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2002
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Abba Eban
Abba Eban (, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban 2 February 1915 - 17 November 2002) was an Israeli diplomat and politician.
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Abdur Rahman Badawi
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Abu Nidal
Abu Nidal (Arabic: أبو نضال) (May 1937 – August 16, 2002), born Sabri Khalil al-Banna (Arabic: صبري خليل البنا), was the founder of Fatah–The Revolutionary Council (Arabic: فتح المجلس الثوري), a militant Palestinian group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of [the] struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: "I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares."
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Adelaide Abankwah
Adelaide Abankwah (born circa 1971) was a pseudonym taken by Ghanaian Regina Norman Danson when she tried to immigrate to the U.S. as a refugee claiming to be fleeing female genital cutting and seeking political asylum.
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Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Carol Wuornos (February 29, 1956–October 9, 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, claiming they raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute. She was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders and executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
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Air China
Air China (, , ) (, Pinyin: , literally meaning "China International Airlines Company", abbreviated ) is the People's Republic of China's state-owned and second-largest commercial airline after China Southern Airlines. Its logo consists of a phoenix in the form of the acronym VIP, and "Air China" in both English and Chinese, which was autographed by Deng Xiaoping. It operates 5,090 flights each week worldwide and is the 18th largest airline in the world by fleet size. Air China is also the world's largest carrier by market capitalisation. It has its headquarters in the Beijing Tianzhu Airport Industrial Zone in Shunyi District, Beijing.
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Alexander Prokhorov
Alexander Mikhaylovich Prokhorov () (11 July 1916 – 8 January 2002) was a Russian physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov.
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Andrea Yates
Andrea Yates (born Andrea Pia Kennedy July 2, 1964) is a former Houston, Texas resident who killed her five young children on June 20, 2001 by drowning them in the bathtub in her house. She had been suffering for years with very severe postpartum depression and psychosis. Her case placed the M'Naghten Rules, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. Yates's 2002 conviction of capital murder and sentence to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years was later overturned on appeal.
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Antonio Meucci
Antonio Meucci (; April 13, 1808 – October 18, 1889) was a compatriot of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, and an inventor, best known for developing a voice communication apparatus in 1857. Many people credit him with the invention of the telephone
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Astrid Lindgren
Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren (née Ericsson) (, 14 November 1907 – 28 January 2002) was a Swedish author and screenwriter who is the world's 25th most translated author and has sold roughly 145 million copies worldwide. She is best known for the Pippi Longstocking, Karlsson-on-the-Roof and the Six Bullerby Children book series.
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Austria
Austria or (), officially the Republic of Austria (German: ), is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers and has a temperate and alpine climate. Austria's terrain is highly mountainous due to the presence of the Alps; only 32% of the country is below , and its highest point is . The majority of the population speaks German, which is also the country's official language. Other local official languages are Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene.
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Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (22 June 190627 March 2002) was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people who have won three Academy Awards for producing, directing and writing the same film (The Apartment).
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Bob Hayes
Robert Lee "Bullet Bob" Hayes (December 20, 1942 – September 18, 2002) was an Olympic sprinter turned American football wide receiver in the National Football League for the Dallas Cowboys. An American track and field athlete, he was a two-sport stand-out in college in both track and football at Florida A&M; University. Hayes was enshrined in the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor in 2001 and was selected for induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in January 2009. He was officially inducted in Canton, Ohio on August 8, 2009. Hayes is the second Olympic gold medalist to be inducted to the Hall of Fame, after Jim Thorpe.
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Bobby Frank Cherry
Bobby Frank Cherry (June 20, 1930 – November 18, 2004) was an American white supremacist and Klansman who was convicted of murder in 2002 for his role in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. The bombing killed four young African-American girls (Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair) and injured more than twenty other people.
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Bobo Olson
Carl Olson (July 11, 1928 – January 16, 2002) was an American boxer. He was the world middleweight champion between October 1953 and December 1955, the longest reign of any champion in that division during the 1950s, although he is probably best remembered for his three knockout losses against Sugar Ray Robinson.
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Byron White
Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White (June 8, 1917 – April 15, 2002) won fame both as a football halfback and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993. He was married to Marion Lloyd Stearns in 1946 and the father of two children, Charles (Barney) Byron White and Nancy Pitkin White.
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Camilo José Cela
Camilo José María Manuel Juan Ramón Francisco Javier de Jerónimo Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquess of Iria Flavia (11 May 1916 - 17 January 2002), commonly known as Camilo José Cela (), was a Spanish novelist and short story writer. In 1989, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Carmen Silvera
: Not to be confused with Carmen Sylva.
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Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok (; February 17, 1929 - July 23, 2002) was an American Jewish author and rabbi. Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen, a 1967 novel, which became a bestseller. The book stayed on New York’s best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies.
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Charles Sheffield
Charles Sheffield (June 25, 1935 – November 2, 2002), was an English-born mathematician, physicist and science fiction author. He had been a President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society.
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Chechnya
The Chechen Republic (; , Chechenskaya Respublika; , Noxçiyn Respublika), or, informally, Chechnya (; ; , Noxçiyçö), sometimes referred to as Ichkeria, Chechnia, Chechenia or Noxçiyn, is a federal subject of Russia. It is located in southeastern part of Europe, in the Northern Caucasus mountains, in the North Caucasian Federal District. As of 1 January 2010, the population was 1,267,740 (according to Russian State statistics).
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Chick Hearn
Francis Dayle "Chick" Hearn (November 27, 1916 – August 5, 2002) was an American sportscaster. Known primarily as the long-time play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association, the legendary Hearn is remembered for his rapid fire, staccato broadcasting style, inventing colorful phrases such as slam dunk, air ball, and no harm, no foul that have become common basketball vernacular, and for broadcasting 3,338 consecutive Lakers games starting on November 21, 1965. Additionally, Hearn started the now common tradition of estimating the distance of shots taken.
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Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. He directed many of the classic short animated cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew and the other Warners characters, including Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening and ''What's Opera, Doc?'' (all three of which were later inducted into the National Film Registry) and Jones' famous "Hunting Trilogy" of Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (1951–1953).
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Cleopatra Stratan
Cleopatra Stratan (born October 6, 2002 in Chişinău, Moldova) is the youngest person ever to score commercial success as a singer, with her 2006 album La vârsta de trei ani ("At the age of 3"). She holds the record for being the youngest artist who performed live for two hours in front of a large audience, the highest paid young artist, the youngest artist to receive an MTV award and the youngest artist to score a #1 hit in a country ("Ghiţă" in Romanian Singles Chart).
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César Milstein
César Milstein (8 October 1927 – 24 March 2002) was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Niels K. Jerne and Georges Köhler.
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Daniel Pearl
Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1964 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists.
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Davey Boy Smith
David Smith (November 27, 1962 – May 18, 2002) was a British professional wrestler, better known as "The British Bulldog" Davey Boy Smith, who was born in Golborne in North West England. Smith is known for his appearances with Stampede Wrestling, the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Described by WWE as "one of the most physically impressive individuals in WWE history", Smith found success as both a singles and tag competitor, holding every major title in the organization except the WWF Championship, for which he was a frequent challenger.
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Davis Cleveland
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Dee Dee Ramone
Dee Dee Ramone (born Douglas Glenn Colvin) (September 18, 1951 – June 5, 2002) was a German-American songwriter and musician, best known as founding member, bassist and main songwriter of the punk rock band the Ramones.
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Desmond Hoyte
Hugh Desmond Hoyte (March 9, 1929 – December 22, 2002) was a Guyanese politician. He served as Prime Minister of Guyana from 1984 to 1985 and President of Guyana from 1985 until 1992.
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Dhirubhai Ambani
Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, (Gujarati: ધીરુભાઈ અંબાણી) also known as Dhirubhai, 28 December 1932, - 6 July 2002, was an Indian rags-to-riches business tycoon who founded Reliance Industries in Mumbai with his cousin. Ambani took his company (Reliance) public in 1977, and by 2007 the combined fortune of the family (sons Anil and Mukesh) was
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Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE (19 April 1935 – 27 March 2002) was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.
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Duncan Hallas
Duncan Hallas (23 December 1925 - 19 September 2002), was a prominent member of the Trotskyist movement and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain.
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Edsger W. Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002; ) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.
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Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (4 August 1900 – 30 March 2002) was the Queen consort of King George VI of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions from 1936 until her husband's death in 1952, after which she was known as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, to avoid confusion with her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. She was the last Queen consort of Ireland and Empress consort of India.
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Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926) is the reigning queen and head of state of 16 independent sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. In addition, as Head of the Commonwealth, she is the figurehead of the 54-member Commonwealth of Nations and, as the British monarch, she is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
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Enrique Bolaños
Enrique José Bolaños Geyer (born 13 May 1928) was the 82nd President of Nicaragua from 10 January 2002 to 10 January 2007. President Bolaños is of Spanish and German heritage and was born in Masaya (department of Masaya).
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Eugène Brands
Eugène Brands (January 15, 1913 - January 15, 2002 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch painter. He was briefly a member of the Cobra artist movement.
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Ferdinand Marcos
Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos (September 11, 1917 – September 28, 1989) was 10th President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He was a lawyer, member of the Philippine House of Representatives (1949–1959) and a member of the Philippine Senate (1959–1965). He was Senate President in 1963. He claimed to have led a guerrilla force called Ang Maharlika in northern Luzon during the Second World War, something much doubted however to be true. As Philippine president and strongman, his greatest achievement was in the fields of infrastructure development and international diplomacy. However, his administration was marred by massive authoritarian corruption, despotism, nepotism, political repression, and human rights violations. He benefited from a large personality cult in the Philippines during his regime. In 1983, his government was implicated in the assassination of his primary political opponent, Benigno Aquino, Jr.. The implication caused a chain of events, including a tainted presidential election that served as the catalyst for the People Power Revolution in February 1986 that led to his removal from power and eventual exile in Hawaii. It was later alleged that he and his wife Imelda Marcos had moved billions of dollars of embezzled public funds to the United States, Switzerland, and other countries, as well as into alleged corporations during his 20 years in power.
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Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is a Cuban politician. One of the primary leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Castro served as the Prime Minister of Cuba from February 1959 to December 1976, and then as the President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of Council of Ministers of Cuba until his resignation from the office in February 2008. He currently serves as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, a position he has held since 1965.
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Franco Lucentini
Franco Lucentini (December 24, 1920 - August 5, 2002) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies.
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Franz Krienbühl
Franz Krienbühl (March 24, 1929 – April 16, 2002) was a Swiss speed skater who is mostly known for his inventions that changed the sport.
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Freddy Heineken
Alfred Henry (Freddy) Heineken (November 4, 1923, Amsterdam, Netherlands –January 3, 2002) was a Dutch major stock holder and president of Heineken International, the brewing company bought in 1864 by his grandfather Gerard Adriaan Heineken in Amsterdam.
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Fritz Walter
Friedrich "Fritz" Walter (31 October 1920 – 17 June 2002) was a German footballer. In his time with the German national team, he won 61 caps and scored 33 goals.
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Galen Rowell
Galen Avery Rowell (August 23, 1940 – August 11, 2002) was a noted wilderness photographer and climber. Born in Oakland, California, he became a full-time photographer in 1972.
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George Alec Effinger
George Alec Effinger (January 10, 1947 – April 27, 2002) was an American science fiction author, born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio.
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George Porter
George Hornidge Porter, Baron Porter of Luddenham, OM, FRS (6 December 1920 – 31 August 2002) was a British chemist.
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George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (; born July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut) was the 43rd President of the United States, serving from 2001 to 2009, and the 46th Governor of Texas, serving from 1995 to 2000.
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Gerhard Schröder
Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder ( ; 7 April 1944) is a German politician, and was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), he led a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens. Before becoming a full-time politician, he was a lawyer, and before becoming Chancellor he served as Prime Minister of Lower Saxony (1990-1998). Following the 2005 federal election, which his party lost, after three weeks of negotiations he stood down as Chancellor in favour of Angela Merkel of the rival Christian Democratic Union. He is currently the chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG.
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Glenn Quinn
Glenn Martin Christopher Francis Quinn (28 May 1970 – 3 December 2002) was an Irish actor in television and film, known for playing Mark Healy in the American sitcom Roseanne, and Doyle, a half demon on the 1999–2004 television series Angel, a spin-off series of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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Göran Persson
: See Göran Persson (born 1960) for the politician born in 1960.
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Hamid Karzai
Hamid Karzai, GCMG (Ḥāmid Karzay; born 24 December 1957) is the 12th and current President of Afghanistan, taking office on 7 December 2004. He became a dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban government in late 2001. During the International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, on 5 December 2001, Karzai was selected by prominent Afghan political figures to serve a six month term as Chairman of the Transitional Administration.
