text: The Retrievers Men's Soccer Team won the America East Conference in 2010, receiving an automatic bid to the NCAA Division I men's soccer tournament. The Retrievers won their first-round game against Princeton but lost in the second round to William and Mary. Star striker, Levi Houapeu, from the 2010 team was drafted as a 5th pick in the 3rd round of the 2011 MLS SuperDraft by the Philadelphia Union. He is the first UMBC player to be drafted into the MLS. The men also won the conference again in 2012, and advanced to the NCAA tournament once again. They won their first-round game against Old Dominion, but lost in the second round to defending champion, UNC Chapel Hill. In 2013 the Retrievers led the country with an overall record of (16-1-3) and became the first team since 1997 to repeat as America East Conference Champions. They would earn a #16 seed and a first round bye as well as host UMBC's first ever NCAA Tournament match in any sport. The Retrievers would fall in the second round of the tournament to UConn. In 2014, the Retrievers won their third straight America East Conference Championship and advanced the furthest of any UMBC NCAA Division I team by beating the #12-ranked Creighton, as the Retrievers reached the NCAA Men's Soccer Championship semifinals. UMBC is the first team in tournament history to win four consecutive road games and to post shutouts in four consecutive games.


title: University of Maryland, Baltimore County

text: UMBC Women's Soccer Team went 13-5-2 in their 2013 season, tying for the regular-season conference title then winning the conference tournament. This was their first American East Conference title. They then made their first NCAA tournament appearance in 2013, where they lost to #1-ranked VA Tech 2–0 in the first round. This was an amazing accomplishment considering the team had a cumulative record of 3-39-9 in their previous three years.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: Between 1997 and 2003 Iwata were one of the most successful teams in the J. League. Over this seven-year spell Jubilo finished outside the top two of J1 just once, winning the league title on three occasions. This period also saw a number of cup final appearances, including winning the Emperor’s Cup, the J. League Cup, and the Asian Champions League once each.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: The team started out as the company team for Yamaha Motor Corporation in 1970. After making its way through the Shizuoka and Tōkai football leagues, it played in the Japan Soccer League until it reorganized as the J.League at the end of 1992.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: Their first glory happened when they won both the Emperor's Cup and promotion as champions of the JSL Division 2 in 1982. They won their first Japanese league title in the 1987/88 season. Due to problems in the upcoming professionalization, Yamaha decided to relegate themselves and not be one of the J.League founder members.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: They finished in 2nd place of the JFL 1st division, a division below the top flight, in 1993 and were promoted to the J1 league for 1994. The team welcomed Marius Johan Ooft as its manager, as well as the Brazilian national team captain Dunga and a number of foreign players to build a winning team. Dunga's football philosophy deeply influenced the club, initially as a player and currently as an advisor.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: In a seven-year period between 1997 and 2003, the club won a number of titles relying on Japanese players instead of foreigners who may leave on a transfer during the middle of the season. Within this period Júbilo won the J.League title three times, finished second three more and won each of the domestic cup competitions once. In 1999 they were also crowned Champions of Asia after winning the final match against Esteghlal F.C. and


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: In one of the most fruitful periods in J.League history, Júbilo broke several records and created some new ones. Amongst these are the most goals scored in a season (107 in 1998); the fewest goals conceded in a season (26 in 2001); the biggest goal difference (plus 68 goals in 1998); and the largest win (9–1 against Cerezo Osaka in 1998). In 2002, the team won both stages of the championship, a first in J.League history, and the same year the team had a record seven players selected for the J.League Team of the Year. All of these records still stand today.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: Since their last cup triumph in the 2003 Emperor's Cup, the squad which took them to such heights began to age. Without similarly skilled replacements coming through the youth team or from outside, Júbilo's power started to fade, and in 2007 the club ended the season in a record worst position of 9th. Perhaps more concerning to Júbilo supporters is their eclipse in recent seasons by bitter local rivals Shimizu S-Pulse who, in ending the season above Júbilo every year since 2006, have become Shizuoka prefecture's premier performing team. In 2008 they finished 16th out of 18 – their lowest position in the 18-club table – but kept their J1 position by defeating Vegalta Sendai in the promotion/relegation playoff.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: In 2013 season, it took them until 8th week to make their first win in the league matches, and never move up higher than 16th since they were ranked down to 17th as of the end of 5th week. Then eventually suffered their first relegation to 2014 J.League Division 2 after they were defeated by Sagan Tosu at their 31st week match.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: Júbilo were promoted back to J1 in 2015 after finishing runners-up. After a 18th place finish in 2019, Iwata were relegated to J2 for 2020. The following year, Júbilo won J2 and were promoted for the 2022 J1 League season.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: On 2022, Júbilo couldn't find their way into success throughout the season, with forgettable campaigns being made in each competition. In the J.League Cup, the team saw an early elimination at the group stage, finishing third at their group after losing half their matches. In the Emperor's Cup, they were eliminated in the Round of 16 by Tokyo Verdy at extra-time, despite looking promising after 5–2 win against Matsumoto Yamaga on the 2nd round. In the J1 League, their situation became worse, staying the last 16 rounds of the league season without leaving the relegation zone, having the relegation to the J2 confirmed on the penultimate round.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: On 19 October 2022, Júbilo Iwata announced through their media accounts that for both transfers windows of the 2023 season, the club would be unable to make new signings after a ban was imposed by FIFA. The ban, however, didn't applied to youth team promotions of Júbilo's academy system, and for players returning from loan transfers. FIFA made the decision based on issues regarding Fabián González's contract with the club, as the player supposedly cancelled a contract signed with an unnamed Thai club without a justifiable reason. According to Júbilo, at the time of his signing (in the pre-season) they were unaware of the previous contract González signed with the Thai club. The situation became public after the Thai club left a complaint highlighting the transfer issue situation to FIFA's Dispute Resolution Chamber on April 2022. González was also imposed a punishment by FIFA, being suspended from any participation in official matches for four months. The transfer ban also led to a provisional contract cancellation of Shu Morooka on 17 November 2022, who had during the season signed a provisional contract for the 2023 season, after graduating from university. Then, on the same day, it was announced he would join Kashima Antlers instead.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: Júbilo's closest professional rivals are S-Pulse from Shizuoka. Júbilo also has rivalries with Kashima Antlers and Yokohama Marinos, with whom they traded the Japanese league championship since the late 1980s. During the Japan Soccer League days, they had a more local derby with Honda, across the Tenryu in Hamamatsu, but as Honda has long resisted professionalism, competitive matches between them since 1994 are a rarity.


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: The following players have been selected by their country in the World Cup, while playing for Júbilo Iwata:


title: Júbilo Iwata

text: In the manga series – "Captain Tsubasa", three characters were players of Júbilo Iwata. The midfielders Taro Misaki and Hanji Urabe, and the defender Ryo Ishizaki.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Marjorie Lord (née Wollenberg; July 26, 1918 – November 28, 2015) was an American television and film actress. She played Kathy "Clancy" O'Hara Williams, opposite Danny Thomas's character on "The Danny Thomas Show" (also known as "Make Room for Daddy)".


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord was born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of Lillian Rosalie (née Edgar) and George Charles Wollenberg. During her early childhood, she was a ballet dancer. Her father was a cosmetics executive. Her paternal grandparents were German, as were two of her maternal great-grandparents. Her family moved to New York City when she was 15.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: In 1935, at the age of 16, Lord made her Broadway debut in "The Old Maid" with Judith Anderson. Her other Broadway appearances came in "Signature" (1945), "Little Brown Jug" (1946), and "The Girl in the Freudian Slip" (1967).


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Although most of Lord's success came in television, she said in 1963: "I am primarily a stage actress. That's what I was trained to do and that's my first love."


title: Marjorie Lord

text: In the 1970s, Lord was active in dinner theater productions, spending 34 weeks in such presentations in 1973 alone.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: One film reference book summarized Lord's movie career by saying, "For two decades, she played leading roles in mostly routine films ..."


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord was signed by RKO Radio Pictures in 1935. While appearing in "Springtime for Henry" with Edward Everett Horton, director Henry Koster approached her and signed her to a contract with Universal Studios. She appeared in six feature films and a film serial "The Adventures of Smilin' Jack" for Universal. Her film work includes a number of wartime pictures, including the 1943 mystery "Sherlock Holmes in Washington", starring Basil Rathbone in the title role. She also appeared in the Western films "Masked Raiders", "Mexican Manhunt", and "Down Laredo Way". In 1966, she played Mrs. Martha Meade, the wife of Bob Hope's character, in the screwball comedy "Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!".


