, describing the music as "bony and menacingly beautiful." Berger also observed that "it's quirky near-pop, the all-pro instrumentation pushing Waits' not-so-melodic but surprisingly flexible vocals out front, where his own peculiar freak flag, his big heart and his romantic optimism gloriously fly."


title: Rain Dogs

text: At year's end, "Rain Dogs" was ranked number 1 among the "Albums of the Year" for 1985 by "NME". In later assessments, "Pitchfork" listed "Rain Dogs" as 8th best album of the 1980s, and "Slant Magazine" listed the album at number 14 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s". "Rolling Stone" listed it as number 21 on its list of "100 Best Albums of the Eighties," as well as listing the album at 399 and 357 in its 2012 and 2020 updates respectively of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Álvaro Uribe Vélez (born 4 July 1952) is a Colombian politician who served as the 31st President of Colombia from 7 August 2002 to 7 August 2010.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Uribe started his political career in his home department of Antioquia. He held offices in the Public Enterprises of Medellín and in the Ministry of Labor and was the director of the Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics (1980–1982). He became the Mayor of Medellín in October 1982. He was a senator between 1986 and 1994 and finally the Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997 before being elected President of Colombia in 2002. Following his 2002 election, Uribe led an all-out military offensive against leftist guerrilla groups such as the FARC and the ELN with funding and backing from the Clinton and Bush administrations in the form of a 2.8 billion dollars direct foreign aid package called "Plan Colombia", as well as leading a controversial effort to demobilize the right-wing paramilitary group known as the AUC, all of which are part of the Colombian Armed Conflict. His role in the conflict was accompanied by large-scale alleged exactions: thousands of civilians were killed by the Colombian army, as part of the "False positives" scandal, with almost total impunity. Their deaths are being investigated by the United Nations. Millions of people have been victims of forced displacement.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: In August 2010, Uribe was appointed vice-chairman of the UN panel investigating the Gaza flotilla raid. In 2012 Uribe and a group of political allies founded the right-wing Democratic Center movement to contest the 2014 national elections. He was elected senator in the 2014 parliamentary election and took office in July 2014. Uribe was critical of his successor Juan Manuel Santos's peace talks with the FARC guerrillas. In August 2020, the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia ordered his arrest as part of an investigation into bribery and witness tampering. He was released from house arrest on 10 October. The case went to the Fiscalía General de la Nación, after which Uribe resigned from his Senate seat. A number of his political opponents have claimed for years that Uribe should be prosecuted, alleging he has ties with paramilitarism.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Álvaro Uribe was born in Medellín, the oldest of five children. His father, Alberto Uribe, was a landowner. At the age of 10 his family left their Salgar ranch and moved to Medellín. He graduated in 1970 from the Instituto Jorge Robledo after being expelled from the Medellín Benedictine School for arguing with the Benedictine monks.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Uribe studied law at the University of Antioquia and he graduated in 1977. His father was killed by a guerrilla group during a 1983 kidnapping attempt. After his father's death, Uribe focused on his political career and became a member of the center-left Colombian Liberal Party. He served on the city council of Medellín between 1984 and 1986.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: In 1993 he attended Harvard University, receiving a Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management from Harvard Extension School and a Certificate in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution from Harvard Law School. Between 1998 and 1999, after having completed his term in office as the governor of Antioquia, he studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, England, on a Chevening-Simón Bolívar scholarship and was appointed Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: In 1976, at the age of 24, Uribe was Chief of Assets for the Public Enterprises of Medellín ("Empresas Públicas de Medellín"). He served as Secretary General of the Ministry of Labor under Alfonso López Michelsen from 1977 to 1978. During this time he married Lina Moreno, a philosopher from Medellín. President Julio César Turbay named him Director of Civil Aviation from 1980 to 1982, at the age of 28 after the previous director was assassinated. He was appointed Mayor of Medellín in 1982, but was removed five months later due to alleged connections with drug cartels.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Uribe was elected one of Antioquia's senators from 1986 to 1990 and again from 1990 to 1994. As senator, he served as president of the Seventh Commission and he supported laws dealing with reform of pensions, labor and social security, as well as promotion of administrative careers, cooperative banking, brown sugar, and protection for women. Some of the legislation later drew criticism, in particular, that which reduced the state's responsibility for social security. During his later term, he received official and unofficial awards as one of the "best senators" (1990, 1992 and 1993) and as the senator with the "best legislative initiatives" (1992).


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: He was elected governor of the department of Antioquia for the 1995 to 1997 term. During his term, Uribe developed what he described as a model for a communitarian state, where in theory citizens would participate in the administration's decision making. It was claimed that this model would help improve employment, education, administrative transparency and public security.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Within his jurisdiction, Uribe openly supported a national program of licensed private security services that became known as CONVIVIR, which had been created by Decree 356 issued by the Colombian Defense Ministry in February 1994. The groups quickly became controversial – while some reportedly improved security in communities and intelligence coordination with the military, their members were accused of abusing civilians and operated without serious oversight. In 1998, Human Rights Watch stated: "we have received credible information that indicated that the CONVIVIR groups of the Magdalena Medio and of the southern Cesar regions were directed by known paramilitaries and had threatened to assassinate Colombians who were considered as guerrilla sympathizers or who refused to join the cooperative groups".


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Uribe ran as an independent liberal candidate, having unofficially separated from his former party. His electoral platform centered on confronting Colombia's main guerrilla movement, the FARC. Other relevant propositions included slashing the national administration's expenses, fighting corruption and initiating a national referendum to resolve several of the country's political and economic concerns.


title: Álvaro Uribe

text: Colombia's government under President Andres Pastrana was undergoing peace negotiations with the largest guerrilla group, the FARC. but after four years of peace negotiations without cease-fires, disapproval of Colombia's main parties grew. Violence was rampant. The FARC had, as they claimed, taken control of some 100 municipalities of Colombia out of 1093 at that moment, kidnappings were common and were among the highest in the world, as well as the assassination and crime rate. The AUC was also gaining influence, and expanding its massacres and illicit drugs production, competing with FARC, ELN and other narco-traffickers.