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Hans Blix
(born 28 June 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs (1978–1979). Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March 2000 to June 2003, when he was succeeded by Demetrius Perricos. In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none. In February 2010, the Government of the United Arab Emirates announced that Blix will be the head of an advisory board for its nuclear power program.
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Hans Enoksen
Hans Enoksen (born 7 August 1956 in Itilleq, Greenland) is a Greenlandic politician who served as the fourth Prime Minister of Greenland from 2002 to 2009.
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Hans Janmaat
Hans Janmaat (November 3, 1934, Nes aan de Amstel - June 9, 2002, The Hague) was a right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He represented the Centrumpartij and his own Centrum Democraten political parties in the House of Representatives, the Dutch lower house of parliament, between 1982 and 1998. Although he was widely known, he was never a major force in the Dutch political landscape.
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Helen Clark
Helen Elizabeth Clark, ONZ (born 26 February 1950) is the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, the third-highest UN position, and was the 37th Prime Minister of New Zealand for three consecutive terms from 1999 to 2008. She led the Labour Party from 1993 until it lost the 2008 general election. Before resigning from Parliament in April 2009, Clark was Labour's foreign affairs spokeswoman and MP for the Mount Albert electorate which she had held since 1981. Forbes magazine ranked her 20th most powerful woman in the world in 2006.
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Helmut Zacharias
Helmut Zacharias (January 27, 1920-February 28, 2002) was a German violinist. He started having lessons at the age of 4. At 6 he played at the cabaret Faun in Berlin and had his first radio broadcast five years later. In the 1950s he was considered to be one of the best jazz violinists of Europe and was dubbed "The Magic Violinist" and "Germany's Mr. Violin", selling over 14 million records worldwide. He played together with many other famous artists, including Yehudi Menuhin and had his own TV show from 1968 to 1973. He died in 2002 in Tessin, Switzerland.
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Howard K. Smith
Howard Kingsbury Smith (May 12, 1914 – February 15, 2002) was an American journalist, radio reporter, television anchorman, political commentator, and film actor. He was one of the original Edward R. Murrow boys.
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Hu Jintao
'''
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Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (; born July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta) is the President of Venezuela. A critic of neoliberalism, globalisation, and United States foreign policy, Chávez has promoted ideas of socialism, participatory democracy and Latin American and Caribbean cooperation. Chávez remains a very controversial figure at home and abroad. Detractors within the Organization of American States, European Union, United Nations, U.S. State Department, and others, criticize Chávez for alleged human rights violations, while others point to improvements in constitutional and legal rights, poverty reduction, health care, women's rights, and treatment of indigenous peoples under his presidency. His political influence in South America – partly due to his government's use of Venezuela's oil wealth – and his sometimes strained relationship with the United States endow him with a high geopolitical profile, leading Time magazine to include him among their list of the world's 100 most influential people in 2005 and 2006.
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Ibn Al-Khattab
Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem () (April 14, 1969 – March 20, 2002), more commonly known as Emir Khattab (also transliterated as Amir Khattab and Ameer Khattab) meaning Commander Khattab, or Leader Khattab, and also known as Habib Abdul Rahman, was a Muslim guerilla fighter and financier working with Chechen Mujahideen in the First Chechen War and the Second Chechen War.
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Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész (; born November 9, 1929) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".
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Ingrid Betancourt
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Jack Shea
John Amos Shea (September 7, 1910 – January 22, 2002), better known as Jack Shea or The Chief, was an American double-Gold medalist in speed skating at the 1932 Winter Olympics. He was the first American to win two Gold medals at the same Olympics , and the patriarch of what the BBC identified as the first family with three generations of Olympians.
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Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac (; born 29 November 1932) is a French right-wing politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 (making him the only person to hold the position of Prime Minister twice under the Fifth Republic), and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
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Jam-Master Jay
Jason William Mizell (January 21, 1965 – October 30, 2002), also known as Jam-Master Jay, was the DJ of the influential hip hop group Run-D.M.C. He helped define the sound of the band and the style of the black hats and Adidas shoes that came to be the band's trademark. During the 1980s, Run-D.M.C. became the biggest hip-hop group and are credited with breaking hip-hop into mainstream music.
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James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn, Jr. (August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an American film and television actor who appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career. He played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Glen Whitehouse in the film Affliction.
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James Tobin
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who, in his lifetime, served on the Council of Economic Advisors and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well known "Tobit model". Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
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Jean Berger
Jean Berger (September 27, 1909, Hamm, Westphalia – May 28, 2002) was a German-born pianist, composer, and music educator.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen
Jean-Marie Le Pen (; born 20 June 1928) is a French conservative and nationalist politician who is founder and president of the Front National (National Front) party. Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, including in 2002, when in a surprise upset he came second, polling more votes in the first round than the main left candidate, Lionel Jospin. Le Pen lost in the second round to Jacques Chirac. Le Pen again ran in the 2007 French presidential election and finished fourth. His 2007 campaign, at the age of 78 years and 9 months, makes him the oldest candidate for presidential office in France.
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Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia, from 1971 to 1975, and was a peanut farmer and naval officer.
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Joachim Hoffmann
Joachim Hoffmann (December 1, 1930, Königsberg, East Prussia – February 8, 2002, Freiburg) was a German historian and scientific director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office.
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Joaquín Balaguer
Joaquín Antonio Balaguer Ricardo (September 1, 1906 – July 14, 2002) was the President of the Dominican Republic from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996.
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John Allen Muhammad
John Allen Muhammad (December 31, 1960 – November 10, 2009) was a spree killer from the United States. With his younger partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, he carried out the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, killing at least 10 people. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens.
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John B. Fenn
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John Cocke
John Cocke (May 30, 1925 – July 16, 2002) was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
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John E. Sulston
Sir John Edward Sulston, FRS (born March 27, 1942) is a British biologist and the 2002 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. He is currently Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation ([http://www.isei.manchester.ac.uk/ iSEI]) at the University of Manchester.
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John Entwistle
John Alec Entwistle (9 October 1944 – 27 June 2002) was an English bass guitarist, songwriter, singer, and horn player, who was best known as the bass guitarist for the rock band The Who. His aggressive lead sound influenced many rock bass players. He has been described as "the greatest bassist in the history of rock" by Greenwich Time and The Ledger.
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John Eriksen
John Hartmann Eriksen (20 November 1957 in Assens – 12 February 2002 in Svendborg) was a Danish footballer. During his career he played for Svendborg FB and Odense BK in his native Denmark, Roda JC and Feyenoord in Holland, FC Mulhouse in France and Servette FC and FC Luzern in Switzerland.
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John Frankenheimer
John Michael Frankenheimer (February 19, 1930 – July 6, 2002) was an American filmmaker. He is known for making The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962), The Train, (1964), Seven Days in May (also 1964) and Ronin (1998).
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John Gorton
Sir John Grey Gorton, GCMG, AC, CH (9 September 191119 May 2002), Australian politician, was the 19th Prime Minister of Australia.
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John Gotti
John Joseph Gotti, Jr (October 27, 1940 - June 10, 2002) was the Boss of the New York City Gambino crime family after the murder of the previous boss Paul Castellano. John Gotti was the most powerful crime boss during his era. He became widely known for his outspoken personality and flamboyant style that eventually caused his downfall.
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John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy." His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position." Rawls employs a number of thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice. He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy.
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John Walker Lindh
John Phillip Walker Lindh (born February 9, 1981) is an American citizen who was captured as an enemy combatant during the United States' 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. He is now serving a 20-year prison sentence in connection with his participation in Afghanistan's Taliban army. He was captured during the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi, a violent Taliban prison uprising where American CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann was killed.
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Jonas Savimbi
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi (August 3, 1934 – February 22, 2002) was an Angolan rebel leader. Savimbi led UNITA, a rebel group that fought against the initially pro-Soviet MPLA in the Angolan Civil War until his death in a clash with Government troops in 2002.
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Joseph Bonanno
Giuseppe “Joseph Charles” Bonanno, Sr. (January 18, 1905 – May 11, 2002) was a Sicilian-born American Mafioso who became the boss of the Bonanno crime family. He was nicknamed "Joe Bananas," a name he despised because it implied he was crazy.
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Joseph Luns
Joseph Marie Antoine Hubert Luns (August 28, 1911 - July 17, 2002) was a Dutch politician and diplomat of the defunct Catholic People's Party (KVP) now merged into the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). He was the longest-serving Minister of Foreign Affairs from September 2, 1952 until July 6, 1971. He served as the 5th Secretary General of NATO from October 1, 1971 until June 25, 1984, the longest-serving Secretary General of NATO for 13-years.
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Katy Jurado
Katy Jurado (January 16, 1924 – July 5, 2002), born María Cristina Estela Marcela Jurado García in Guadalajara, Jalisco, was the first Mexican National actress to be nominated for an Academy Award.
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Kevin Warwick
Kevin Warwick (born 9 February 1954 Coventry, UK) is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. He is best known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, although he has also done much research in the field of robotics.
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Koichi Tanaka
is a Japanese scientist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wuthrich (the latter for work in NMR spectroscopy).
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Kurt Wüthrich
Kurt Wüthrich (born October 4, 1938) is a Swiss chemist and Nobel Chemistry laureate.
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Károly Doncsecz
Károly Doncsecz () was a Slovene potter in Hungary and in 1984 he received the award Master of folk art for his work. Doncsecz was born in Orfalu, (Vas country).
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Laurent Lafforgue
Laurent Lafforgue (born 6 November 1966, in Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France) is a French mathematician.
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Layne Staley
Layne Thomas Staley (August 22, 1967 – April 5, 2002) was an American musician who served as the lead singer and co-lyricist of the rock group Alice in Chains, which was formed in Seattle, Washington in 1987 by Staley and guitarist Jerry Cantrell. Alice in Chains rose to international fame as part of the grunge movement of the early 1990s. The band became known for its distinct vocal style, which often included the "snarl-to-a-scream" vocals of Staley, as well as the harmonized vocals of Staley and Cantrell. Staley was also a member of the supergroups Mad Season and Class of '99. He struggled throughout his career with severe drug addiction, which caused his death in April 2002.
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Lee Boyd Malvo
Lee Boyd Malvo (also known as John Lee Malvo ) (born February 18, 1985), is a serial killer convicted, along with John Allen Muhammad, of mass murder in connection with the Beltway sniper attacks, which took place in the Washington Metropolitan Area over a three-week period in October 2002. According to his own confession they had planned to kill six people a day for a month in order "to terrorize the nation". The beltway attacks turned out to be only the last of a series of shootings across the United States which began on the West Coast. Muhammad had befriended the juvenile Malvo, and had enlisted him in the murderous rampage under some false pretenses and influences which are still not fully understood by authorities. According to Craig Cooley, one of Malvo's defense attorneys, Malvo believed Muhammad when he told him that the $10 million ransom sought from the US government to stop the sniper killings would be used to establish a Utopian society for 140 black homeless children on a Canadian compound.
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Leo Ornstein
Leo Ornstein (born Лев Орнштейн, Lev Ornshteyn) (ca. December 2, 1893 – February 24, 2002) was a leading American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Leopold Vietoris
Leopold Vietoris (4 June 1891 – 9 April 2002) was an Austrian mathematician and a World War I veteran who gained additional fame by becoming a supercentenarian (unusual especially for a male). He was born in Radkersburg and died in Innsbruck.
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Linda Lovelace
Linda Susan Boreman (January 10, 1949 – April 22, 2002), better known by her stage name Linda Lovelace, was an American pornographic actress who was famous for her performance of deep throat fellatio in the enormously successful 1972 hardcore porn film Deep Throat. She later denounced her pornography career, claimed that she had been forced into it by her sadistic first husband, and for a while became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.
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Lionel Hampton
Lionel Leo Hampton (April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002) was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, bandleader and actor. Like Red Norvo, he was one of the first jazz vibraphone players. Hampton ranks among the great names in jazz history, having worked with a who's who of jazz musicians, from Benny Goodman and Buddy Rich to Charlie Parker and Quincy Jones. In 1992, he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
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Lisa Lopes
Lisa Nicole Lopes (May 27, 1971 – April 25, 2002), better known by her stage name Left Eye, was an American rapper, singer, dancer, songwriter, best known as a member of the R&B; girl group TLC.
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Mamo Wolde
MedalCountry|
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Maria Felix
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Masatoshi Koshiba
(born on September 19, 1926 in Toyohashi, Aichi) is a Japanese physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.
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Max Perutz
Max Ferdinand Perutz, FRS, OM, CBE (May 19, 1914, Vienna, Austria – February 6, 2002, Cambridge, United Kingdom) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins. He went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. At Cambridge he founded and chaired (1962–79) The Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, fourteen of whose scientists have won Nobel Prizes. Perutz's contributions to molecular biology in Cambridge are documented in The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990) published by the Cambridge University Press in 1992.