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord appeared in a 1950 episode of "The Lone Ranger" titled "Bullets for Ballots", also featuring Craig Stevens, and a 1955 episode entitled "The Law Lady". She appeared on the 1951 episode "The Return of Trigger Dawson" of Bill Williams's syndicated western television series "The Adventures of Kit Carson" and the 1954 production of "Shadow of Truth" on "Ford Theatre".


title: Marjorie Lord

text: In 1956, while she was appearing in "Anniversary Waltz", Lord caught the attention of Danny Thomas, who asked her to replace Jean Hagen as his television wife on "Make Room for Daddy". Hagen had played Thomas' wife since the series' inception, but she was written out of the script in 1956. Lord accepted the role and joined the cast of the show, now called "The Danny Thomas Show". She played the role until the show was cancelled in 1964. In 1970, Lord and Thomas, along with several other original supporting actors, returned to television with "Make Room for Granddaddy". The show lasted just one season.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord remained active beyond her 90th birthday. On May 8, 2008, she participated in a "Salute to Television Moms" panel discussion organized by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord has a star in the television section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6317 Hollywood Boulevard. The star was dedicated on February 8, 1960.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord was married three times. She wed actor John Archer on December 30, 1941, and they had two children, including actress Anne Archer. They were married from 1941 until their divorce in 1955. Her second husband was producer Randolph Hale, to whom she was married from 1958 until his death in 1974. Her third husband was Harry Volk, the former CEO of Union Bank and a Los Angeles philanthropist, to whom she was married from 1976 until his death in 2000. Her memoir is entitled "A Dance and a Hug". Lord is grandmother of Tommy Davis, son of her daughter Anne, both of whom are noted members of the Church of Scientology.


title: Marjorie Lord

text: Lord died on November 28, 2015, aged 97, at her home in Beverly Hills, California of natural causes. She is survived by her daughter Anne Archer, her son, Gregg Archer, grandchildren Tommy Davis, Jeffrey Jastrow, Tracey McCarter, Adelle Archer, and Nathan Archer, and three great-grandchildren. Upon her death, she was cremated and her ashes given to her son, Gregg Archer.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: Cannabis in the Netherlands is illegal, but is decriminalised for personal use. Recreational consumption of the drug is tolerated, and it is available in coffeeshops.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: Cannabis was first criminalised in the Netherlands in 1953, following earlier laws against its import and export in 1928. Cannabis was banned much earlier in the Dutch colony of Suriname, in the early part of the 20th century, and in Dutch Indonesia in 1927.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: In 1972, the Dutch government divided drugs into more- and less-dangerous categories, with cannabis being in the lesser category. Accordingly, possession of 30 grams or less was made a misdemeanor.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: Cannabis has been available for recreational use in coffee shops since 1976. Cannabis products are only sold openly in certain local "coffeeshops" and possession of up to 5 grams for personal use is decriminalised, however, the police may still confiscate it, which often happens in car checks near the border. Other types of sales and transportation are not permitted, although the general approach toward cannabis was lenient even before official decriminalisation.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: Though retail sales are tolerated, production, transportation, and bulk possession of marijuana outside of retail stores is illegal, preventing testing for contaminants and dosing. After legalization and regulation of the entire supply chain in other countries, some cities in the Netherlands are participating in a pilot project using officially approved growers and testers, and labeling of the amount of THC.


title: Cannabis in the Netherlands

text: Since 2003, there has been a legal prescription drug known as "Mediwiet", available at Dutch pharmacies. There are five different types of medical cannabis in the Netherlands; the fifth contains Cannabidiol and almost no Tetrahydrocannabinol.


title: Henry Fonda filmography

text: This is the filmography of American actor Henry Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982). From the beginning of Fonda's career in 1935 through to his last projects in 1981, Fonda appeared in 106 films, television programs, and shorts.


title: Henry Fonda filmography

text: Through the course of his career he appeared in many critically acclaimed films, including "12 Angry Men" and "The Ox-Bow Incident". His roles in 1940's "The Grapes of Wrath" and 1981's "On Golden Pond" both earned him Academy Award nominations and he won for the latter. Fonda made his mark in Westerns, appearing as Frank James in "Jesse James" and "The Return of Frank James", and war films such as "The Longest Day" and "In Harm's Way", and made frequent appearances in both television and foreign productions late in his career. He was Bette Davis' leading man in the romantic period piece "Jezebel" and portrayed historical figures Abraham Lincoln in "Young Mr. Lincoln" and Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine". Fonda made four movies with his close friend James Stewart; "On Our Merry Way", "How the West Was Won", "Firecreek", and "The Cheyenne Social Club". Henry Fonda made no major film appearances between 1948's "Fort Apache" with John Wayne and "Mister Roberts" with James Cagney in 1955, seven years later, concentrating instead on the stage; both films were directed by John Ford.


title: Taking the knee

text: Taking the knee (or taking a knee) is a symbolic gesture against racism whereby an individual kneels upon one knee in place of standing to attention for an anthem or other such occasion. It was originated by American football player Colin Kaepernick on September 1, 2016, in protest against the lack of attention given to the issues of racial inequality and police brutality in the United States. Kaepernick's protest led to a wider series of national anthem protests. It has since been adopted by sports players in countries around the world, including association football in the United Kingdom, in solidarity with Kaepernick's protest against racism, and has been seen worldwide in non-sporting contexts such as the Black Lives Matter protests.


title: Taking the knee

text: The gesture originated in a 2016 American football game, during which Colin Kaepernick and his 49ers teammate Eric Reid chose to kneel during the playing of the US national anthem, to call attention to the issues of racial inequality and police brutality.


title: Taking the knee

text: "After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former NFL player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, ... during the anthem, as a peaceful protest," said Reid. "We chose to kneel because it's a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy."


title: Taking the knee

text: During the 2016 season, a small number of other players also took the knee before matches. Taking a knee became more frequent after then-President Trump criticized the gesture during a rally in September 2017, describing it as a disrespectful act against the United States national anthem and flag, and urging NFL team owners to sack "son of a bitch" players who performed it. In response, over a hundred NFL players took the knee in subsequent weeks, along with athletes from other sports, and spectators.


title: Taking the knee

text: Taking the knee was used by many clubs before kick-off throughout the 2020–21 English association football season, which was booed by some fans.


title: Taking the knee

text: In a June 2020 radio interview, United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that he saw the gesture as "a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation", adding that he was unaware whether it had a broader history and that it seemed to him to be "taken from the "Game of Thrones"".


title: Taking the knee

text: In September 2020, Middlesbrough said they would stop taking the knee. In December 2020 players from Millwall and QPR said they would not take the knee, but would instead stand arm-in-arm. By February 2021 other teams had stopped taking the knee, including Brentford, while individual players from other teams such as Wilfried Zaha said they would also stop. Zaha later became the first Premier League player to stop taking the knee. Derby County stopped in March 2021.


title: Taking the knee

text: On June 8, 2021, prior to an international friendly game between Hungary and the Republic of Ireland, the Irish players were booed by some Hungarian fans prior to kick-off for taking the knee.


title: Taking the knee

text: The England national team took the knee before matches in 2021's UEFA European Football Championship, resulting in booing from some fans. Conservative MP Lee Anderson stated that he would not watch England games in the tournament as a direct result of this political gesture, saying he believed that "the vast majority of these fans booing last night are not racist" and thought they were "more likely to [...] not share the Marxist views of BLM". Kick It Out's chief executive Tony Burnett considered the booing an example of racism in the sport. The English Football Association later asked fans to respect the players' wishes to take the knee. England players were booed by Poland fans for kneeling against racism ahead of 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifying match at National Stadium, Warsaw.


title: Taking the knee

text: In July 2021, Conservative MP Steve Baker said the Government should start backing players taking the knee, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel had declined to condemn those who booed. Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and leader of the Labour Party, said England's players were "right to take the knee".


title: Taking the knee

text: Ahead of the 2022–23 Premier League season, Premier League club captains agreed to their teams no longer taking the knee routinely before matches, instead restricting the gesture to "significant moments" of the season. Some captains felt that the gesture had lost its power, and hoped that restricting it would increase its impact. Captains affirmed their commitment towards fighting racism and other forms of discrimination. During the national anthem to start the 2022 FIFA World Cup game between England and Iran, England players took the knee as Iran’s players fell silent in reaction to events going on in their country.


title: Taking the knee

text: Josiah Wedgwood pottered the image of a black man kneeling in shackles and depicting slavery on the emblem of the British abolitionist movement during the 18th and 19th centuries—a movement to ban slavery and ill-treatment of people.


title: Taking the knee

text: In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. knelt in prayer with a group of equalities marchers during the Selma to Montgomery marches.


title: TerraPower

text: TerraPower is an American nuclear reactor design and development engineering company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. TerraPower is developing a class of nuclear fast reactors termed traveling wave reactors (TWR).


title: TerraPower

text: TWR places a small core of enriched fuel in the center of a much larger mass of non-fissile material, in this case depleted uranium. Neutrons from fission in the core "breeds" new fissile material in the surrounding mass, producing Plutonium-239. Over time, enough fuel is bred in the area surrounding the core that it can undergo fission, sending neutrons further into the mass and continuing the process while the original core expires. Over a period of decades, the reaction moves from the core of the reactor to the outside, thus "travelling wave".


title: TerraPower

text: In September 2015, TerraPower signed an agreement with state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation to build a prototype 600 MWe reactor unit at Xiapu in Fujian province, China, from 2018 to 2025. Commercial power plants, generating about 1150 MWe, were planned for the late 2020s. However, in January 2019 it was announced that the project had been abandoned due to technology transfer limitations placed by the Trump administration.


title: TerraPower

text: In October 2020, the company was chosen by the United States Department of Energy as a recipient of a matching grant totaling between $400 million and $4 billion over the ensuing 5 to 7 years to build a demonstration reactor using their "Natrium" design. Natrium uses liquid sodium as a coolant (reducing the cost using an ambient pressure primary loop). It then transfers that heat to molten salt, which can be stored in tanks and used to generate steam on demand, enabling the reactor to run continuously at constant power, while allowing dispatchable electricity generation.


title: TerraPower

text: TerraPower is partly funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Los Alamos National Laboratory. One of TerraPower's primary investors is Bill Gates (via Cascade Investment). Others include Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures, which reportedly invested $35 million in 2010. TerraPower is led by chief executive officer Chris Levesque. In December 2011 India's Reliance Industries bought a minority stake through one of its subsidiaries and its Chairman Mukesh Ambani joined the board. Other TerraPower participants include scientists and engineers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Fast Flux Test Facility, Microsoft, and various universities, as well as managers from Siemens, Areva NP, the ITER project, Ango Systems Corporation, and DOE.