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Max Reinhardt
__NOTOC__
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Merlin Santana
Merlin Thomas Santana (March 14, 1976 – November 9, 2002) was an American actor, perhaps best known for his role as high school student Romeo Santana on the WB series The Steve Harvey Show.
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Milton Berle
Milton Berle (July 12, 1908 – March 27, 2002) was an American comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater (1948–55), in 1948 he was the first major star of US television and as such became known as Uncle Miltie and Mr. Television to millions during TV's golden age.
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Myra Hindley
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Ne Win
Ne Win ( ; 24 May or 14 May 1911 or 10 July 1910 – 5 December 2002) was a Burmese politician and military commander. He was Prime Minister of Burma from 1958 to 1960 and 1962 to 1974 and also head of state from 1962 to 1981. He also was the founder and from 1963 to 1988 the chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party, which from 1964 until 1988 was the sole political party in the Burmese nation state.
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Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle (29 October 1930–21 May 2002) was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.
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Nándor Hidegkuti
Nándor Hidegkuti (March 3, 1922 – February 14, 2002) was a Hungarian football player and manager. He played as a forward and spent the majority of his playing career at MTK Hungária FC. During the 1950s he was also a prominent member of the legendary Hungary team known as the Golden Team. Other members of the team included Ferenc Puskás, Zoltán Czibor, Sándor Kocsis and József Bozsik. In 1953, playing as a deep lying centre-forward, he scored a hat-trick for Hungary when they beat England 6-3 at Wembley Stadium. Playing from deep, Hidegkuti was able to distribute the ball to the other four attackers and cause considerable confusion in the English defence. This was an innovation at the time and revolutionised the way the game was played. This is now known as SS or Second Striker with players such as Francesco Totti and Wayne Rooney playing there today.
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Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (with numerous variations; , Usāmah bin Muḥammad bin ‘Awaḍ bin Lādin; born March 10, 1957) is a member of the prominent Saudi bin Laden family and the founder of the Islamic extremist organization al-Qaeda, best known for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. As a result of his dealings in violent, extremist jihad, Osama bin Laden lost his Saudi citizenship and was disowned by his wealthy Saudi Arabian family. Bin Laden is on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives due to several 1998 US embassy bombings.
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Palestinians
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Parley Baer
Parley Edward Baer (August 5, 1914 – November 22, 2002) was an American actor in film, television, and radio.
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Paul Wellstone
Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was a two-term U.S. Senator from the state of Minnesota and member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is affiliated with the national Democratic Party. Before being elected to the Senate in 1990, he was a professor of political science at Carleton College. Wellstone was a progressive and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October 2002, 11 days before the US senate election in which he was running for a third term. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.
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Peggy Lee
Peggy Lee (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002) was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer and actress in a career spanning nearly seven decades. From her beginnings as a vocalist on local radio, to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, she was forging her own sophisticated persona, Lee evolved into a multi-faceted artist and performer. She wrote music for films, acted, and created conceptual record albums—encompassing poetry, jazz, chamber pop, art songs, and other genres.
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Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.
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Pierre Werner
Pierre Werner (29 December 1913 - 24 June 2002) was a Luxembourg politician. Pierre Werner was born in Saint-André-lez-Lille, Nord, France to parents from Luxembourg. During the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg (1940-45) Werner, working as a banker, gave clandestine support to the resistance against the occupation forces. After World War 2 he became the Controller of the banking system in his country. He attended the Bretton Woods conference which set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Werner entered the Luxembourg government as Finance Minister in 1953, and was Prime Minister from 1959 to 1974 and from 1979 to 1984. He also served as Minister for Culture.
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Pim Fortuyn
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn (; February 19, 1948 – May 6, 2002) was a Dutch politician, civil servant, sociologist, author and professor who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF).
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Queenie Leonard
Queenie Leonard (February 18, 1905 – January 17, 2002) was a British character actress and singer.
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Ray Conniff
Joseph Raymond Conniff (November 6, 1916 – October 12, 2002) was an American bandleader and arranger best known for his Ray Conniff Singers during the 1960s.
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Riccardo Giacconi
Riccardo Giacconi (born October 6, 1931) is an Italian/American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy.
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Robert Guéï
Robert Guéï (March 16, 1941 – September 19, 2002) was the military ruler of the Côte d'Ivoire from December 24, 1999 to October 26, 2000.
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Robert Hanssen
Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former American FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. He is currently serving a life sentence at the Federal Bureau of Prisons Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, a "Supermax" federal penitentiary in which Hanssen spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.
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Robert Lull Forward
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Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology.
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Robert Urich
Robert Urich (December 19, 1946 – April 16, 2002) was an American actor. He played the starring role in the television series (1985–1988) and Vega$ (1978–1981). He also appeared in other television series over the years including: S.W.A.T. (1975), Soap (1977), and The Lazarus Man (1996), as well as in several feature films including Turk 182!, The Ice Pirates, and Magnum Force. Urich died in 2002 in Thousand Oaks, California. The actor announced in 1996 that he was suffering from synovial cell sarcoma, a rare cancer that attacks the body's joints, he underwent several treatments to fight the cancer during the last years of his life.
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Rod Steiger
Rodney Stephen "Rod" Steiger (April 14, 1925July 9, 2002) was an American actor known for his performances in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Waterloo, The Pawnbroker, On the Waterfront, The Harder They Fall and Doctor Zhivago.
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Rosemary Clooney
Rosemary Clooney (May 23, 1928 – June 29, 2002) was an American singer and actress. She came to prominence in the early 1950s with the novelty hit "Come On-a My House" written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (David Seville) creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks, which was followed by other pop numbers such as "Botch-a-Me" (a cover version of the Italian song Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina by Alberto Rabagliati), "Mambo Italiano", "Tenderly", "Half as Much", "Hey There" and "This Ole House", though she would go on to success as a jazz vocalist.
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Rudolph Giuliani
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Ruth Handler
Ruth Handler (November 4, 1916 – April 27, 2002) was an American businesswoman, born to Jewish-Polish immigrants Jacob and Ida Moskowicz, the president of the toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., and is remembered primarily for her role in marketing the Barbie doll.
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Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: ; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Ba'ath Party, which espoused secular pan-Arabism, economic modernization, and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to long-term power.
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Sam Snead
Samuel Jackson Snead (May 27, 1912 – May 23, 2002) was an American professional golfer who was one of the top players in the world for most of four decades. He and two of the other greatest golfers of all time, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, were born within six months of each other in 1912. Snead won a record 82 PGA Tour events.
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Saparmurat Niyazov
Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov; 19 February 1940 - 21 December 2006), (Russian: Сапармурат Атаевич Ниязов) (Turkmen: Saparmyrat Ataýewiç Nyýazow) was a Turkmen politician who served as President (later President for Life) of Turkmenistan from 2 November 1990 until his death in 2006. He was First Secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party from 1985 until 1991 and continued to lead Turkmenistan for 15 years after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. His name in English is a romanization of the Russian spelling Сапармурат Атаевич Ниязов of his Turkmen name.
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Slobodan Milosevic
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Sopubek Begaliev
Sopubek Begaliev () (March 29, 1931–October 9, 2002) was a Soviet-era economist and politician. He was the founder of the Assembly of People of the Kyrgyz Republic, an organization that promotes inter-ethnic harmony, civil peace, and unanimity. Through his efforts, Begaliev worked to lay the foundation for a strong and peaceful society in the country. Other Newly Independent States have since followed the Kyrgyz example.
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Spike Milligan
Terence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002), known as Spike Milligan, was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor; the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. Milligan was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the popular Eccles.
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Stephen Ambrose
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history. Beginning late in his life and continuing after his death, however, many reports and evidence have continued to surface documenting long time patterns of plagiarism, falsification, and inaccuracies in many of his published writings and other work. In response to one of the early reports, Ambrose said he was not "out there stealing other people's writings."
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.
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Sydney Brenner
Sydney Brenner, CH FRS (born January 13, 1927) is a South African biologist and a 2002 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate, shared with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston.
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Ted Williams
Theodore Samuel Williams (August 30, 1918 – July 5, 2002) was an American left fielder in Major League Baseball. He played 21 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, twice interrupted by military service as a Marine Corps pilot. Nicknamed The Kid, the Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame, and The Thumper, he is widely considered one of the greatest hitters ever.
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Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl (October 6, 1914, Larvik, Norway – April 18, 2002, Colla Micheri, Italy) was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a scientific background in zoology and geography. Heyerdahl became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he sailed 4,300 miles (8,000 km) by raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. All his legendary expeditions are shown in the Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo.
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Traudl Junge
Traudl Junge (born Gertraud Humps 16 March 1920 – 10 February 2002) was Adolf Hitler's youngest personal private secretary, from December 1942 to April 1945.
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Valeri Lobanovsky
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Virginia Hamilton
Virginia Hamilton (March 12, 1936 – February 19, 2002) was an award-winning author of children's books. She wrote over 35 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great, for which she won the National Book Award in 1974 and the 1975 Newbery Medal.
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Vladimir Voevodsky
Vladimir Voevodsky (, born 4 June 1966) is a Russian mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002.
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Walter Winterbottom
Sir Walter Winterbottom CBE (31 January 1913 – 16 February 2002) was the first manager of the England football team, serving from 1946 until 1962.
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Waylon Jennings
Waylon Arnold Jennings (June 15, 1937 – February 13, 2002) was an American country music singer, writer and musician. A self-taught guitar player, he rose to prominence as a bass player for Buddy Holly following the break-up of The Crickets. Jennings escaped death in the February 3, 1959, plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson when he gave up his seat to Richardson who had been sick with the flu. Urban legend and Hollywood folklore have it that Jennings and The Big Bopper flipped a coin for the last seat on the plane, with Jennings losing. It was, in fact, Tommy Allsup who flipped the coin for the fated plane trip, losing his seat to Ritchie Valens.
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Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg (; born Caryn Elaine Johnson; November 13, 1955) is an American comedian, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, and talk show host.
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Yousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh, CC (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was a Canadian photographer of Armenian heritage, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time.
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Yucca Mountain
Yucca Mountain is a mountain in Nevada approximately northwest of the Las Vegas metropolitan area. It is the proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
http://wn.com/Yucca_Mountain
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Afghanistan
{{Infobox country
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Ahmedabad
Ahmedabad () is the largest city in Gujarat, India. It is the seventh largest city and eighth largest metropolitan area of India, with a city population of approximately 3.96 million and metropolitan population of 5.41 million. Located on the banks of the River Sabarmati, the city is the administrative centre of Ahmedabad district and was the capital of Gujarat from 1960 to 1970; the capital was shifted to Gandhinagar thereafter. In the middle of 1990's it was the fifth largest city in India.In colloquial Gujarati, the city is commonly called Amdavad.
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Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola (, ; ), is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city. The exclave province of Cabinda has a border with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic (, ), is the second largest country in South America, constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth-largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations, though Mexico, Colombia and Spain are more populous.
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Australia
{{Infobox country
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Austria
Austria or (), officially the Republic of Austria (German: ), is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers and has a temperate and alpine climate. Austria's terrain is highly mountainous due to the presence of the Alps; only 32% of the country is below , and its highest point is . The majority of the population speaks German, which is also the country's official language. Other local official languages are Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene.
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Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east. It is one of the country's 33 provinces with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island.
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Belgium
Belgium (, ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, as well as those of several other major international organizations such as NATO. Belgium covers an area of , and it has a population of about 10.8 million people.
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Benguet
Benguet (Filipino:Benhwet) is a landlocked province of the Philippines in the Cordillera Administrative Region in Luzon. Its capital is La Trinidad and borders, clockwise from the south, Pangasinan, La Union, Ilocos Sur, Mountain Province, Ifugao, and Nueva Vizcaya.
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Bethlehem
Bethlehem (, , lit "House of Meat"; , Beth Leḥem or Modern Hebrew Beyt Leḥem, lit "House of Bread;" Bethleém) is a Palestinian city in the central West Bank, approximately south of Jerusalem, with a population of about 30,000 people. It is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate of the Palestinian National Authority and a hub of Palestinian culture and tourism. The Hebrew Bible identifies Beit Lehem as the city David was from and the location where he was crowned as the king of Israel. The New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke identify Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. The town is inhabited by one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, though the size of the community has shrunk due to emigration.
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Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham (, ) is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to an estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007, Birmingham had a population of about 229,800. The Birmingham Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009, had a population of about 1,212,848. The Birmingham Metropolitan Area contains about one-quarter of the entire population of Alabama.
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Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace is the official London residence of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a rallying point for the British people at times of national rejoicing and crisis.
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Bulgaria
Bulgaria ( , Balgariya, ), officially the Republic of Bulgaria (, Republika Balgariya, ), is a country in Southern Europe. Bulgaria borders five other countries: Romania to the north (mostly along the Danube), Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia to the west, and Greece and Turkey to the south. The Black Sea defines the extent of the country to the east.