title: TerraPower

text: SK Group agreed to invest $250 million in 2022. The round was co-led by SK Inc and SK Innovation and Gates. DOE gave TerraPower cost-share funding through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) to test, license and build an advanced reactor within seven years. Terrapower selected Kemmerer, Wyoming as the preferred site.The proposed reactor would yield 345 MWe with a molten salt energy storage system. The reactor can temporarily boost output to 500 MWe, enabling the plant to integrate with renewable resources.


title: TerraPower

text: TerraPower chose traveling wave reactors (TWRs) as its primary technology. Their major benefit is high fuel utilization that does not require nuclear reprocessing and could eliminate the need to enrich uranium. TWRs are designed to convert typically non-fissile fertile nuclides (U-238) into fissile nuclides (Pu-239) in-situ and then shift power production from the "burned" region to the "bred" region. This allows the benefits of a closed fuel cycle without the expense and proliferation-risk of enrichment/reprocessing plants. Enough fuel for between 40 and 60 years of operation could be included in the reactor during manufacturing. The reactor could be installed below ground, where it could operate for an estimated 100 years. TerraPower described its reactor design as a Generation IV design.


title: TerraPower

text: By using depleted uranium as fuel, the new reactor type could reduce enriched uranium stockpiles. TerraPower notes that the US harbors 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium and that 320 metric tons could power 100 million homes for a year. Reports claim that TWR's high fuel efficiency, combined with the ability to use uranium recovered from river or sea water, means enough fuel is available to generate electricity for 10 billion people at US per capita consumption levels over million-year time-scales.


title: TerraPower

text: The TWR design is still in research and development. The conceptual framework was simulated by supercomputers with empirical evidence for theoretical feasibility. US regulators postponed the construction of an experimental reactor for a decade via certification process. On November 6, 2009, TerraPower executives and Bill Gates visited Toshiba's Yokohama and Keihin Factories in Japan, and concluded a non-disclosure agreement with them on December 1. Toshiba had developed an ultracompact reactor, the 4S, that could operate for 30 years without fuel handling and generated 10 megawatts. Some of the 4S technologies are considered to be transferable to TWRs.


title: TerraPower

text: In October 2015 the company was reported to be investigating a molten salt reactor design with Southern Company as a technology alternative. In February 2022, it was announced that the two companies had agreed to build a demonstration fast-spectrum salt reactor at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).


title: TerraPower

text: Natrium combines a molten sodium reactor with a 1 GWh molten salt energy storage system. Sodium offers a 785-Kelvin temperature range between its solid and gaseous states, nearly 8x that of water's 100-Kelvin range. Without requiring costly and risky pressurization, sodium can absorb large amounts of heat. It is not at risk of decomposition at high temperature as water does. Sodium is non-corrosive. Natrium is fueled by high-assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) as its fuel. HALEU is enriched to contain between 5 and 20 percent uranium, which can be produced from spent fuel. Plant sites are expected to be smaller and 4x more efficient than conventional plants. Natrium control rods descend using only gravity in case of equipment damage/failure. Power output is a constant 345 MWe. The plant is designed to run at 100 percent output, 24/7. The storage system is designed to work in tandem with intermittent energy sources, responding to their spikes and crashes. It can produce 150% of the rated power output, or 500 MWe for 5.5 hours.


title: TerraPower

text: In June 2021, TerraPower and PacifiCorp (of Warren Buffett) announced plans to build a joint Natrium reactor. Four cities in Wyoming affected by closure of fossil-fuel power plants are under consideration for the demonstration reactor: Gillette, Kemmerer, Glenrock and Rock Springs, Wyoming. PacificCorp does business in Wyoming as Rocky Mountain Power and has a coal power plant in each of the candidate locations. It was announced November 16, 2021 that Kemmerer had been selected. The commercial power plant could be operational by 2030.


title: Ali Ansari (actor)

text: Ali Ansari (Urdu: علی انصاری) (born 8 September 1987) is a Pakistani actor, model, musician (trained drummer) and video jockey. Born in Lahore into Momin Ansari family, he began his career as a RJ for hit radio show "Dude, where’s my song?" and then became a model. He made his debut as a television actor in the 2015 television soap series, "Riffat Appa Ki Bahuein". He gained popularity by playing the role of "Saarim" in romantic saga "Khaani", "Arham" in Mehreen Jabbar's small screen venture "Dino Ki Dulhaniya" and as "Rayed" in "Rang Mahal" (2021). Ansari is currently appearing in a leading role in Moomal Entertainment's "Bebaak".


title: Pidilite Industries

text: Pidilite Industries Limited is an Indian adhesives manufacturing company based in Andheri (East), Mumbai. The company is the dominant and leading adhesives company in India. Pidilite also manufactures products across verticals such as art materials and stationery; food and fabric care; car products, adhesives, and sealants; and speciality industrial products like adhesives, pigments; textile resins, leather chemicals, and construction chemicals.


title: Pidilite Industries

text: Pidilite markets the Fevicol range of adhesives. Its other brands are FeviKwik, Dr. Fixit, Roff, Cyclo, Ranipal, Hobby Ideas, M-seal, and Acron. It also markets and manufactures WD-40 in India.


title: Pidilite Industries

text: The company has manufacturing facilities across India including in Mahad (Maharashtra), Vapi (Gujarat), Baddi and Kala Amb (both in Himachal Pradesh). In 2022, Pidilite Industries partnered with 100x.VC.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge (; born 1990) is a Chinese food vlogger and YouTuber from Yunnan. Dianxi Xiaoge, along with Ms Yeah and Li Ziqi, are the only Chinese Internet celebrities who have reached international prominence, according to the "Southern Metropolis Daily" in 2019. Her actual name is Dong Meihua (), and she goes by the nicknames Penji () and Apenjie ().


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge lives in a family farm in a small western mountain in the town of in Shidian County in Baoshan, Yunnan. It was challenging for her parents to make a living farming in the village, which led her to seek schooling and employment outside her province. Dianxi Xiaoge studied to become a police officer at though upon graduation in 2012 chose to join an Internet startup company in the marketing department. She planned to eventually buy a house in Chongqing and move her parents in so they would all have a better life. But she returned to her village in 2016 after her father had a heart attack. To make a living in Yunnan, Dianxi Xiaoge began selling local specialities online before capitalizing on the rise in 2016 of short videos when she started posting her own. She created her YouTube channel in 2018 and first went viral internationally after releasing a video where she made hamburgers for her grandparents who had never eaten them before.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Scholars have called her a cottagecore content creator and an example of the rural living segment of the Wanghong economy. Dianxi Xiaoge's videos showcase the calm, idyllic village life and feature her making videos of Yunnan cuisine using produce that she planted, harvested, and raised herself. Her male Alaskan Malamute named Dawang () follows her around in many videos. She ends her videos with a family meal of what she cooked. Urban dwellers have viewed her videos as a temporary refuge from the bustling, stressful city life. Coda Media's Isobel Cockerell said Dianxi Xiaoge's presence and popularity on YouTube despite the censorship of YouTube in China indicates she has implicit government support. In 2020, she had roughly 16 million subscribers on all her platforms including Sina Weibo, YouTube, Douyin, and Facebook, and her videos each were receiving roughly 20 million views. Her Weibo was among the 10 most subscribed independent accounts that year.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge lives in a family farm in a small western mountain in the town of in Shidian County. Her village in which 140 families live is about a one-hour bus ride from Baoshan Yunrui Airport. She lives about a 30-minute drive from the town in the remote mountains where houses including hers are constructed along the hillside. The asphalt road to the houses is filled with numerous turns. Potted plants adorn the ground in front of a row of old-style wooden houses. In her courtyard, she has a pigpen where she raises pigs and a cowshed where she raises cows. A stone bridge with water flowing downwards is at the right of the courtyard. Succulent plants and other kinds of flowers and plants fill up the entire courtyard. The house beams are made of old-style wooden frames. Inside the house, the walls are covered in several old photos, while the floor is made of wood. The farmhouse has a wood-fired stove. The house's second story has a section where her family stores corn. Her younger male cousin lives in the house next door and in 2019 purchased 300 baby chickens using funds from jobs he did outside the province.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge (), whose actual name is Dong Meihua (), was born in 1990 in Shidian County in Baoshan, a prefecture-level city in the southwestern part of China's Yunnan province which borders Myanmar. In Chinese, "Dian" is for short for Yunnan and "Xi" means "west". She included the phrase as part of her online name since she lives in the western part of Yunnan. In Chinese, "Xiaoge" means "little brother". Despite being a woman, she calls herself this since she had been a tomboy as a child. She found "Xiaomei" () to be too cute, whereas she liked "Xiaoge" for coming across as more playful and carefree. She has had Dianxi Xiaoge as her online name since around 2016. Dianxi Xiaoge also has the nickname Penji (), and her viewers call her Apenjie (), mimicking her younger brother (), Xiaohao, who calls her Apenjie in the videos. Her village's tradition is that when a baby is born, the mother's family will visit. The newborn will be named by whatever the family brings. Dianxi Xiaoge's maternal grandmother brought a bucket for cleansing and a chicken, which is why she was given the nickname "Penji" or "Bucket Chicken".


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Her father is Dong Chaoyu. She has a younger sister and a younger brother, Xiaohao. When she had not yet entered primary school, Dianxi Xiaoge's mother had to wake up early in the morning to hike to the bottom of the mountain to bring back several buckets of springwater since their village did not have running water yet. Although her mother was adept at making all kinds of food, Dianxi Xiaoge was the most excited to eat the laba congee, which they would purchase from the county seat only a few times a year. It was too challenging for her family to subsist on only farming since the mountains were steep and the land was thin. Her parents worked at construction sites in various cities. In her pre-university days, whenever she was not in school, Dianxi Xiaoge would spend time with her parents and her younger sister at the sites. They would see each other during a hastily eaten lunch at the site. Her mother enjoyed cooking and stressed to Dianxi Xiaoge that village girls should know how to cook, so Dianxi Xiaoge and her sister cooked a lot of food from a young age. Her parents raised her and her sister in a traditional household to prepare them to perform household chores when they have their own families.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: As a youth who grew up in the mountains, Dianxi Xiaoge had a deep desire to leave her hometown for a city where she would buy property and forge a better life for her family. When filling out her university preferences for the gaokao, she did not choose a single university in Yunnan. Dianxi Xiaoge attended the . She participated in rescue efforts during the August 14, 2010, landslide in Yingxiu. The public security bureau of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture awarded her with a third-class Meritorious Service Medal for her rescue work. Dianxi Xiaoge was riding a bus in 2011 when it suddenly burst into flames. After she helped rescue people on the bus, the gave her a second-class Meritorious Service Medal. The Luzhou city government in 2012 gave her the "Luzhou City acting bravely for a just cause warrior" award and the "Luzhou City Jiangyang District acting bravely for a just cause citizen" award. That year, the gave her the "Outstanding Communist Youth League Member of Sichuan Province" award. While in college, she received monetary awards from the commendations for her actions during two rescue operations. Throughout her four years of college, she did not request funds from her family for her expenses since they were covered by her monetary awards.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge graduated from Sichuan Police College in 2012 after which she sent her resume to provinces other than Yunnan since she had no interest in going home. Although her major was in becoming a police officer, she did not do any police work after graduation. She instead secured a marketing role at an Internet startup company, where she worked for over four years, and worked various jobs afterwards. Her goal was to buy a house in Chongqing and move her parents into the house to be with her. Her plans changed after her father had a heart attack in 2016 and needed to undergo an operation to insert a coronary stent. He would have to continue taking medicine for the rest of his life after the operation and could no longer do arduous work. After she learned that her father had become ill, Dianxi Xiaoge realized that she had too few memories of her parents. Keen to not have any regrets and treasuring being with family the most above all else, Dianxi Xiaoge returned in 2016 to Shidian County to the mountain she had left to be with her family after having been away for eight years for schooling and work.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Once home, she was initially perplexed about what to do to make a living as she had observed her parents' struggles. She started selling local specialties online such as fruits harvested from the mountain and Yunnan brown sugar. Dianxi Xiaoge received ridicule for her efforts and found that sales were weak even after she posted ads on the Moments feature of WeChat. Seeking a way to increase sales, she capitalized on the rise in 2016 of short videos and began posting her own. She was particularly influenced by people who had achieved success on the Internet, including Papi Jiang, a comedian. Dianxi Xiaoge had always enjoyed cooking so to start from a domain she was comfortable in, she began making cooking videos. She started uploading her videos to Xigua Video in 2016 and at the time had no prior filming and editing experience. The first video she uploaded was filmed using her cell phone and depicted her running into a bamboo forest. She showed viewers how to hack bamboo and find bamboo worms which she later fried. The 25 viewer comments Dianxi Xiaoge received were critical about her "eating bugs", and she encountered difficulties at the beginning of her video-making career. She used all of her savings and went into credit card debt to purchase materials to make videos. Her initial work resulted in low viewership and no profits, causing her to be disheartened when comparing herself to other creators. According to "The Paper", whereas Dianxi Xiaoge put a lot of effort into making high-quality videos, the other creators focused on producing a large number of videos of lesser quality such as harvesting and then cooking sweet potatoes. She persisted in making videos, emphasizing the peaceful, pastoral way of living. In one year, she had grown her subscriber base to 100,000.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge signed an agreement in 2017 to be represented by the multi-channel network Papitube established by Papi Jiang. Within two to three years, she became a full-time video creator after viewership rose and she was making substantial profit, while those other creators she had envied were no longer making videos. She had not initially planned to have non-Chinese audiences view her videos. Dianxi Xiaoge started her YouTube channel in 2018 and within three months had grown her subscriber base from zero to onemillion in November 2018. Her video about her making hamburgers for her grandparents went viral in China and outside the country which brought her a lot of attention. Having lived their entire lives in the village, her grandparents had not previously eaten hamburgers which they viewed as a Western dish. After initially using the camera from her phone to film videos, she switched to using a Sony α7 camera. She spends her time in the village on most days rather than going into the town. Her day is occupied with filming and editing videos of her cooking.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Some overseas Chinese students in 2018 provided translated captions in numerous languages for Dianxi Xiaoge's videos which significantly grew her fanbase. She gave a talk at the University of Oxford after receiving an invitation from Baidu's Baijiahao to speak to Chinese students in December 2019 about her life in Yunnan. The "Southern Metropolis Daily" said in 2019 that Dianxi Xiaoge, along with Ms Yeah and Li Ziqi, were the only Chinese Internet celebrities who "have really successfully become popular overseas and made good money". Dianxi Xiaoge received three awards at Weibo's 2019 Weibo Celebrity Festival: "Annual Video Celebrity" (), "Promoted Celebrity" (), and "Top Ten Influential Food V" (). The Yunnan Youth Entrepreneurship Association () named her a public welfare ambassador in 2019. On January 8, 2020, the Baoshan Culture and Tourism Bureau () installed Dianxi Xiaoge as a "Baoshan Culture and Tourism Promotion Ambassador". The "South China Morning Post" listed her as among "9 Chinese women who made a big difference in 2020", overcoming the impediments the COVID-19 pandemic had wreaked on women. In 2021, Dianxi Xiaoge was promoted as the Baoshan Cultural Tourism Promotion Ambassador by the local government.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge uploads videos weekly on Wednesdays. She makes videos of food from Yunnan using produce that she planted, harvested, and raised herself. Her videos depict the entire process of how food gets from the fields to her dinner table. Some of her videos depict Yunnan dishes she has previously consumed but not cooked. Shadowing and relying on instructions from village elders, she made those dishes for the first time for her videos.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: She goes up the mountains in the early spring to pick wild fruits and vegetables. She preserves meat and cooks rice noodles. During the Dragon Boat Festival, she picked rice dumpling leaves with her family to make zongzi. In the summer, she picked lotus roots to make lotus root powder. A 10-minute long video that seems leisurely can take an entire day or a week of preparation followed by over ten hours of filming. At the end of her videos, she shows her family having a dinner together of the food she has cooked. The scenes frequently are filmed from 6am or 7:00am until between 11:00pm and 2:00am. Scenes take a variable amount of time to film since the wood-fired stove takes an inconstant amount of time, and she tries remaking a dish if it does not appear correctly done. In 2020, after she finished filming their reunion dinner, they had their actual reunion dinner at 5:00am.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge features her dog, a male Alaskan Malamute named Dawang (), in numerous videos. The inspiration to have Dawang had its roots in her seeing a large dog of the same breed when she was traveling home from her job in Chongqing. That dog was being walked by a girl which created feelings of envy in Dianxi Xiaoge who told her sister her goal of having a large dog too. Within a year of her return to Yunnan, Dianxi Xiaoge's sister bought her Dawang. She initially did not include Dawang in her videos as she was worried that viewers would ask why she had a foreign dog when living in a rural village. After taking care of him for seven months, she was filming their communal dinner at a late time and Dawang refused to leave. That marked his first time appearing in a video. Wagging his tail, Dawang is shown following Dianxi Xiaoge when she heads to the mountains or back down and when she enters the kitchen or eats a meal with her family. Dawang is seen eating banana leafs, rolling about in the mud, and running in the countryside. Her younger brother, Xiaohao, also appears in numerous clips such as doing household chores with her early in the day. He goes to boarding school on weekdays and returns home on weekends. Dianxi Xiaoge puts in Xiaohao's schoolbag snacks such as tamarind, maltose, and Chinese chestnuts. She shares humorous scenes with her family that her Chinese viewers deeply relate to such as her grandmother chastising Dianxi Xiaoge for starting to diet. She introduces dishes special to Yunnan such as spicy sauce, cooked rice, tamarind cake, and Yunnan ham cake. Some of her dishes such as "hairy tofu" are unfamiliar to people in China who live outside Yunnan. In her videos, she has gone mushroom hunting, collected honey from flowers, and picked winter melon. She homebrews sweet rice wine. Her most viewed video "Have you tried Lard-sealed Pork, it's juicy but not greasy" (), which received over 28million views by the end of 2019, is about making a Chinese New Year dish. Similar to her other productions, the video closes with her family sharing a meal of the lard-sealed pork.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: In many of her videos, Dianxi Xiaoge is able to make multiple types of dishes using a highlighted ingredient. She accomplished this using tropical fruit, beef balls, potatoes, and Yunnan-style cheese. She makes Yunnan-style mooncakes that have a honey-sweetened ham filling. Dianxi Xiaoge uploaded a video around November 2020 of her consuming a lettuce wrap containing chili pepper, garlic, and meat. Korean commenters shared unfavorable feedback since she uploaded the video with "I'll continue to share my life and Yunnan-styled food in my uploads" in the description, but the commenters thought her dish was made in the same way as ssam, a Korean food.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: She does not have professional camera operators or film editors. She and her sister comprise her film crew. She did not hire anyone as it is difficult for people in the creative industry to make a living in the secluded Baoshan which is unable to keep them from leaving. In 2020, she had roughly 16 million subscribers on all her platforms, and her videos each were receiving roughly 20 million views. At the beginning of 2020, she had 3.28 million Sina Weibo subscribers, 3.88 million YouTube subscribers, 1.43 million Douyin subscribers, and 540,000 Facebook followers. Her Weibo was among the 10 most subscribed independent accounts that year.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge showcases the local style of the ethnic minority in Yunnan. She is a conveyor of the human spirit, filming a peaceful and simple life in the country that her viewers crave but are unable to experience themselves, "The Paper" found. Jed Gregorio of the "Philippine Daily Inquirer" found Dianxi Xiaoge's videos to be "immaculately produced, with a minimalist aesthetic". He wrote, "this aspect of her videos is mesmerizing; the ASMR sounds of fresh, crunchy vegetables tumbling, the gentle splashing of clear water, and the rustling of leaves in the perceptibly cool mountain breeze do wonders to my serotonin levels. Someone should put this in a pill." Mashable's Amanda Yeo said her "gorgeous videos feel more cosy and rough, like a warm friend inviting you into her home to share a home-cooked meal". Her videos "show the pastoral style of nature, the poetic and artistic charm of harmonious coexistence between man and nature", according to Voice of America. They give urban dwellers a momentary refuge from bustling cities. "People's Daily" praised Dianxi Xiaoge, "People were amazed at the skillful hands that made the life in the mountain village so poetic and picturesque." The newspaper said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, urban dwellers who have watched her videos feel "an escape from the reality of life". KQED Inc.'s Ruth Gebreyesus agreed, calling her videos "as much a visual delight as they are a sonic feast" and said that "one episode after another, her bucolic Yunnan life is a respite from the realities of quarantine and city life". Clarissa Wei of South China Morning Post Publishers's Goldthread found that since Baoshan, the city where Dianxi Xiaofei lives, is "in a less touristy part of the province", it "lend[s] her videos an additional air of authenticity". Writing for Xinhua News Agency, Julia Pierrepont III said that "Unlike most of the other rural bloggers who rely on a more authentic, amateur style of camerawork" Dianxi Xiaoge "specializes in highly-stylized, artistic and professional cinematography".