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Canada
Canada () is a country in North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean. It is the world's second largest country by total area. Canada's common border with the United States to the south and northwest is the longest in the world.
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Chechnya
The Chechen Republic (; , Chechenskaya Respublika; , Noxçiyn Respublika), or, informally, Chechnya (; ; , Noxçiyçö), sometimes referred to as Ichkeria, Chechnia, Chechenia or Noxçiyn, is a federal subject of Russia. It is located in southeastern part of Europe, in the Northern Caucasus mountains, in the North Caucasian Federal District. As of 1 January 2010, the population was 1,267,740 (according to Russian State statistics).
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Colombia
Colombia (), officially the Republic of Colombia (, ), is a constitutional republic in northwestern South America. Colombia is bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the northwest by Panama; and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. Colombia also shares maritime borders with Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. With a population of over 45 million people, Colombia has the 29th largest population in the world and the second largest in South America, after Brazil. Colombia has the fourth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico, the United States, and Spain.
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Costa Rica
:For the plant genus Costarica, see its synonym Sicyos.
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Cuba
The Republic of Cuba (; , ) is an island country in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos.
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Côte d'Ivoire
The Republic of (; ), commonly known in English as Ivory Coast, is a country in West Africa. It has an area of 322,462 km2, and borders the countries of Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana; its southern boundary is along the Gulf of Guinea. The country's population which was 15,366,672 in 1998, was estimated to be 20,617,068 in 2009.
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Dodoma Region
Dodoma is one of the regions of Tanzania. The region covers an area of 41,310 km² and has 1,698,996 inhabitants (census of August 2002). The region is the 12th region of Tanzania in area and covers about 5% of the mainland of the country (not counting the islands). The capital of the region is the city of Dodoma.
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East Timor
East Timor, officially named Timor-Leste, (Tetum: Timór-Leste; officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste) is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor. The small country of 15,410 km² (5,400 sq mi) is located about 640 km (400 mi) northwest of Darwin, Australia.
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ECOWAS
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Egypt
Egypt (; , Miṣr, ; Egyptian Arabic: مصر, Maṣr, ; Coptic: , ; Greek: Αίγυπτος, Aiguptos; Egyptian:
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Eveleth, Minnesota
Eveleth is a city in St. Louis County, Minnesota, USA. The population was 3,865 at the 2000 census.
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FBI
http://wn.com/FBI -
Finland
Finland (pronounced ), officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden on the west, Norway on the north and Russia on the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.
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France
{{Infobox Country
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French Open
The French Open ( or Tournoi de Roland-Garros, ) is a major tennis tournament held over two weeks between late May and early June in Paris, France, at the Stade Roland Garros. It is the second of the Grand Slam tournaments on the annual tennis calendar and the premier clay court tennis tournament in the world. Roland Garros is the only Grand Slam still held on clay and ends the spring clay court season.
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Galicia (Spain)
:This article is about the nation in Spain. For the Polish-Ukrainian region, see Galicia (Eastern Europe).
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Gambia
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Germany
Germany (), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (, ), is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The territory of Germany covers 357.021 km2 and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state of the European Union, and home to the third-largest number of international migrants worldwide.
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Greece
Greece (; , Elláda, ; , Hellás, ), also known as Hellas and officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía, ), is a country in southeastern Europe. Situated on the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula, Greece has land borders with Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of mainland Greece, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the tenth longest coastline in the world at in length, featuring a vast number of islands (approximately 1400, of which 227 are inhabited), including Crete, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, and the Ionian Islands among others. Eighty percent of Greece consists of mountains, of which Mount Olympus is the highest at .
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Greenland
Greenland ( meaning "Land of the Kalaallit people"; ) is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Physiographically, it is a part of the continent of North America. The largest island in Greenland is also named Greenland, and makes up most of the country's land area.
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Helsinki
Helsinki (; , ) is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the southern part of Finland, in the region of Uusimaa/Nyland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, by the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is (), making it the most populous municipality in Finland by a wide margin. Helsinki is located some east of Stockholm, Sweden, west of St. Petersburg, Russia and north of Tallinn, Estonia. Helsinki has close connections with these three cities.
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Houston
Houston () is the fourth-largest city in the United States of America and the largest city in the state of Texas. As of the 2009 U.S. Census estimate, the city had a population of 2.3 million within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of the metropolitan area—the metropolitan area in the U.S. with a population of approximately 5.9 million.
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India
India (), officially the Republic of India ( ; see also official names of India), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.18 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Mainland India is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal on the east; and it is bordered by Pakistan to the west; Bhutan, the People's Republic of China and Nepal to the north; and Bangladesh and Burma to the east. In the Indian Ocean, mainland India and the Lakshadweep Islands are in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, while India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share maritime border with Thailand and the Indonesian island of Sumatra in the Andaman Sea. India has a coastline of .
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Iran
Iran ( ), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Central Eurasia and Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was also known to the western world as Persia. Both Persia and Iran are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, Iran is the name used officially in political contexts.
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Iraq
Iraq ( or , Arabic: ), officially the Republic of Iraq (Arabic:
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Ireland
Ireland (,; , ; Ulster Scots: Airlann) is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the northwest of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islets. To the east of Ireland is Great Britain, separated from it by the Irish Sea. The island is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers just under five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, which covers the remainder and is located in the northeast of the island. The population of Ireland is approximately 6.2 million people. Just under 4.5 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just under 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.
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Islamabad
(Punjabi, Pashto, {{lang-ur|) Islām ābād (Meaning "Abode of Islam") is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. The population of the city has increased from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.21 million in 2009. The Rawalpindi/Islamabad Metropolitan Area is the third largest in Pakistan with a population of over 4.5 million inhabitants.
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Israel
Israel (, ''Yisrā'el; , Isrā'īl), officially the State of Israel (Hebrew: , Medīnat Yisrā'el; , Dawlat Isrā'īl''), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and Gaza on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is the world's only predominantly Jewish state, and is defined as A Jewish and Democratic State by the Israeli government.
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Italy
Italy (; ), officially the Italian Republic (), is a country located in south-central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia — the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea — and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, whilst Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.4 million inhabitants, it is the sixth most populous country in Europe, and the twenty-third most populous in the world.
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Japan
Japan (日本 Nihon or Nippon), officially the State of Japan ( or Nihon-koku), is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin" (because it lies to the east of nearby countries), which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
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Karachi
Karachi (: , {{lang-ur|) is the largest city, main seaport and financial centre of Pakistan, and the capital of the province of Sindh. With an estimated population of about 18 million, Karachi is one of the world's largest cities in terms of population, the 13th largest urban agglomeration, the 4th largest metropolitan area in the world, and the 2nd largest city within the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. It is Pakistan's premier centre of banking, industry, and trade and is home to Pakistan's largest corporations, including those involved in textiles, shipping, automotive industry, entertainment, the arts, fashion, advertising, publishing, software development and medical research. The city is a major hub of higher education in South Asia and the wider Islamic world.
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Kodak Theatre
The Kodak Theatre is a live theatre in the Hollywood and Highland retail, dining, and entertainment complex on Hollywood Boulevard and North Highland Avenue in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Since its opening on November 9, 2001, the theatre has been the home of the annual Academy Awards Ceremonies (The Oscars), which were first held there in March 2002, and is the first permanent home for the awards. Since 2002, the theater was also the home for American Idol.
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Lagos
Lagos (, or overseas or Èkó in the Yoruba language) is a port and the most populous conurbation in Nigeria. It is currently the second most populous city in Africa, after Cairo, and is estimated to be the fastest growing city in Africa (UN-HABITAT, 2008) and the seventh fastest growing in the world. The city is the economic and financial capital of Nigeria.
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Larsen Ice Shelf
The Larsen Ice Shelf is a long, fringing ice shelf in the northwest part of the Weddell Sea, extending along the east coast of Antarctic Peninsula from Cape Longing to the area just southward of Hearst Island. Named for Captain Carl Anton Larsen, the master of the Norwegian whaling vessel Jason, who sailed along the ice front as far as 68°10' South during December 1893.
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Latvia
Latvia (; ), officially the Republic of Latvia () is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia (343 km), to the south by Lithuania (588 km), to the east by the Russian Federation (276 km), and to the southeast by Belarus (141 km). Across the Baltic Sea to the west lies Sweden. The territory of Latvia covers and it has a temperate seasonal climate.
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Laughlin, Nevada
Laughlin is a census-designated place (CDP) in Clark County, Nevada, United States. As of the 2000 census, the population was 7,076. Laughlin is a port located on the Colorado River 94 miles (152.3 km) south of Las Vegas. Directly across the river from Laughlin is Bullhead City, Arizona, which has four times the population of Laughlin (approximately 39,000) and supplies much of the workforce.
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Libya
Libya ( ; Libyan vernacular: Lībya ; Amazigh: ), officially the '''Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya ( , also translated as Socialist People's Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya'''), is a country located in North Africa. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Libya lies between Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west.
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Lincoln's Inn Fields
'''Lincoln's Inn Fields''' is the largest public square in London, UK. It was laid out in the 1630s under the initiative of the speculative builder and contractor William Newton, "the first in a long series of entrepreneurs who took a hand in developing London", as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner observes. The original plan for "laying out and planting" these fields, drawn by the hand of Inigo Jones, was said still to be seen in Lord Pembroke's collection at Wilton House. The grounds, which had remained private property were acquired by London County Council in 1895. It is today managed by the London Borough of Camden and forms part of the southern boundary of that borough with the City of Westminster.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (, U.S. usually ; ), officially the Republic of Lithuania () is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the southwest.
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London
London () is the capital of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who called it Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
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Luxembourg
Luxembourg ( ), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (, , ), is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. Luxembourg has a population of over half a million people in an area of approximately 2,586 square kilometres (999 sq mi).
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Moscow
Moscow ( or ; ; see also ) is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a global city. Moscow is the most populous city on the continent of Europe and the seventh largest city proper in the world, a megacity. The population of Moscow (as of 1 January 2010) is 10,563,038.
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Myyrmanni bombing
The Myyrmanni bombing took place on October 11, 2002, in Myyrmäki, Vantaa, Finland, in Greater Helsinki, at the Myyrmanni shopping mall. The bomb killed seven, including two teenagers, a 7-year-old child and the presumed bomber. 166 people were injured, including 10 children. 66 victims required hospitalization with the remainder treated and released at the scene. The shopping center was especially crowded, with almost 2,000 people, including many children who had come to see a clown performance.
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NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, ) is an Executive Branch agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's civilian space program and aeronautics and aerospace research. Since February 2006, NASA's self-described mission statement is to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
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Netanya
Netanya () is a city in the Northern Centre District of Israel and is the capital of the surrounding Sharon plain. It is located between the 'Poleg' stream and Wingate Institute in the south and the 'Avichail' stream in the north. Its of beaches have made the city a very popular tourist resort. Today the city houses a notably large population of English-speaking immigrants from the United Kingdom, USA, and Canada. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), at the end of 2008 the city had a total population of 179,000. An additional 150,000 people live in the local and regional councils within 10 kilometers from Netanya with serves as a regional center for them. The city mayor is Miriam Feirberg. The city is expected to reach a population of 350,000 by 2020. The city name has sometimes been spelled Nathania.
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Netherlands
{{Infobox country
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New York
New York (; locally or ) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the north and west, and Quebec to the north. New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
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Nicaragua
Nicaragua ( ) officially the Republic of Nicaragua (, ), is a representative democratic republic. It is the largest country in Central America with an area of 130,373 km2. The country is bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The Pacific Ocean lies to the west of the country, the Caribbean Sea to the east. The country's Caribbean coast is part of the Western Caribbean Zone. Falling within the tropics, Nicaragua sits between 11 degrees and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere. Nicaragua's abundance of biologically significant and unique ecosystems contribute to Mesoamerica's designation as a biodiversity hotspot. The capital city of Nicaragua is Managua. Roughly one quarter of the nation's population lives in the Nicaraguan capital, making it the second largest city and metropolitan area in Central America (following Guatemala City).
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Nigeria
Nigeria (), officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising thirty-six states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in the north. Its coast in the south lies on the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean. The three largest and most influential ethnic groups in Nigeria are the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. In terms of religion Nigeria is roughly split half and half between Muslims and Christians with a very small minority who practice traditional religion.
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Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish and Norwegian: Nobels fredspris) is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.
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North Korea
North Korea, officially the '''Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK'''; Chosongul: 조선민주주의인민공화국), is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea. The Amnok River and the Tumen River form the border between North Korea and the People's Republic of China. A section of the Tumen River in the extreme northeast is the border with Russia.
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Pakistan
{{Infobox country
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Passover massacre
The Passover Massacre (also known as the Netanya Bombing or the Park Hotel Passover attack) was a suicide bombing carried out by Hamas at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel on March 27, 2002, during a Passover seder. Thirty Israeli civilians were killed in the attack and 140 were injured. It was the deadliest attack against Israelis during the Second Intifada.