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Dianxi Xiaoge said that there were three broad categories for short videos. In the first, viewers learn how to do something such as cook a dish. In the second, viewers are made to laugh. In the third, viewers learn about the fine cuisine of a particular culture and the social customs and local conditions of a place. Her initial videos were in the first category of teaching people to cook a dish but the style was unsuccessful since Yunnan's unique ingredients made it challenging for viewers to follow her videos to make the same dish. She could make instructional cooking videos of dishes that did not need Yunnan's unique ingredients but that would make her indistinguishable from other video makers. Dianxi Xiaoge said her videos belonged to the third category as with numerous food ingredients and over 50 ethnic groups, Yunnan has much for her to examine and show. She did not include subtitles in her videos since her aim was not to teach people to cook dishes but to show her village's way of living. Dianxi Xiaoge speaks with her family in the Baoshan dialect of Southwestern Mandarin which leads to some Weibo commenters saying they are unable to comprehend what she is saying. In her videos, she generally does not say much.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Xinhua News Agency and the 2021 book "The Future of Global Retail" authored by Winter Nie et al. compared Dianxi Xiaoge to fellow food vlogger Li Ziqi. The two women both have numerous followers who are not from China and have an identical business model. Like Li, Dianxi Xiaoge uploads videos to YouTube and sells the cooking merchandise depicted in her videos on the online shopping platform Taobao. Whereas Dianxi Xiaoge has candid videos in which people in the backdrop do not seem to know they are part of the video, Li's videos look "dreamlike" and seem to be shot almost too perfectly". For making dishes, Dianxi Xiaoge employs a steel bucket, something that other families in the country would use, whereas Li has an "'antique wood' bucket" that could be from a house furnished by an interior designer. Dianxi Xiaoge comes across as "the girl next door, warm, chatty and casual", who makes "simple and interesting dishes" sourced from her village's crops. Nie said that "both portray a serene pastoral life with wonderful food and enticing dishes" and "are successful entrepreneurs that leverage our dreams of living simply but also fulfil our desires for quality produce and sensory experiences".


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Compared to other rural creators in China, Dianxi Xiageo's videos do not have as much speaking and have "more refined countryside images" as her videos are skillfully filmed and edited. Writing for Mashable, Amanda Yeo called her "basically a kindhearted Disney heroine made real — you get the impression that she lives in happy harmony with her family, her local community, and nature all at once". A "Southern Metropolis Daily" reviewer found that her videos over the years had improved in having clearer audio and more apt background music. The scholar Han Li found that after Dianxi Xiaoge partnered with the MCN Papitube, she has capably demonstrated her "flight from the city". Likening Dianxi Xiaoge to the Chinese documentary television series "A Bite of China", Xinhua said Dianxi Xiaoge could be called "A Bite of Yunnan" in introducing Yunnan cuisine to the world. Kaila Yu of "Paper" called Dianxi Xiaoge a cottagecore producer who embodies "the traditional family unit", a common theme of Chinese creators in the genre. Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor Jennifer deWinter said of Dianxi Xiaoge's videos, "It's a complete brain break: pleasant sounds and pleasant visuals and a kind of Chinese cottagecore aesthetic." Li concluded that the high viewership of her videos is owing to the bucolic rural way of living, the peaceful imagery, and the uncommon dishes and ways of cooking in Yunnan. She goes through a rose garden at the beginning of a rose dishes video. The weather is entreating and similar to spring, and the video allows the audience to see multiple picturesque rural scenes. Accentuating the striking imagery, "the rhythmically cut shots range between wide angles of the entire garden and close-ups of individual flowers". In a second video, she makes "tripewrapped pork" in which she shows how to cure and make pork tripe through multiple Yunnan methods. She includes cutaways to show that time has passed since two months are needed to preserve the pork tripe. The cutaways depict the townspeople living in a bucolic, relaxed manner. Dianxi Xiaoge routinely puts on a simple shirt and a cone-shaped hat made of bamboo which makes her come across as "simple, unadorned and accessible". She purposefully distinguishes herself from the latest ways of cooking from the city using her "rudimentary (if not primitive) countryside" cooking tools. With her family members and occasionally people from her village, she eats a communal meal in their home's courtyard, conversing in the region's dialect. The scene gives the audience "a most intimate, homey, and harmonious atmosphere", Li said.


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Whereas people in the city are rushed and strained and thus governed by commercialism, the village dwellers are the last bastions of anti-consumerism. Voice of America's Yu Zhou said that her videos are examples of anti-consumerism and anti-commercialism since she creates everything by hand and at home. In one March 22, 2019, video, Dianxi Xiaoge cooked five dishes using roses and revealed that she was promoting rose cakes branded with her name that would be sold for the first time on her e-commerce website. To accentuate that the food will be delivered quickly and newly produced, the packaging has photos of an airplane and control tower right next to a bird-and-flower painting. According to Yu, "this is not self-betrayal" because to attract attention to Yunnan's local style, it is essential to use modern technology like airplanes and quick delivery. Dianxi Xiaoge created a video of how she put together a tofu skin snack. On her e-commerce website, she debuted her branded tofu skin delicacy within two days of her publishing the video. She highlighted in her video that large factories were unable to reproduce her technique to make the delicacy since she went through meticulous steps of procuring natural soybean and water as the tofu skin's sole ingredients. Stating that the delicacy allows consumers to "taste the humanity of Yunnan", she stated that this justifies the product's being more expensive. Dianxi Xiaoge's "homemade" and "organic" branded goods draw in consumers who want something that is "unique" and "genuine". Li observed that "the very gesture of anticommercialization can only be realized through the commodification of her digital productions" and Dianxi Xiaoge and the consumers "have no choice but to resort to consumerism for anticommercializing".


title: Dianxi Xiaoge

text: Chinese culture is a theme in Dianxi Xiaoge's videos. Lugging a suitcase, her brother, Chun, returns from the city to their family in a Chinese New Year video. The poignant scene invokes the Chinese concept of "Xiangchou" () in which people are nostalgic of their hometown. The video shows a joyful family sharing an abundant meal and enjoying fireworks. Her videos are an example of the rural living segment of the Wanghong economy.


title: Malini Sharma

text: Malini Daman Sharma (born 5 January 1974) is an Indian model and actress, who has worked in videos like "Sawan Mein Lag Gayi Aag", "Kya Soorat Hai", "Ranjhar", "Kitni Akeli" and movies like "Raaz". For her role in the latter, she received the 2003 Zee Cine Award for Best Female Debut.