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Penghu Islands
#REDIRECTPenghu
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Philippines
The Philippines ( ), officially known as the Republic of the Philippines (), is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam. The Sulu Sea to the southwest lies between the country and the island of Borneo, and to the south the Celebes Sea separates it from other islands of Indonesia. It is bounded on the east by the Philippine Sea. Its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire and its tropical climate make the Philippines prone to earthquakes and typhoons but have also endowed the country with natural resources and made it one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world. An archipelago comprising 7,107 islands, the Philippines is categorized broadly into three main geographical divisions: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Its capital city is Manila.
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Portugal
Portugal (, ), officially the Portuguese Republic (; ), is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east. The Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira are also part of Portugal.
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Prague
Prague (; , see also ) is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Nicknames for Prague have included: Praga mater urbium/Praha matka měst ("Prague – Mother of Cities") in Latin/Czech, Stověžatá Praha ("City of a Hundred Spires") in Czech and Zlaté město/Goldene Stadt ("Golden City") in Czech/German.
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Pusan
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Ringgold, Georgia
Ringgold is a city in Catoosa County, Georgia, United States. The population was 2,422 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of Catoosa County. Ringgold is part of the Chattanooga, TN–GA Metropolitan Statistical Area.
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Romania
Romania ( ; dated: Rumania; ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, north of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Romania shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova to the northeast, and Bulgaria to the south.
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Russia
Russia (; ), also officially known as the Russian Federation (), is a state in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the United States by the Bering Strait. At , Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than a ninth of the Earth's land area. Russia is also the ninth most populous nation with 142 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning 9 time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources. It has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Salt Lake City, Utah
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Senegalese
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Siberia
Siberia ( ), is a vast region, constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union (USSR) from its beginning, as the preceding Russian Empire conquered it in the 16th century.
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Slovakia
The Slovak Republic (short form: Slovakia ; Slovak:, long form ) is a state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is a landlocked country bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south. The largest city is the capital, Bratislava, and the second largest is Košice. Slovakia is a member state of the European Union, NATO, United Nations, OECD and WTO among others. The official language is Slovak, a member of the Slavic language family.
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Slovenia
Slovenia ( ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (, ), is a country in Central Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy on the west, the Adriatic Sea on the southwest, Croatia on the south and east, Hungary on the northeast, and Austria on the north. The capital and largest city of Slovenia is Ljubljana.
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Sotheby's
'''Sotheby's''' is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.
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South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country located at the southern tip of Africa, with a coastline on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. To the north lie Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe; to the east are Mozambique and Swaziland; while Lesotho is an independent country wholly surrounded by South African territory.
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South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK, , ) and sometimes referred to simply as Korea, is a state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, and North Korea to the north. Its capital is Seoul. South Korea lies in a temperate climate region with a predominantly mountainous terrain. Its territory covers a total area of 99,392 square kilometers and has a population of .
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Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, , abbreviated СССР, SSSR), informally known as the Soviet Union () or Soviet Russia, was a constitutionally socialist state that existed on the territory of most of the former Russian Empire in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
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Spain
Spain ( ; , ), officially the Kingdom of Spain (), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Its mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar; to the north by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the northwest and west by the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal.
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Sri Lanka
The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (commonly known as Sri Lanka (, , or ); ; , ) is a country and a sovereign state off souther coast of the Indian subcontinent. A island nation in South Asia, it was till 1972 known as Ceylon (, , or ). Sri Lanka is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait.
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Sudan
Sudan (), officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in northeastern Africa. It is the largest country in Africa and the Arab world, and tenth largest in the world by area. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east,Kenya and Uganda to the southeast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west and Libya to the northwest. The world's longest river, the Nile, divides the country between east and west sides.
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Switzerland
Switzerland (, , , ), officially the Swiss Confederation (Confoederatio Helvetica in Latin, hence its ISO country codes CH and CHE), is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe where it is bordered by Germany to the north, France to the west, Italy to the south, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east.
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Syria
Syria ( ; ' or '), officially the Syrian Arab Republic (), is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest.
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Taiwan Strait
The Taiwan Strait or Formosa Strait (formerly Black Ditch ()) is a 180-km-wide (111.85-mile-wide) strait between China and Taiwan. The strait is part of the South China Sea and connects to East China Sea to the northeast. The narrowest part is 131 km (81.4 mi.) wide.
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Tanzania
The United Republic of Tanzania (; phonetical: tan-zann-ei-a; or sometimes tan-zanneia; ) is a country in central East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.
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Texas
Texas () is the second-largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state in the contiguous United States.
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The Hague
The Hague (with capital T; Dutch: ', officially also ') is the third largest city in the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam, with a population of 485,818 (as of May 31, 2009) (population of agglomeration: 1,011,459) and an area of approximately 100 km². It is located in the west of the country, in the province of South Holland, of which it is also the provincial capital. The Hague is, like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Almere, part of the Randstad metropolitan area, with 6,659,300 inhabitants.
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Turkmenistan
The Turkmenistan (), also known as Turkmenia () is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkmen SSR). Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest, Uzbekistan to the east and northeast, Kazakhstan to the north and northwest and the Caspian Sea to the west.
http://wn.com/Turkmenistan -
Ukraine
Ukraine ( ; , transliterated: , ), with its area of 603,628 km2, is the second largest country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast respectively.
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a country and sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island nation, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border with another sovereign state, sharing it with the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Great Britain is linked to continental Europe by the Channel Tunnel.
http://wn.com/United_Kingdom -
United States
The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Caribbean and Pacific.
http://wn.com/United_States -
US State Department
http://wn.com/US_State_Department -
Venezuela
Venezuela (; ), officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Spanish: República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south. Its roughly northern coastline includes numerous islands in the Caribbean Sea, and in the north east borders the northern Atlantic Ocean. Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Curaçao, Aruba and the Leeward Antilles lie near the Venezuelan coast. Venezuela's territory covers around with an estimated population of 26,414,816. Venezuela is considered a country with extremely high biodiversity, with habitats ranging from the Andes mountains in the west to the Amazon Basin rainforest in the south, via extensive llanos plains and Caribbean coast in the center and the Orinoco River Delta in the east.
http://wn.com/Venezuela -
Vitim event
The Vitim event or Bodaybo event is believed to be an impact by a bolide or comet nucleus in the Vitim River basin. It occurred near the town of Bodaybo in the Mamsko-Chuisky district of Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia on September 25, 2002 at approximately 10:00 p.m. (local time). The event was also detected by a U.S. military missile-defense satellite.
http://wn.com/Vitim_event -
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. (), formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790. Article One of the United States Constitution provides for a federal district, distinct from the states, to serve as the permanent national capital. The City of Washington was originally a separate municipality within the federal territory until an act of Congress in 1871 established a single, unified municipal government for the whole District. It is for this reason that the city, while legally named the District of Columbia, is known as Washington, D.C. The city shares its name with the U.S. state of Washington, which is located on the country's Pacific coast.
http://wn.com/Washington_DC -
West Bank
The West Bank (, , , ''HaGadah HaMa'aravit'') is a landlocked territory and is the eastern part of the Palestinian territories; on the west bank of the Jordan River in the Middle East. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the country of Jordan. The West Bank also contains a significant coastline along the western bank of the Dead Sea. Since 1967, most of the West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation as what it calls the Judea and Samaria Area. A smaller part of the West Bank is administered by the Israeli civilian authorities as part of Jerusalem District.
http://wn.com/West_Bank -
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, which is almost always referred to popularly and informally as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in Westminster, London, England (UK), located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English, later British and later still (and currently) monarchs of the Commonwealth Realms. It briefly held the status of a cathedral from 1546–1556, and is a Royal Peculiar.
http://wn.com/Westminster_Abbey
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RELEASE
ALBUMS
Deep Still Blue
(Released 2007)
- Where the Stars and Moon Play
- When I See You Again
- Deep Still Blue
- An Ocean Apart
- Sarah's Rainbow
- Little Angel
- Setting Sail
- Summer's End
- Sweet Dreams
- The Voyage Home
The Emerald Way
(Released 2006)
- Inner Light
- Another Answer Came
- Remember Now
- The Emerald Way
- Overheard in a Dream
- Soul Doors
- Unopened Flower
- Timeless
- Traveler Winds
- Secret Shores
This Moment Now
(Released 2003)
- Suddenly Yours
- Sunny Day
- Morning of Light
- Even Now
- Life Is
- Moment of Love
- Romancing the Moon
- A Gate of Dreams
- Children in June
- Bliss
- Dreaming of You
The Sacred Well: Best of 2002
(Released 2002)
- Stardust
- City of Peace
- Lovers' Bridge
- Summer of 300 Years
- Lady of the Moon
- The Sea at Night
- Stella Maris
- Kindred Spirit
- To Touch the Sky
- The Calling
- The Ocean Dreams
- Full Circle
Across an Ocean of Dreams
(Released 2002)
- The Ocean Dreams
- The Sound of Still Water
- The Sea at Night
- Valley of Healing Waters
- The River's Journey
- Oceans of Life
- Well of Wisdom
- Lady of the Moon
- Nautilus
- Heart of the Nile
River of Stars
(Released 2000)
- River of Stars
- Elysian Fields
- Stella Maris
- First Daughter of the Moon
- Starwalkers
- Heaven and Earth
- Lovers' Bridge
- The Dreaming Tree
- Tanabata Moon
- Rays of Light
Wings
(Released 1999)
- Once in Ancient Greece
- A Year and a Day
- The Sands of Crete
- Icarus
- Athens Memories
- The Tower of Minos
- Wings
- Feathers
- Temple of Apollo
Savitri
(Released 1999)
- In the Time of Legend
- Savitri-Child of the Sun
- The Quest
- Satyavan
- One
- Descent Into Darkness
- The Year
- The Forest
- A Voice in the Night
- A Dream Twilight
- The Eternal Day
- Return to Earth
Land of Forever
(Released 1998)
- Summer of 300 Years
- Sea of Dreams
- Land of Forever
- Realms of Splendor
- The Calling
- Dance with a Princess
- Feast of Immortals
- Falling Through Time
- Heavenly Cities
- Oceansky
Chrysalis
(Released 1997)
- To Touch the Sky
- Chrysalis
- A Gift of Life
- Greater Than the Sum
- Spinning the Silk
- Journey Within
- Dream Come True
- Healing Rain
- Cocoon
- Magic Flower
- Return to Freedom
- Memory of the Sky
- Lady of the Lake
- Higher Destination
- Athena
- Firebird
- Breathing Light
- Stillpoint
- Sunlight through a Feather
- The End Is a Beginning
- Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
- In the Bleak Midwinter
- Carol of the Bells
- The First Noel
- O Little Town of Bethlehem
- It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
- What Child Is This
- Away in a Manger
- Silent Night
- O Come All Ye Faithful
Send this Playlist by SMS
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Fifa world cup 2002 - top ten super skills
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:10
- Published: 24 Jun 2007
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: boromir866
www.miniclip.totalh.com Football world cup 2002 - top ten super skills made by fifa not by me 10 Larsson - Sweden vs. Senegal 9 Denilson - Brazil vs. Germany 8 Diouf - Sewden vs. Senegal 7 Sas - Brazil vs. Turkey 6 Ronaldinho - Brazil vs. China 5 Gomez - Costa Rica vs. Brazil 4 Blanco - Mexico vs. Italy 3 Figo - Portugal vs. USA 2 Mansiz - Brazil vs. Turkey 1 Svensson - Sweden vs. Senegal
http://wn.com/Fifa_world_cup_2002__top_ten_super_skills
Free To Fly by 2002
We created this video using performance footage of our band (2002) mixed with elements from our new DVD "A Word in the Wind". Be sure and click on "Watch in HD" if you can! (bottom, right)
http://wn.com/Free_To_Fly_by_2002
Explosive Demolition- 2002 Best Building Implosions
Video from Jan 2003 Int'l Society of Explosive Engineers (ISEE) conference in Las Vegas. It is one of four such "year end highlight videos" produced by Protec/Implosionworld for the annual conference between 1999 & 2003. Approximately 70 implosions from 2002 are seen through our photographer's unique persective... which sometimes involved losing a few cameras. Unfortunately the ISEE eventually alienated the structural blasting component of the society, so these highlight videos were discontinued. Implosionworld's footage is now mostly seen on Discovery Channel and Nat Geo documentaries, etc. NOTE: 9/11 conspiracy folks & politicos save your time, this is not your forum. All 'truther' comments will be removed & accts blocked. Just enjoy the video.... . .