title: Malini Sharma

text: She was married to model Priyanshu Chatterjee but they divorced in 2001. Malini Sharma decided to quit the showbiz industry after her debut film Raaz. She signed for Gunaah (2002 film), this time as the lead opposite Dino Morea. The unit was in for a royal scare when two days before shooting, Sharma backed out. She also worked as art director for the two films named ‘Thoda Pyar Thoda Magic’ and ‘ Just Married’.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: Aussie Gold Hunters is an Australian factual television show which follows crews of gold prospectors in Australia. The series is produced by Electric Pictures and began on the Discovery Channel on 15 September 2016. The series has been a ratings success and gone on to air in 125 countries including the United Kingdom.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: In August 2022 the series was renewed for a eighth and ninth season, with season eight to premiere in 2023. Season seven concluded on 13 October 2022.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: The series follows gold miners in various locations of Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland as they strive to reach their individually set season target (measured in troy ounces of gold). They use a variety of mining techniques including use of metal detectors of surface or excavated soil for gold nuggets; and sluicing, dry blowing or heap leaching for gold particles.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: The first season of eight episodes produced by Electric Pictures premiered on 15 September 2016. In March 2017 the series was renewed for a 10 episode second season, which premiered on 6 July 2017. In March 2018 the series was renewed for a 13 episode third season, which premiered on 31 May 2018. In September 2018 the series was renewed for a 13 episode fourth season, which premiered on 2 May 2019.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: In October 2019 the series was renewed for 40 episodes across two seasons. The 20 episode fifth season premiered on 30 April 2020. Following the conclusion of the fifth season, three specials featuring highlights from the five seasons premiered on 17 September 2020. The sixth season initially premiered in the United Kingdom on Discovery+ on 22 February 2021 before premiering in Australia on Discovery Channel on 29 April 2021. In April 2021 it was announced the series had been renewed for a seventh and eighth season. The seventh season premiered on 2 June 2022. In August 2022, Warner Bros Discovery UK announced the series was renewed for an additional two series, with the eighth and ninth seasons to premiere in 2023 and 2024 respectively. The eighth season will see the return of six teams and the addition of two new teams.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: Not all the miners featured on the show are Australian. Lindsay Ironside was imported from Canada by Vernon Strange. Henri Chassaing came from Switzerland.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: In 2020, season four of "" featured gold mining in the states of Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia. The season saw former Aussie Gold Hunters' cast member Tyler Mahoney in a main role. There were also guest appearances by former cast members Jake Larsen demonstrating heap leaching, as well as Ted and Lecky Mahoney teaching the process of pegging land leases.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: The series has been a domestic and international ratings success. The series has been the #1 factual program on Foxtel for four consecutive years from 2017 to 2020. In addition, in the United Kingdom where the series is broadcast on Quest "Aussie Gold Hunters" is consistently the channel's top rating show of the week as well as frequently ranking in the top 10 of non-public broadcasting shows.


title: Aussie Gold Hunters

text: As of May 2020, "Aussie Gold Hunters" has been broadcast in 125 countries with an estimated reach of 40 million viewers.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Beeching cuts (also Beeching Axe) was a plan to increase the efficiency of the nationalised railway system in Great Britain. The plan was outlined in two reports: The Reshaping of British Railways (1963) and The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (1965), written by Richard Beeching and published by the British Railways Board.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The first report identified 2,363 stations and of railway line for closure, amounting to 55% of stations, 30% of route miles, and 67,700 British Rail positions, with an objective of stemming the large losses being incurred during a period of increasing competition from road transport and reducing the rail subsidies necessary to keep the network running. The second report identified a small number of major routes for significant investment. The 1963 report also recommended some less well-publicised changes, including a switch to the now-standard practice of containerisation for rail freight, and the replacement of some services with integrated bus services linked to the remaining railheads.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Protests resulted in the saving of some stations and lines, but the majority were closed as planned; Beeching's name remains associated with the mass closure of railways and the loss of many local services in the period that followed. A few of these routes have since reopened; some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes; others have since been built over, have reverted to farmland, or remain derelict with no plans for any reuse or redevelopment. Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines.


title: Beeching cuts

text: After growing rapidly in the 19th century during the Railway Mania, the British railway system reached its height in the years immediately before the First World War, with a network of . The network had opened up major travel opportunities for the entire country that had never been available before. However, lines were sometimes uneconomic, and several Members of Parliament had direct involvement with railways, creating a conflict of interest. In 1909, Winston Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, argued that the country's railways did not have a future without rationalisation and amalgamation. By 1914, the railways had some significant problems, such as a lack of standard rolling stock and too many duplicated routes.


title: Beeching cuts

text: After the war, the railways faced increasing competition from a growing road transport network, which had increased to 8 million tons of freight annually by 1921. Around of passenger railways closed between 1923 and 1939. These closures included the Charnwood Forest Railway, closed to passengers in 1931, and the Harborne Line in Birmingham, closed to passengers in 1934. Some lines had never been profitable and were not subject to loss of traffic in that period. The railways were busy during the Second World War, but at the end of the war they were in a poor state of repair and in 1948 nationalised as British Railways.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Branch Lines Committee of the British Transport Commission (BTC) was formed in 1949 with a brief to close the least-used branch lines. This resulted in the loss (or conversion to freight-only operation) of some of railway between 1948 and 1962; the most significant closure was that of the former Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway in 1959. In opposition to these cuts, the period also witnessed the beginning of a protest movement led by the Railway Development Association, whose most famous member was the poet John Betjeman. They went on to be a significant force resisting the Beeching proposals.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Economic recovery and the end of petrol rationing led to rapid growth in car ownership and use. Vehicle mileage grew at a sustained annual rate of 10% between 1948 and 1964. In contrast, railway traffic remained steady during the 1950s but the economic situation steadily deteriorated, with labour costs rising faster than income and fares and freight charges repeatedly frozen by the government to try to control inflation. By 1955, the railways' share of the transport market had dropped from 16% to 5%.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The 1955 Modernisation Plan promised expenditure of over £1,240 million; steam locomotives would be replaced with diesel and electric locomotives, traffic levels would increase, and the system was predicted to be back in profit by 1962. Instead losses mounted, from £68 million in 1960 to £87 million in 1961, and £104 million in 1962 (£ billion in terms). The BTC could no longer pay the interest on its loans.


title: Beeching cuts

text: By 1961, losses were running at £300,000 a day; since nationalisation in 1948, of line had been closed, railway staff numbers had fallen 26% from 648,000 to 474,000 and the number of railway wagons had fallen 29% from 1,200,000 to 848,000.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The first Beeching report, titled "The Reshaping of British Railways", was published on 27 March 1963.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The report starts by quoting the brief provided by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, from 1960: "First, the industry must be of a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects. In particular, the railway system must be modelled to meet current needs, and the modernisation plan must be adapted to this new shape" and with the premise that the railways should be run as a profitable business.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Beeching first studied traffic flows on all lines to identify "the good, the bad, and the indifferent". His analysis showed that the least-used 1,762 stations had annual passenger receipts of less than £2,500 each (£ as of ), that over half of the 4,300 stations open to passengers in 1960 had receipts of less than £10,000, that the least-used 50% of stations contributed only 2% of passenger revenue, and that one third of route miles carried just 1% of passengers.


title: Beeching cuts

text: By way of example, he noted that the line from Thetford to Swaffham carried five trains each weekday in each direction, carrying an average of nine passengers with only 10% of the costs of operating the line covered by fares; another example was the Gleneagles-Crieff-Comrie line which had ten trains a day and five passengers on average, earning only 25% of costs. Finally there was the service from Hull to York via Beverley (using part of the Yorkshire Coast Line, which was not closed, and the York to Beverley Line, which was). The line covered 80% of its operating costs, but he calculated that it could be closed because there was an alternative, but less direct, route.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Out of of railway, Beeching recommended that —mostly rural and industrial lines—should be closed entirely, and that some of the remaining lines should be kept open only for freight. A total of 2,363 stations were to close, including 435 already under threat, both on lines that were to close and on lines that were to remain open.


title: Beeching cuts

text: He recommended that freight services should mainly be for bulk commodities such as minerals and coal, and that the freight system make use of new containerised handling systems rather than less efficient and slower wagon-load traffic. The latter recommendation would prove prescient with the rise of intermodal freight transport in the following decades.


title: Beeching cuts

text: On 16 February 1965, Beeching introduced the second stage of his reorganisation of the railways. In his report, "The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes", he set out his conclusion that of the of trunk railway only "should be selected for future development" and invested in.


title: Beeching cuts

text: This policy would result in traffic being routed along nine lines. Traffic to Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland would be routed through the West Coast Main Line to Carlisle and Glasgow; traffic to the north-east of England would be concentrated through the East Coast Main Line, which was to be closed north of Newcastle; and traffic to Wales and the West Country would go on the Great Western Main Line to Swansea and Plymouth.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Underpinning Beeching's proposals was his belief that there was too much duplication in the railway network: "The real choice is between an excessive and increasingly un-economic system, with a corresponding tendency for the railways as a whole to fall into disrepute and decay, or the selective development and intensive utilisation of a more limited trunk route system". Of the of trunk route, involves a choice between two routes, a choice of three, and over a further a choice of four. In Scotland, only the Central Belt routes and the lines via Fife and Perth to Aberdeen were selected for development, and none were selected in Wales, apart from the Great Western Main Line as far as Swansea.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Beeching's secondment from ICI ended early in June 1965 after Harold Wilson's attempt to get him to produce a transport plan failed. It is a matter of debate whether Beeching left by mutual arrangement with the government or if he was sacked. Frank Cousins, the Labour Minister of Technology, told the House of Commons in November 1965 that Beeching had been dismissed by Tom Fraser, then Minister of Transport. Beeching denied this, pointing out that he had returned early to ICI as he would not have had enough time to undertake an in-depth transport study before the formal end of his secondment.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The first report was accepted by the Labour government of the day, but many of the closures it recommended sparked protests from communities that would lose their trains, many of which (especially rural communities) had no other public transport. The government argued that many services could be provided more effectively by buses.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Line closures, which had been running at about 150–300 miles per year between 1950 and 1961, peaked at in 1964 and had come to a virtual halt by the early 1970s. One of the last major closures was the 98-mile long (158 km) Waverley Route between Carlisle, Hawick and Edinburgh in 1969; the reopening of a 35-mile section of this line was approved in 2006 and passenger services resumed in September 2015.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Holiday and coastal resorts were severely affected by the closures. The report recommended closing almost all services along the coasts of north Devon, Cornwall and East Anglia aside from Norwich to Great Yarmouth. All services on the Isle of Wight were recommended for closure, as were all branch lines in the Lake District. One of the most significant closures was the Great Central Main Line from London Marylebone to Leicester and Sheffield.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Beeching Report was intended to be the first stage in the rail network's contraction. As a result, some lines it had not recommended for closure were subsequently shut down, such as the Woodhead Line between Manchester and Sheffield in 1981, after the freight traffic (mostly coal) on which it had relied declined. Many surviving lines were rationalised, including reduction to single track and consolidation of signals. Most of the Oxford–Cambridge Varsity Line closed despite its strategic location serving Milton Keynes, Britain's largest "new town". Kinross-shire, and Fife especially, suffered closures not included in the Report, including the main line from Edinburgh to Perth. King's Lynn was to have remained at the centre of routes towards Norwich, Hunstanton and Wisbech, all of which closed.


title: Beeching cuts

text: With a few exceptions, after the early 1970s proposals to close other lines were met with vociferous public opposition and were quietly shelved. This opposition likely stemmed from the public experience of the many line closures during the cuts in the mid- and late 1960s.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Beeching's reports made no recommendations about the handling of land after closures. British Rail operated a policy of disposing of land that was surplus to requirements. Many bridges, cuttings and embankments have been removed and the land sold for development. Closed station buildings on remaining lines have often been demolished or sold for housing or other purposes. Increasing pressure on land use meant that protection of closed trackbeds, as in other countries (such as the US Rail Bank scheme, which holds former railway land for possible future use) was not seen to be practical. Many redundant structures from closed lines remain, such as bridges over other lines and drainage culverts. They often require maintenance as part of the rail infrastructure while providing no benefit. Critics of Beeching argue that the lack of recommendations on the handling of closed railway property demonstrates that the report was short-sighted. On the other hand, retaining a railway on these routes, which would obviously have increased maintenance costs, might not have earned enough to justify that greater cost. As demand for rail has grown since the 1990s, the failure to preserve the routes of closed lines (such as the one between Bedford and Cambridge, which was closed despite Beeching recommending its retention) has been criticised.


title: Beeching cuts

text: By 1968, the railways had not been restored to profitability and Beeching's approach appeared to many to have failed. It has been suggested that by closing almost a third of the network Beeching achieved a saving of just £30 million, whilst overall losses were running in excess of £100 million per year. However, the precise savings from closures are impossible to calculate. The Ministry of Transport subsequently estimated that rail operating costs had been cut by over £100 million in the wake of the Beeching Report but that much of this had been swallowed up by increased wages. Some of the branches closed acted as feeders to the main lines, and that feeder traffic was lost when the branches closed; the financial significance of this is debatable, for over 90% of the railways' 1960 traffic was carried on lines which remained open ten years later.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Whatever the figures, towards the end of the 1960s it became increasingly clear that rail closures were not bringing the rail system out of deficit and were unlikely ever to do so. Transport minister Barbara Castle decided that some rail services, which could not pay their way but had a valuable social role, should be subsidised. Legislation allowing this was introduced in the Transport Act 1968 (section 39 made provision for a subsidy to be paid by the Treasury for a three-year period) but this was later repealed in the Railways Act 1974. Whether these subsidies affected the size of the network is questionable: the criteria for reprieving loss-making lines had not altered, merely the way their costs appeared in the railways accounts—previously their contribution to the railways' overall loss was hidden in the total deficit.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The "bustitution" policy that replaced rail services with buses also failed. In many cases the replacement bus services were slower and less convenient than the trains they were meant to replace, and so were unpopular. Replacement bus services were often run between the (now disused) station sites (some of which were some distance from the population centres they served), thus losing any potential advantage over the closed rail service. Most replacement bus services lasted less than two years before they were removed due to a lack of patronage, leaving large parts of the country with no public transport.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The assumption at the time was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Many of the closed lines had run at only a small deficit. Some lines such as the Sunderland-to-West Hartlepool line cost only £291 per mile to operate. Closures of such small-scale loss-making lines made little difference to the overall deficit.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Possible changes to light railway-type operations were attacked by Beeching, who wrote: "The third suggestion, that rail buses should be substituted for trains, ignores the high cost of providing the route itself, and also ignores the fact that rail buses are more expensive vehicles than road buses." There is little in the Beeching report recommending general economies (in administration costs, working practices and so on). For example, a number of the stations that were closed were fully staffed 18 hours a day, on lines controlled by multiple Victorian era signalboxes (again fully staffed, often throughout the day). Operating costs could have been reduced by reducing staff and removing redundant services on these lines while keeping the stations open. This has since been successfully achieved by British Rail and its successors on lesser-used lines that survived the cuts, such as the East Suffolk Line from Ipswich to Lowestoft, which survives as a "basic railway".


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Marshlink line between and , threatened with closure in the Beeching Report, is now seen as important due to the opening of the Channel Tunnel and High Speed 1. Traffic on the single-track Golden Valley Line between Kemble and Swindon and the Cotswold Line between Oxford and Worcester has increased significantly, and double track has now been reinstated on the Golden Valley Line, partly to facilitate a diversionary route during electrification and other works on the Severn tunnel line.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Conservatives increased their Commons majority in the general election of 8 October 1959, their first with Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister. Ernest Marples, previously Postmaster General, was made Transport Minister two weeks later in a cabinet reshuffle; Macmillan noted that the Northern working-class boy who had won a scholarship to a grammar school was one of only two "self-made men" in his cabinet.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Marples had a background with a successful road construction company. When opening the M1 motorway, he said: "This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold scientific age in which we live. It is a powerful weapon to add to our transport system." His association with the high-profile construction company Marples Ridgway became a matter of concern to both the public and politicians. As is customary, he resigned as a director of the company in 1951 on becoming a junior minister, but he only disposed of his shares in the company in 1960 after the company won a contract to build the Hammersmith Flyover, when questions were asked both in the media and also in the Commons on 28 January 1960; he made a statement to the House later that day confirming that the sale of shares was in hand and would be completed "very soon", noting that as part of the agreement he could be required to buy the shares from the purchaser at the original price after he ceased to hold office, if so desired by the purchaser. While it was reported that he sold the shares to his wife, she denied in a newspaper interview, that any transaction had taken place. It was reported that he had transferred his shares into an Overseas Trust. In July 1964, Marples Ridgway and Partners Limited were awarded a £4.1 million contract for the "Hendon Urban Motorway" extension of the M1, in the same year that the company was taken over by the Bath and Portland Group. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing on anyone's part in this or any of the other contracts awarded to the company during his term of office, it did however lead to a sense of unease, not least within the railway sector.


title: Beeching cuts

text: In April 1960, Sir Ivan Stedeford established an advisory group known as the Stedeford Committee at the request of Harold Macmillan to report on the state of the British Transport Commission and to make recommendations. Sir Ewart Smith, a retired former Chief Engineer at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), was asked by Ernest Marples to become a member of an advisory group; Smith declined but recommended Richard Beeching in his place, a suggestion that Marples accepted. Beeching, with a PhD in Physics, had been appointed to the main board of ICI at the age of 43. The board consisted of senior figures in British businesses, and none of the board had previous knowledge or experience of the railway industry. Stedeford and Beeching clashed on a number of issues, but the future size of the railway system was not one of them. For all the suspicion it aroused, the committee had little to say on this and the government was already convinced of the need to reduce the size of the rail network. In spite of questions being asked in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was not published at the time. In December 1960 questions were asked in the Lords about this "secret" and "under-the-counter" study group. It was later suggested that Stedeford had recommended that the government should set up another body "to consider the size and pattern of the railway system required to meet current and foreseeable needs, in the light of developments and trends in other forms of transport ... and other relevant considerations".


title: Beeching cuts

text: Marples then appointed Beeching as Chairman of the British Transport Commission in March 1961. He would receive the same yearly salary that he was earning at ICI, the controversial sum of £24,000 (£,000 in terms), £10,000 more than Sir Brian Robertson, the previous chairman of the BTC, £14,000 more than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and two-and-a-half times higher than the salary of any head of a nationalised industry at the time. At that time the government was seeking outside talent to sort out the huge problems of the railway network, and he was confident that he could make the railways pay for themselves, but his salary, at 35 times that of many railway workers, has been described as a "political disaster".


title: Beeching cuts

text: The Transport Act 1962 dissolved the British Transport Commission (BTC), which had overseen the railways, canals and road freight transport and established the British Railways Board, which took over on 1 January 1963, with Dr Beeching as its first chairman. The Act put in place measures that simplified the process of closing railways by removing the need for the pros and cons of each case to be heard in detail. It was described as the "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854".


title: Beeching cuts

text: The general election in October 1964 returned a Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson after 13 years of Conservative government. During the election campaign Labour had promised to halt rail closures if elected, but it quickly backtracked, and later oversaw some of the most controversial closures. Tom Fraser was appointed Minister of Transport, but was replaced by Barbara Castle in December 1965. Castle published a map in 1967, "Network for Development", showing the railway system "stabilised" at around 11,000 route miles (17,700 km).


title: Beeching cuts

text: Section 39 of the Transport Act 1968 made provision for grants to be paid in relation to loss-making lines and services, but many of the services and railway lines that would have qualified had already been closed. A number of branch lines and local services were saved by this legislation.


title: Beeching cuts

text: After 1970, when the Conservatives were returned to power, serious thought was given to a further programme of closures, but this proved politically impossible. In 1982, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, Sir David Serpell, a civil servant who had worked with Beeching, compiled the Serpell Report which said that a profitable railway could be achieved only by closing much of what remained. The report's infamous "Option A" proposed greatly increasing fares and reducing the rail network to a mere , leaving only of railway in Wales (a section of the South Wales Main Line from the Severn Tunnel to ) and none in Somerset, Devon or Cornwall. The Midland Main Line was planned to close, leaving Leicester and Derby without a rail link, while the East Coast Main Line, part of the key London/Edinburgh link, was intended to be cut north of Newcastle. The report was published on 20 January 1983 and received an immediate backlash from the media. It was quietly shelved in the run up to the 1983 election.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Ian Hislop comments that history has been somewhat unkind to "Britain's most hated civil servant", by forgetting that Beeching proposed a much better bus service that ministers never delivered, and that in some ways he was used to do their "dirty work for them". Hislop describes him as "a technocrat [who] wasn't open to argument to romantic notions of rural England or the warp and weft of the train in our national identity. He didn't buy any of that. He went for a straightforward profit and loss approach and some claim we are still reeling from that today". Beeching was unrepentant about his role in the closures: "I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping".