http://wn.com/Explosive_Demolition_2002_Best_Building_Implosions
Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe 2002 high quality
www.hao.ru presents Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe - 2002 high quality rip
http://wn.com/Rednex__Cotton_Eye_Joe_2002_high_quality
2002 World Cup Soccer Commercial
One of the best soccer commercials
http://wn.com/2002_World_Cup_Soccer_Commercial
Michael Jordan 2002: NBA Record 51 pts at age 38
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:32
- Published: 20 Jul 2006
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: hoopsencyclopedia
LEARN TO SCORE LIKE MJ: cli.gs At age 38 and 315 days, MJ shattered the record for the oldest player to score 50+. The game prior had MJ scoring just 6 due to injury which stopped his NBA-record double-figures scoring streak at 866 games. MJ came out to make up for that here. It should be mentioned that MJ's injury limited him to just 2 full-game scrimmages the entire year in practice. One must wonder, without the injury, what might have been possible at ages 38-40? Zone was allowed starting that year with hand-checking tighter than today as one-legged, twilight MJ broke a few records that day.
http://wn.com/Michael_Jordan_2002_NBA_Record_51_pts_at_age_38
HHH return in 2002
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:48
- Published: 25 Oct 2007
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: nwomatt125
*All footage courtesy of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended.* the return of Triple H in 2002
http://wn.com/HHH_return_in_2002
Avril Lavigne - Mobile (Official Unreleased Music Video 2002)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:33
- Published: 05 Jan 2011
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: avrilwhatthehell
Unreleased music video for Avril's song Mobile, from her debut album Let Go
http://wn.com/Avril_Lavigne__Mobile_Official_Unreleased_Music_Video_2002
Chicago (2002)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:26
- Published: 07 Jan 2008
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: bohemianmoviefreak
Theatrical trailer for the hit movie musical "Chicago"
http://wn.com/Chicago_2002
![Yes - Soon [Live 2002]](http://web.archive.org./web/20120131152019im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WybjHMUTFhM/0.jpg "Yes - Soon [Live 2002]")
Mitt Romney in Worcester 2002 "My views are progressive"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:05
- Published: 13 Dec 2011
- Uploaded: 22 Jan 2012
- Author: Akaczynski1
Mitt Romney speaks to reporters after a campaign stop in Worcester, MA in 2002. Follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/Akaczynski1 for more great political videos.
http://wn.com/Mitt_Romney_in_Worcester_2002_My_views_are_progressive
2002 NBA All-Star Game
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:58
- Published: 16 Jan 2008
- Uploaded: 20 Jan 2012
- Author: medestinier
2002 NBA All-Star Game
http://wn.com/2002_NBA_All-Star_Game
Ron Paul's 2002 Predictions All Come True - Incredible Video!
This video was made by CollectiveCheckup at www.youtube.com and ripped to add CC. This video is a famous Ron Paul speech from April 24, 2002 where he makes a series of predictions, and it is juxtaposed with actual news headlines from years later that confirm his predictions all came true.
http://wn.com/Ron_Paul's_2002_Predictions_All_Come_True__Incredible_Video!
Faithless - Insomnia - Live at Glastonbury 2002
Faithless performing Insomnia as the sun sets over the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury 2002... wish i'd been there, but i'm gonna make up for it this year... Bring on June 27th!
http://wn.com/Faithless__Insomnia__Live_at_Glastonbury_2002
Ron Paul's 2002 Predictions Come True
April 24, 2002, US House of Representatives. Congressman Ron Paul predicts the unintended consequences of the Welfare/Warfare State. Most of his predictions have already occurred six years later, is this man a prophet or just wise? (Transcript) Mr. Speaker, our government intervention in the economy and in the private affairs of citizens and the internal affairs of foreign countries leads to uncertainty and many unintended consequences. Here are some of the consequences about which we should be concerned. I predict US taxpayers will pay to rebuild Palestine, both the West Bank and the Gaza, as well as Afghanistan. US taxpayers paid to bomb these areas, so we will be expected to rebuild them. [ US Congress has approved a total of over $700 billion for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans' health care for the three operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks. That figure is part of the entire military budget, which in 2007 alone was $699 billion. In 2007, the United States increased its military aid to Israel by over 25% to an average of $3 billion per year.] Peace, of sorts, will come to the Middle East, but will be short-lived. There will be big promises of more US money and weapons flowing to Israel and to Arab countries allied with the United States. US troops and others will be used to monitor the ``peace.'' In time, an oil boycott will be imposed, with oil prices soaring to historic highs. [$130/barrel <b>...</b>
http://wn.com/Ron_Paul's_2002_Predictions_Come_True
Tom Waits- Letterman interview 2002
Engaging interview with Tom at the time of the realease of Alice and Blood Money
http://wn.com/Tom_Waits_Letterman_interview_2002
Frida
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 122:52
- Published: 15 Dec 2011
- Uploaded: 19 Dec 2011
- Author: LionsgateUKMovies
Nominated for six 2002 Academy Awards(R), including Salma Hayek for Best Actress, FRIDA is the triumphant motion picture about an exceptional woman who lived an unforgettable life! A product of humble beginnings, Frida Kahlo (Hayek) earns fame as a talented artist with a unique vision. And from her enduring relationship with her mentor and husband, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina SPIDERMAN 2), to her scandalous affairs, Frida's uncompromising personality would inspire her greatest creations!
http://wn.com/Frida
Ron Paul Was Right (2002)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:52
- Published: 06 Jan 2012
- Uploaded: 25 Jan 2012
- Author: compelled2283
In a 5 minute 2002 speech, Ron Paul tells the speaker exactly what is going to happen (and has happened) by the end of 2012. "I have no timetable for these predictions, but just in case, keep them around and look at them in 5-10 years. Let's hope and pray that I'm wrong on all accounts. If so, I will be very pleased. " Bad news: correct on all accounts.
http://wn.com/Ron_Paul_Was_Right_2002
Adaptation
Director Spike Jonze delivers a stunningly original comedy that seamlessly blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche (Cooper), NewYorker journalist Susan Orlean (Streep), Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Cage), and his twin brother, Donald (also Cage). As Charlie struggles to adapt Orlean's best-selling book "The OrchidThief," he writes himself into his own movie. The various stories crash into one another exploding into a wildly imaginative film. ADAPTATION, the year's most talked about movie, is at once a hilarious drama and a moving comedy. MPAA Rating: R © 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://wn.com/Adaptation
Coldplay Politik Live @ Glastonbury 2002
Coldplay performing POLITIK live @ glastonbury in 2002
http://wn.com/Coldplay_Politik_Live_@_Glastonbury_2002
David Bowie - Ashes to ashes (Olympia)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:30
- Published: 18 May 2008
- Uploaded: 21 Jan 2012
- Author: neurotickynedouk
David Bowie - Ashes to ashes Live at Olympia, Paris 1 July, 2002
http://wn.com/David_Bowie__Ashes_to_ashes_Olympia
Ferry Corsten - Tokyo Video Compilation (2002)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 16:46
- Published: 29 Jul 2010
- Uploaded: 21 Jan 2012
- Author: ferrycorstenofficial
A registration of Ferry Corsten in Tokyo 2002. Taken from the "Ferry Corsten : World Tour Tokyo" mix compilation as released via Purple Eye / Tsunami in 2002. 01. Gouryella - Tenshi 02. Ferry Corsten - Punk 03. System F - Needlejuice 04. Eon - Pocket Damage 05. System F - Out Of The Blue
http://wn.com/Ferry_Corsten__Tokyo_Video_Compilation_2002
2002 FIFA worldcup final Brazil V Germany (highlights)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:58
- Published: 16 Aug 2007
- Uploaded: 24 Jan 2012
- Author: FIFAWorldcup1998
2002 FIFA worldcup final Brazil V Germany (highlights)
http://wn.com/2002_FIFA_worldcup_final_Brazil_V_Germany_highlights
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Creative Commons / Gpetrov![Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery seen from Lake Siverskoye. Kirillov (Russian: Кири́ллов) is a town and the administrative center of Kirillovsky District of Vologda Oblast, Russia,[1] located on the shores of Lakes Siverskoye and Dolgoye 100 kilometers (62 mi) northeast of Cherepovets.](http://web.archive.org./web/20120131152019im_/http://cdn9.wn.com/pd/46/ee/bf4969fb408cdec5bc991747a55a_small.jpg "Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery seen from Lake Siverskoye. Kirillov (Russian: Кири́ллов) is a town and the administrative center of Kirillovsky District of Vologda Oblast, Russia,[1] located on the shores of Lakes Siverskoye and Dolgoye 100 kilometers (62 mi) northeast of Cherepovets.")
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![Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery seen from Lake Siverskoye. Kirillov (Russian: Кири́ллов) is a town and the administrative center of Kirillovsky District of Vologda Oblast, Russia,[1] located on the shores of Lakes Siverskoye and Dolgoye 100 kilometers (62 mi) northeast of Cherepovets.](http://web.archive.org./web/20120131152019/http://cdn3.wn.com/pd/46/ee/bf4969fb408cdec5bc991747a55a_medium.jpg "Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery seen from Lake Siverskoye. Kirillov (Russian: Кири́ллов) is a town and the administrative center of Kirillovsky District of Vologda Oblast, Russia,[1] located on the shores of Lakes Siverskoye and Dolgoye 100 kilometers (62 mi) northeast of Cherepovets.")
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DNA India
Designated court judge Jyotsna Yagnik visited various spots in Naroda Patia area of Ahmedabad where 96 people were killed by a riotous mob on February 28, 2002. The judge had decided to inspect the site to take note of the topography of the area for better assessment of the evidences, statements and...
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The Columbus Dispatch
As city’s leader, he won budget cuts, income-tax hike John Brennan, 64, who was re-elected mayor last fall, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. Related Items The Daily Briefing...
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Fitch Withdraws Prerefunded Maturities of Ottawa County Water Supply System (MI) Ref Bond Ser 2002
30 Jan 2012
Business Wire
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fitch Ratings has withdrawn its ratings on certain maturities of the following bond due to prerefunding activity: -- Ottawa County (MI) (Ottawa County Water Supply System) refunding bonds series 2002. The correct rating history for the above bond is now reflected on...
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Recall Alert: 2001-2002 Mazda Tribute
30 Jan 2012
Chicago Tribune
Mazda is recalling more than 50,000 Tribute compact SUVs to address a brake fluid leak, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration....
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The Grio
In the latest episode of Whoo Kid's Untold Stories the G- Unit DJ speaks about the day that Kanye West got into a car crash that almost took his life. During the show DJ Whoo Kid speaks about a studio session at which Kanye and Ludacris...
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Goal
The announcement through Ahn's agency comes after 14 years of high-profile play in both Asia and Europe, including his unforgettable goal against Italy at the 2002 tournament Sign up with 188BET for a FREE bet up to £25 – Great Prices, Every Game Open an account with Sportingbet today and get...
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Korea's 2002 W.Cup hero Ahn Jung-Hwan to retire
27 Jan 2012
Yahoo Daily News
South Korean footballer Ahn Jung-Hwan, famous for his dramatic goal in the 2002 World Cup, will retire next week, his agency said Friday. In a press release quoted by Yonhap news agency, Moro Sports Korea said Ahn would hold a press conference Tuesday to announce his decision. "Ahn returned from...
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The Washington Post
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__NOTOC__
2002 (MMII) was a common year that started on a Tuesday. In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 2002nd year of the Common Era, or of Anno Domini; the 2nd year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 3rd of the 2000s decade.
International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains
Year of the Outback in Australia
National Science Year in the United Kingdom
Autism Awareness Year in the United Kingdom
January 1
* The Open Skies mutual surveillance treaty, initially signed in 1992, officially enters into force.
* Euro notes and coins are issued in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands.
January 8 – The No Child Left Behind Act is signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush.
January 9 The United States Department of Justice announces it will pursue a criminal investigation of Enron.
January 10 – Enrique Bolaños begins his 5-year term as President of the Republic of Nicaragua.
January 14 – The asylum case of Adelaide Abankwah is heard in New York.
January 16 – The UN Security Council unanimously establishes an arms embargo and freezes the assets of Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban.
January 17 – The eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo displaces an estimated 400,000 people.
January 23 – ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan, accused of being a CIA agent by his captors.
January 27 – Several explosions at a military dump in Lagos, Nigeria kill more than 1,000.
January 31 – A large section of the Antarctic Larsen Ice Shelf begins disintegrating, consuming about 3,250 km (1,254 miles) over 35 days.
February 1 – Kidnapped ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter Daniel Pearl is murdered in Karachi, Pakistan.
February 3 – Costa Rica holds presidential and congressional elections.
February 8–February 24 – The 2002 Winter Olympics are held in Salt Lake City, Utah.
February 8– The Cartoon Network series The Cramp Twins debuts.
February 12
* The trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic begins at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
* The U.S. Secretary of Energy makes the decision that Yucca Mountain is suitable to be the United States' nuclear repository.
February 13 – Queen Elizabeth gives former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani an honorary knighthood.
February 19 – NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe begins to map the surface of Mars using its thermal emission imaging system.