title: Beeching cuts

text: On 7 June 2019, former Minister for Transport Andrew Adonis delivered a speech on "Reversing Beeching".


title: Beeching cuts

text: Since the Beeching cuts, road traffic levels have grown significantly and since privatisation in the mid-1990s there have been record levels of passengers on the railways owing to a preference to living in smaller towns and rural areas, and in turn commuting longer distances (although the impact of this is disputed). A few of the railway closures have been reversed. However, despite the considerable increase in railway journeys since the mid-1990s, rail transport's share of the total passenger transport market remains below that of the early 1960s, with road overwhelmingly the dominant mode: rail's market share was 13% in 1961, 6% in 1991 and 2001, and 10% in 2014.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Some closed stations have reopened, and passenger services have been restored on a few lines where they had been removed.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Some lines closed under the Beeching cuts have reopened as private heritage railways. Some examples are East Lancs Railway, Mid Hants Railway, North Yorkshire Moors Railway, North Norfolk Railway and West Somerset Railway.


title: Beeching cuts

text: Flanders and Swann, writers and performers of satirical songs, wrote a lament for lines closed by the Beeching cuts entitled "Slow Train" (1963). Michael Williams' book "On the slow train" takes its name from the Flanders and Swann song. It celebrates 12 of the most beautiful and historic journeys in Britain, some of which were saved from the Beeching cuts. It perpetuated the myth that the Beeching cuts were concerned solely with sleepy rural branch lines, but they actually also concerned well-used "industrial" and commuter lines.


title: Beeching cuts

text: The BBC TV comedy series "Oh, Doctor Beeching!", broadcast from 1995 to 1997, was set at a small fictional branch-line railway station threatened with closure under the Beeching cuts.


title: Beeching cuts

text: In the satirical magazine "Private Eye", the "Signal Failures" column on railway issues is written under the pseudonym "Dr. B. Ching".


title: Beeching cuts

text: The lyrics of the I Like Trains song "The Beeching Report" are a criticism of Dr Beeching and the Beeching cuts.


title: Beeching cuts

text: After this period, "residual" Beeching closures took place: Bridport to Maiden Newton (in 1975), Alston to Haltwhistle (in 1976), Woodside to Selsdon (in 1983).


title: Petra (band)

text: Petra is an American music group regarded as a pioneer of the Christian rock and contemporary Christian music genres and was, for many years, regarded as the "world's most popular Christian rock band". Formed in 1972, the band took its name from the Greek word for "rock". Though it disbanded formally in 2006, incarnations have played reunion shows in the years since and released two albums in November 2010, and in November 2017. In 2013, it reformed with a new drummer, Cristian Borneo, and recorded a new song titled "Holy is Your Name", before going back on tour.


title: Petra (band)

text: With a style initially similar to The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Petra's sound evolved into a more energetic, driving rock sound in the early 1980s akin to Foreigner, Styx and Journey. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Petra was one of the world's most popular Christian rock bands, with each of its albums during that period selling hundreds of thousands of copies while the band sold-out arenas and regularly placed songs at the top of Christian radio charts. With its lyrics, music and style, Petra influenced numerous other artists at a time when Christian rock experienced strong opposition from many conservative pastors and churches.


title: Petra (band)

text: In more than three decades, the band experienced numerous lineup changes yet released 20 studio albums, as well as two Spanish-language and two live albums, selling nearly 10 million copies while being nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning four, and winning 10 Dove Awards. Its biggest hit, "The Coloring Song", reached the top position on three Christian radio charts simultaneously, and at its peak, the band's tours rivaled Amy Grant's in popularity among Christian audiences. Petra was the first rock band inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and the first Christian band whose memorabilia was included in the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant chain.


title: Petra (band)

text: The band announced its retirement in 2005, launching a farewell tour that was recorded for release on CD and DVD. Petra's 33-year career ended with a performance in the early hours of January 1, 2006, in Murphy, North Carolina. However, the band has continued to perform sporadically since then. In November 2010, an incarnation of the band's mid-1980s lineup surfaced under the name Classic Petra. It released an album, "Back to the Rock", featuring one new song ("Too Big To Fail"), one song taken from Greg X. Volz's 2009 album "God Only Knows" ("[Back To] The Rock"), as well as re-recordings of hits from that era. The band released a companion live CD and DVD in 2011.


title: Petra (band)

text: Petra's style changed significantly over the decades in an effort to remain relevant to the youth it was trying to reach but remained within the rock genre implied by its name. At its inception, the band's style was eclectic, borrowing from musical influences as diverse as The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Kansas. Early albums featured electric double-guitar leads reminiscent of the Allman Brothers Band.


title: Petra (band)

text: In the 1980s, the band began using keyboards and synthesizers to complement its guitar-based rock. Early in the decade, Petra produced a straightforward pop/rock sound reminiscent of Foreigner, while increasingly using synthesizers and electronic effects as the decade progressed. By the late 1980s, Petra used a change in vocalists to embrace a guitar-based hard rock style similar to Def Leppard, Aerosmith and Journey – a style that, along with the growing popularity of Christian rock as a whole, led to Petra's peak success.


title: Petra (band)

text: With the rise of alternative rock in the mid-1990s, the band's albums subsequently featured an increasing reliance on acoustic guitars and mellower tunes, including a fully acoustic album. Petra returned to its roots with a hard rock album in 2003, while the 2010 Classic Petra reunion was billed as an effort to re-record some of the band's early 1980s hits "with a modern edge". It included two new songs that fit within the guitar- and keyboard-based rock style that marked much of the band's early career.


title: Petra (band)

text: In the early 1970s, songwriter and guitarist Bob Hartman met bassist John DeGroff and formed the band Dove, which he quickly disbanded when DeGroff left to attend a Bible school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, known as the Christian Training Center. Hartman soon followed, and in 1972 he and DeGroff joined two classmates, guitarist Greg Hough and drummer Bill Glover, to form Petra. The band played small Midwest venues such as churches, coffeehouses and parks, to share the message of Christianity with concertgoers. Glover said on an interview "we weren't picky and we wanted to get God's Word out to our peers. We would set up in parking lots, parks, college campuses, coffee houses, etc." A frequent venue was a Fort Wayne Christian-themed coffeehouse named The Adam's Apple.


title: Petra (band)

text: This mix of evangelism with rock placed Petra among the early pioneers of Jesus Music, part of the larger counterculture Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Church authorities struggled with and frequently opposed the use of churches for rock concerts, and few Christian radio stations, with the exception of some college-based signals, would play the band's songs. Petra was criticized for its rock sound, a hint of the opposition it would experience as its popularity grew.


title: Petra (band)

text: Petra's blend of style and message attracted the attention of the newly created Myrrh Records' Paul Craig Paino, who convinced the label's founder, Billy Ray Hearn, to attend one of the band's concerts at The Adam's Apple. Hearn signed Petra in 1973 to record its debut album, which Hearn produced. Hearn later said he knew Petra was "the most radical thing around ... as far out as anything that had come out until that time."


title: Petra (band)

text: With no lead vocalist, Hartman and Hough shared singing duties on the self-titled debut, which was released in 1974. Featuring "tight, Allman Brothers-type dual guitar lines and riffs", "Petra" also featured the comical country tune "Lucas McGraw", which became something of a cult classic, and the seminal "Backslidin' Blues", the first contemporary Christian blues song put on vinyl. The rarity of being a Christian rock band led to larger concerts and greater popularity, and Myrrh asked Petra to record a second album aimed principally at non-Christians, reflecting the evangelistic nature of the band's shows.


title: Petra (band)

text: In 1976, Glover had resigned from the band. He was replaced by a string of drummers which included a childhood friend of Hough, Bob Rickman, and Glover's cousin, Mark Richards. However, by the time their record deal for the second album went through, Richards had already left, and Petra decided to hire Glover as a studio musician.


title: Petra (band)

text: By Hartman's admission, his vocal style did not match well with the band's genre, and Petra brought in a number of guest vocalists for the second record, among them former e vocalist Greg X. Volz (that band's name being a lower-case abbreviation of "Emmanuel"). Volz took the lead vocals on two songs and backed up several others. Among Volz's songs was a cover of the Argent anthem "God Gave Rock and Roll to You", which Myrrh had hoped to release as a radio single to the secular market. The song was immediately controversial – and revolutionary. "It was the boldest statement anyone in Christian music had made until that time," said Ambassador Artist Agency president Wes Yoder. "This was a radical notion, especially in the minds of the leaders of conservative churches." Other guest singers featured in the album were Steve Camp, Karen Morrison, and Austin Roberts.


title: Petra (band)

text: The recording process also was marked by disputes: the label refused Hartman's request to name the album "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" while a bluesy, crowd-favorite track written by Hartman about rejecting the pre-Christian self, "Killing My Old Man", was deemed too controversial and cut from the album (the song would later appear on the album "Never Say Die"). With a harder-edged sound reminiscent of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, "Come and Join Us" was released in 1977. It failed to sell well, however, and Myrrh dropped Petra from its label.