February 20 – In Reqa Al-Gharbiya, Egypt, a fire on a train injures over 65 and kills at least 370.
February 22
* Angolan political and rebel leader Jonas Savimbi is killed in a military ambush.
* A Spanish-facilitated ceasefire begins in Sri Lanka.
February 23 – FARC kidnaps Ingrid Betancourt in Colombia while she campaigns for the presidency.
February 27 – A series of riots leaves hundreds dead, after 59 Hindu pilgrims die aboard a train burned by a Muslim mob in Godhra, India.
February 28
* The ex-currencies of all euro-using nations cease to be legal tender in the European Union.
* Gujarat communal riots begin, wherein the Gulbarg Society massacre takes place in Ahmedabad, in which 69 people were burnt alive or killed.
March 1
* U.S. invasion of Afghanistan: In eastern Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda begins.
* Continuing violence in Ahmedabad, India kills 28; police shoot and kill 5 rioters.
* The Envisat environmental satellite successfully reaches an orbit 800 km above the Earth using an Ariane 5 on its 11th launch, carrying the heaviest payload to date at 8,500 kg.
* ''STS-109'': Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' flies the Hubble Space Telescope service mission, its last before ''STS-107''.
March 3 – São Tomé and Príncipe hold legislative elections.
March 4 – Ansett Australia, one of the oldest airlines in the world and the second largest in Australia, ceases operation after collapsing financially. This event also marks the largest job loss in Australian history.
March 6 – France agrees to return the remains of Saartjie Baartman to South Africa.
March 12 – In Houston, Texas, Andrea Yates is found guilty of drowning her 5 children on June 20, 2001. She is later sentenced to life in prison.
March 14
* 125 vehicles are involved in a massive pile up on Interstate 75 in Ringgold, Georgia.
* ECOWAS Parliament established.
March 17
* Portugal holds parliamentary elections.
* In Islamabad, Pakistan, the International Protestant Church attack occurs.
March 19 – US war in Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda ends (started on March 1) after killing 500 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, with 11 allied troop fatalities.
March 21 – In Pakistan, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and 3 others are charged with the kidnapping and killing of ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter Daniel Pearl.
March 24 – The 74th Academy Awards, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, are held at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California with the film ''A Beautiful Mind'' winning Best Picture.
March 27 – A Palestinian suicide bomber kills 30 Israeli civilians and injures 140 others at the Park Hotel in Netanya, triggering Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale counter-terrorist Israeli military incursion into the West Bank, two days later.
April 2 – Israeli forces besiege the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, when militants take shelter there.
April 9 – The funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother takes place in Westminster Abbey, London.
April 11 – April 14 – A military coup d'état against the leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez fails.
April 15 – An Air China Boeing 767-200 crashes into a hillside during heavy rain and fog near Pusan, South Korea, killing 128.
April 17 – Four Canadian infantrymen are killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire from 2 US F-16s.
April 18 – The discovery of a new insect order, Mantophasmatodea, is announced.
April 21 – French presidential election, 2002: The first round results in a runoff between Jacques Chirac and the leader of the main French far-right party, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
April 22 – At a special session of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Director-General Jose Bustani is fired.
April 25 – ''Soyuz TM-34'': South African Mark Shuttleworth blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome; he had paid £15 million for the trip.
April 27 – The Laughlin, Nevada River Run Riot kills 3.
May 5 – In the second round of the French presidential election Jacques Chirac is reelected.
May 6 – In the Netherlands, politician Pim Fortuyn is assassinated.
May 9
* A 38-day stand-off in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ends, when the Palestinians inside agree to have 13 suspected militants among them deported to several different countries.
* In Kaspiysk, Russia, a remote-control bomb explodes during a holiday parade, killing 43 and injuring at least 130.
May 10 – FBI agent Robert Hanssen is sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for selling American secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
May 12
* Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a 5-day visit with Fidel Castro, becoming the first U.S. President, in or out of office, to visit the island since Castro's 1959 revolution.
* The Russian Shuttle ''Buran'' is destroyed in the Buran hangar collapse, killing 8 workers.
May 20 – East Timor regains its independence.
May 21 – The US State Department releases a report naming 7 state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.
May 22 – 16th Street Baptist Church bombing: A jury in Birmingham, Alabama convicts former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry of the 1963 murders of 4 girls.
May 25
* Estonia hosts the first Eurovision Song Contest in a former Soviet republic.
* China Airlines Flight 611 disintegrates near the Penghu Islands at Taiwan Strait, killing all 225 people on board.
May 26
* The Mars Odyssey finds signs of large water ice deposits on the planet Mars.
* A barge collides with the Interstate 40 bridge across the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma, killing 14.
May 31 – June 30 – the 2002 FIFA World Cup is held in South Korea and Japan
June 3 – The ''Party in the Palace'' takes place at Buckingham Palace, London for Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee celebrations.
June 4 – The planetoid Quaoar is discovered orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper belt.
June 6 – Eastern Mediterranean Event: An object with an estimated diameter of 10 meters collides with Earth, over the Mediterranean Sea, and detonates in mid-air.
June 8 – Serena Williams defeats her sister Venus Williams in straight sets to win the 2002 French Open.
June 10
* An annular solar eclipse occurs.
* The first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of 2 humans, is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the United Kingdom.
June 11 – Antonio Meucci is recognized as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress.
June 14 – In Karachi, Pakistan, a car bomb in front of the U.S. Consulate kills 12 Pakistanis and injures 50.
June 15 – Near Earth Asteroid 2002 MN misses the planet by 75,000 miles (120,000 km), about 1/3 the distance to the moon.
June 24 – The Igandu train disaster in Dodoma Region, Tanzania, kills 281 people in the worst rail accident in African history.
June 30 – Brazil wins its fifth FIFA World Cup, defeating Germany in the final.
July 1
* The International Criminal Court is established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Crimes committed on or after this date may be prosecuted by the court.
* A Russian passenger jet and a cargo plane collide over the town of Überlingen, Germany; 72 are killed (see Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937).
July 9 – The Organization of African Unity is disbanded and replaced by the African Union.
July 10
:* At a Sotheby's auction, Peter Paul Rubens' painting "The Massacre of the Innocents" (first version) is sold for £49.5million (US$76.2 million) to Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet.
:* A helicopter crash in Cyprus kills the head of the Cyprus National Guard, Lt. General Evangelos Florakis.
July 14 – During Bastille Day celebrations, Jacques Chirac escapes an assassination attempt.
July 15 – In Washington, D.C., "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh pleads guilty to aiding the enemy and possession of explosives during the commission of a felony; Lindh agrees to serve 10 years in prison for each charge.
July 19 – Hail kills 25 and injures hundreds in the Chinese province of Henan.
July 21 – Telecommunications giant WorldCom files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (the largest such filing in United States history).
July 27
* A Sukhoi Su-27 fighter crashes at an air show in Ukraine, killing 77 and injuring more than 100, making it the worst air show disaster in history (see Sknyliv airshow disaster).
* Helen Clark, leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, is re-elected in a landslide victory.
August – The 2002 European floods ravage Central Europe.
August 10 – Turkmenistan adopts a law to rename all the months and most of the days of the week according to Ruhnama, a book written by Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov.
August 12 – In Arlington, Virginia, US Airways declares bankruptcy.
August 26 – First live video stream of Major League Baseball by MLB.com, to 30,000 out-of-market online viewers. Becomes known in 2003 as MLB.TV, pioneering technology to become first pro sports league to stream live video of its full schedule.
September 2 – The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, successor of the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment, 1983 World Commission on Environment and Development, and the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development, opens.
September 5 – A car bomb kills at least 30 people in Afghanistan, and an apparent assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai fails the same day.
September 10 – Switzerland joins the United Nations.
September 11 – The World Summit on Sustainable Development comes to a close.
September 15 – The Swedish parliamentary election, 2002 leaves Prime Minister Göran Persson and the Social Democrats in power.
September 19 – Civil war starts in Côte d'Ivoire.
September 20 – The Kolka-Karmadon rock ice slide occurs.
September 22 – The German federal election leaves Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, his Social Democrats and the Greens in power.
September 25 – The Vitim event, a possible bolide impact, occurs in Siberia, Russia.
September 26 – The Senegalese passenger ferry ''Joola'' capsizes in a storm off the coast of Gambia; 1,863 are killed.
October 2
* The Congress of the United States passes a joint resolution, which authorizes the President to use the United States Armed Forces as he deems necessary and appropriate, against Iraq.
* The Beltway sniper attacks begin with 5 shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland.
October 7 – The discovery of Quaoar is announced.
October 9 – The Dot-com bubble bear market reaches bottom, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average slips below 7,200.
October 11 – Myyrmanni bombing: A lone bomber explodes a home-made bomb in the Myyrmanni shopping mall north of Helsinki, Finland; the casualties include himself.
October 12 – Terrorists detonate bombs in 2 nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 and injuring over 300.
October 16 – Iraq War Resolution is authorized by a majority of the U.S. Congress.
October 21 – 9 of 13 DNS root servers are disabled in a DDoS attack.
October 22 – 25 – Chechen rebels take control of the theatre ''Nord-Ost'' in Moscow and hold the audience hostage.
October 24 – The Beltway snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, are arrested.
October 25 – U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, his family, and his staff are killed in a plane accident at Eveleth, Minnesota.
October 27 – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is elected President of Brazil.
November 2 – The Godless Americans March on Washington brings together 2,000 atheists, freethinkers, and humanists in a mile-long parade down the National Mall.
November 5 – The U.S. Republican Party maintains control of the House of Representatives and gains control of the United States Senate.
November 6 – The U.S. Federal Reserve System drops its primary discount rate by 50 basis points to 0.75%, putting the real interest rate solidly below the inflation rate.
November 7 – Iran bans the advertising of United States products.
November 8 – Iraq disarmament crisis: The United Nations Security Council unanimously approves UN Security Council Resolution 1441, forcing Saddam Hussein to disarm or face "serious consequences".
November 13
* Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq agrees to the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1441.
* The oil tanker ''Prestige'' sinks off the Galician coast, causing a huge oil spill.
November 14 – Argentina defaults on a US $805 million World Bank loan payment.
November 15 – Hu Jintao becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
November 16 – A Campaign against Climate Change march takes place in London from Lincoln's Inn Fields, past Esso offices to the United States Embassy.
November 18 – Iraq disarmament crisis: United Nations weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix arrive in Iraq.
November 21 – At the NATO Summit in Prague, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia are invited to join the organization.
November 22 – In Nigeria, more than 100 are killed at an attack aimed at the Miss World contestants.
November 25 – U.S. President George W. Bush signs the Homeland Security Act into law, establishing the Department of Homeland Security, in the largest U.S. government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.
November 26 – Legislation by the European Court of Human Rights and Law Lords, ruling in favour of convicted murderer Anthony Anderson, ends the right of the Home Secretary to set minimum terms for convicted murderers.
December 7 – As required by the recently passed U.N. resolution, Iraq files a 12,000 page weapons declaration with the U.N. Security Council.
December 9 – United Airlines, the second largest airline in the world, files for bankruptcy.
December 10 – The High Court of Australia hands down its judgement in the Internet defamation dispute in the case of Gutnick v Dow Jones.
December 12 – Hans Enoksen is elected prime minister of Greenland.
December 27 – A suicide truck-bomb attack destroys the headquarters of Chechnya's Moscow-backed government, killing 72.
December 29 – The Communist New People's Army blows up a bust of Ferdinand Marcos in Benguet, Philippines.
December 30 – An eruption on the volcanic island Stromboli off the coast of Sicily causes a flank failure and tsunami. The island is later evacuated.
Population Division of the United Nations calculate that 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV.
February 5 – Davis Cleveland, American actor
July 22 – Prince Felix of Denmark, Prince of Denmark
October 6 – Cleopatra Stratan, Moldovan child singer
January 3 – Freddy Heineken, Dutch-born beer magnate (b. 1923)
January 8
* Alexander Prokhorov, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1916)
* Dave Thomas, American fast food entrepreneur (''Wendy's'') (b. 1932)
January 12
* Stanley Unwin, South African comedian (b. 1911)
* Cyrus Vance, American politician, 59th United States Secretary of State (b. 1917)
January 15 – Eugène Brands, Dutch painter (b. 1913)
January 16
* Michael Anthony Bilandic, Mayor of Chicago (b. 1923)
* Bobo Olson, American boxer (b. 1928)
January 17
* Queenie Leonard, British singer and actress (b. 1905)
* Camilo José Cela, Spanish writer (b. 1916)
January 22
* Jack Shea, American double-Gold medalist in speed skating (b. 1910)
* Peggy Lee, American singer and actress (b. 1920)
January 23
* Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist (b. 1930)
* Robert Nozick, American philosopher (b. 1938)
January 28 – Astrid Lindgren, Swedish children's book author (b. 1907)
February 6 – Max Perutz, Austrian-born molecular biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (b. 1914)
February 8
* Joachim Hoffmann, German historian (b. 1930)
* Thomaz Soares da Silva, Brazilian football player (b. 1921)
February 9 – Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (b. 1930)
February 10 – Traudl Junge, German private secretary of Adolf Hitler (b. 1920)
February 12 – John Eriksen, Danish football player (b. 1957)
February 13 – Waylon Jennings, American country music singer (b. 1937)
February 14 – Nándor Hidegkuti, Hungarian footballer (b. 1922)
February 15
* Howard K. Smith, American television journalist (''ABC News'') (b. 1914)
* Kevin Smith, New Zealand actor (b. 1963)
February 16 – Walter Winterbottom, English football manager (b. 1913)
February 19 – Virginia Hamilton, American writer (b. 1936)
February 22
* Chuck Jones, American animator (b. 1912)
* Jonas Savimbi, Angolan rebel and political leader (b. 1934)
February 24 – Leo Ornstein, American composer and pianist (b. 1892)
February 27 – Spike Milligan, British comedian, writer, and poet (b. 1918)
February 28 – Helmut Zacharias, German violinist (b. 1920)
March 11 – James Tobin, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1918)
March 12 – Spyros Kyprianou, former President of Cyprus (b. 1932)
March 20 – Ibn Al-Khattab, Saudi guerilla (b. 1969)
March 24 – César Milstein, Argentine scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1927)
March 27
* Milton Berle, American comedian and actor (b. 1908)
* Dudley Moore, British pianist, comedian, and actor (b. 1935)
* Billy Wilder, Polish-American film screenwriter and director (b. 1906)
March 30 – Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, queen consort of George VI of the United Kingdom (b. 1900)
April 5 – Layne Staley, American singer (b. 1967)
April 8 – Maria Felix, Mexican actress (b. 1914)
April 9 – Leopold Vietoris, Austrian mathematician (b. 1891)
April 15 – Byron White, American athlete and Supreme Court Justice (b. 1917)
April 16
* Franz Krienbühl, Swiss speed skater (b. 1929)
* Robert Urich, American actor (b. 1946)
April 18 – Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian explorer (b. 1914)
April 22 – Linda Lovelace, American pornographic actress (b. 1949)
April 25 – Lisa Lopes, American rapper; one-third of the multi-platinum girl group TLC (b. 1971)
April 27
* George Alec Effinger, American author (b. 1947)
* Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, Swiss industrialist and art collector (b. 1921)
* Ruth Handler, American toy manufacturer (b. 1916)
May 5 – Hugo Banzer, Bolivian politician, 62nd and 75th President of Bolivia (b. 1926)
May 6 – Pim Fortuyn, Dutch politician and professor (b. 1948)
May 11 – Joseph Bonanno, Italian-born gangster (b. 1905)
May 13 – Valeri Lobanovsky, Ukrainian football manager (b. 1939)
May 18 – Davey Boy Smith, British professional wrestler (b. 1962)
May 19 – John Gorton, Australian politician, 19th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1911)
May 20 – Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist and author (b. 1941)
May 21 – Niki de Saint Phalle, French artist (b. 1930)
May 23 – Sam Snead, American golfer (b. 1912)
May 26 – Mamo Wolde, Ethiopian runner (b. 1932)
May 28 – Jean Berger, German-American composer (b. 1909)
June 4 – Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Peruvian politician, 85th and 88th President of Peru (b. 1912)
June 5 – Dee Dee Ramone, American bassist (b. 1951)
June 6 – Hans Janmaat, Dutch politician (b. 1934)
June 7 – Lilian, Princess of Réthy, Belgian princess (b. 1916)
June 10 – John Gotti, American gangster (b. 1940)
June 17 – Fritz Walter, German footballer (b. 1920)
June 24 – Pierre Werner, Luxembourgian politician, 19th and 21st Prime Minister of Luxembourg (b. 1913)
June 26 – Arnold Brown, English General of The Salvation Army (b. 1913)
June 27 – John Entwistle, English bassist (b. 1944)
June 29 – Rosemary Clooney, American singer and actress (b. 1928)
July 5
* Benjamin O. Davis Jr., American general (b. 1912)
* Katy Jurado, Mexican actress (b. 1924)
* Ted Williams, American baseball player (b. 1918)
July 6
* Dhirubhai Ambani, Indian businessman (b. 1932)
* John Frankenheimer, American film director (b. 1930)
July 9 – Rod Steiger, American actor (b. 1925)
July 10 – Evangelos Florakis, Greek military officer (b. 1943)
July 13 – Yousuf Karsh, Turkish-born photographer (b. 1908)
July 14 – Joaquín Balaguer, Dominican politician, 41st, 45th and 49th President of the Dominican Republic (b. 1906)
July 16 – John Cocke, American computer scientist (b. 1925)
July 17 – Joseph Luns, Dutch politician and diplomat, 5th Secretary General of NATO (b. 1911)
July 19 – Alan Lomax, American folklorist and musicologist (b. 1915)
July 23 – Chaim Potok, American author and rabbi (b. 1929)
July 25 – Abdur Rahman Badawi, Egyptian philosopher (b. 1917)
July 28 – Archer John Porter Martin, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
August 4 – Carmen Silvera, British actress (b. 1922)
August 5
*Chick Hearn, American SportsCaster (b. 1916)
*Franco Lucentini, Italian writer (b. 1920)
August 6 – Edsger W. Dijkstra, Dutch computer scientist (b. 1930)
August 11 – Galen Rowell, American photographer, writer, and climber (b. 1940)
August 14 – Dave Williams, American singer (b. 1972)
August 16 – Abu Nidal, Paleiostinian militant (b. 1937)
August 31
* Lionel Hampton, American musician (b. 1908)
* George Porter, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1920)
September 11 – Kim Hunter, American actress (b. 1922)
September 18 – Bob Hayes, American athlete (b. 1942)
September 19
* Robert Guéï, Ivorian military ruler (b. 1941)
* Duncan Hallas, prominent member of the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain (b. 1925)
September 21 – Robert Lull Forward, American author and physicist (b. 1932)
October 6 – Claus van Amsberg, German born Prince Consort of the Netherlands (b. 1926)
October 9
* Sopubek Begaliev, Soviet-era economist and politician (b. 1931)
* Aileen Wuornos, American serial killer (b. 1956)
October 12 – Ray Conniff, American musician and bandleader (b. 1916)
October 13 – Stephen Ambrose, American historian and biographer (b. 1936)
October 18 – Nikolai Rukavishnikov, Russian cosmonaut (b. 1932)
October 25 – Richard Harris, Irish actor (b. 1930)
October 30 – Jam-Master Jay, American Hip-Hop DJ (b. 1965)
November 2 – Charles Sheffield, English author and physicist (b. 1935)
November 9 – Merlin Santana, American actor (b. 1976)
November 12 – Károly Doncsecz, Slovenian potter (b. 1918)
November 15 – Myra Hindley, English murderer (b. 1942)
November 17 – Abba Eban, Israeli politician and diplomat, 3rd Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1915)
November 18 – James Coburn, American actor (b. 1928)
November 19 – Max Reinhardt, British publisher (b. 1915)
November 22 – Parley Baer, American actor (b. 1914)
November 24 – John Rawls, American political theorist (b. 1921)
December 3 – Glenn Quinn, Irish actor (b. 1970)
December 5 – Ne Win, Burmese military commander (b. 1911)
December 18 – Ray Hnatyshyn, Governor General of Canada (b. 1934)
December 22
* Desmond Hoyte, Guyanese politician, 3rd Prime Minister of Guyana and 4th President of Guyana (b. 1929)
* Joe Strummer, British musician (b. 1952)
Peace – Jimmy Carter
Literature – Imre Kertész
Chemistry – John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka, Kurt Wüthrich
Physics – Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba, Riccardo Giacconi
Physiology or Medicine – Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, and John E. Sulston
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith
Laurent Lafforgue, Vladimir Voevodsky
2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist – Google's Yearly List of Major Events and Top Searches for 2002
Top Stories of 2002 - CNN
Year in Review - Netscape
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bn:২০০২
zh-min-nan:2002 nî
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bh:२००२
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gan:2002年
hak:2002-ngièn
xal:2002 җил
ko:2002년
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hi:२००२
hr:2002.
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bpy:মারি ২০০২
id:2002
ia:2002
os:2002-æм аз
is:2002
it:2002
he:2002
jv:2002
kn:೨೦೦೨
pam:2002
krc:2002 джыл
ka:2002
csb:2002
kk:2002
kw:2002
sw:2002
kv:2002 во
ht:2002 (almanak gregoryen)
ku:2002
la:2002
lv:2002. gads
lb:2002
lt:2002 m.
lij:2002
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ln:2002
jbo:2002moi
lmo:2002
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mi:2002
mr:इ.स. २००२
arz:2002
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mdf:2002
mn:2002
nah:2002
nl:2002
nds-nl:2002
ne:सन् २००२
new:सन् २००२
ja:2002年
nap:2002
no:2002
nn:2002
nrm:2002
nov:2002
oc:2002
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pa:੨੦੦੨
pi:२००२
pag:2002
pnb:2002
pap:2002
pms:2002
tpi:2002
nds:2002
pl:2002
pt:2002
crh:2002
ty:2002
ksh:Joohr 2002
ro:2002
qu:2002
rue:2002
ru:2002 год
sah:2002
se:2002
stq:2002
sq:2002
scn:2002
simple:2002
sk:2002
sl:2002
so:2002
ckb:٢٠٠٢
sr:2002
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fi:2002
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ta:2002
kab:2002
tt:2002 ел
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tet:2002
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tg:2002
tr:2002
tk:2002
udm:2002 ар
uk:2002
ur:2002ء
vec:2002
vi:2002
vo:2002
fiu-vro:2002
wa:2002
zh-classical:二〇〇二年
vls:2002
war:2002
yi:2002
yo:2002
zh-yue:2002年
diq:2002
bat-smg:2002
zh:2002年
The year 2002 was designated the:
Events
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February
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April
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June
July
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November
December
Date unknown
Births
Deaths
January
February
March
April
May
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Nobel Prizes
Fields Medalists
In fiction
References
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Background | solo_singer |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Brooke Ellen Bollea |
| Birth date | May 05, 1988 |
| Origin | Tampa, Florida, U.S. |
| Instruments | Vocals, piano |
| Genre | Pop, dance-pop, R&B;, hip hop |
| Occupation | Singer, songwriter, television personality |
| Years active | 2002–present |
| Label | Storch, SoBe, Fontana |
| Related acts | Scott Storch, Colby O'Donis, Paul Wall, Flo Rida, Stack$ |
| Website | Official Website }} |
Brooke Ellen Bollea (born May 5, 1988), better known by her stage name Brooke Hogan, is an American singer, actress, model, socialite, and television personality, and the oldest child of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan (Terry Gene Bollea). She appeared on the reality-television series ''Hogan Knows Best'', which focused on her family, and which premiered on July 10, 2005 on VH1. Since the cancellation of ''Hogan Knows Best'', she has starred in the now-cancelled reality series spin-off, ''Brooke Knows Best'', which focuses on her life independent from her parents and living with two roommates.
Hogan released her debut album in 2006, titled ''Undiscovered''. In 2009, she released her second studio album, ''The Redemption''.
Early life
Brooke Hogan was born in Tampa, Florida, the older child of Hulk Hogan (Terry Gene Bollea) and Linda Bollea. She has one younger brother, Nick Hogan (Nick Bollea).In high school, she took dance classes, voice lessons, piano lessons, and gymnastics. She joined the cheerleading squad of her Clearwater, Florida school, Clearwater Central Catholic, in her freshman year. Hogan graduated from high school at the age of sixteen.
Career
2002–2005: Music beginnings and ''Hogan Knows Best''
Hogan was signed to Trans Continental Records in 2002. Some early music was produced with the help of Rich Cronin. Her first song on the United States singles charts was "Everything to Me". Produced and written by Shep Goodman and Kenny Gioia as part of her album ''This Voice'', the single was released in July 2004. It appeared at #97 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the Hot 100 Singles Sales, but dropped off the chart in a few weeks. The album was planned for release September 21, 2004, but this never happened. Hogan opened for Hilary Duff in support of her unreleased debut. She sang the national anthems before Game 7 of the 2004 Stanley Cup Finals on June 7, 2004. During this time manager Larry Rudolph helped her rise to fame as well as work on her debut album.Hogan appeared with her father in an hour-long profile on VH1, ''(Inside) Out: Hulk Hogan, Stage Dad''. The success of this special spawned an entire series. ''Hogan Knows Best'' debuted in July 2005 and was the highest-rated series premiere in VH1's network history. Hulk Hogan said the series, which helped Brooke become a household name, was intended in part to promote Brooke's music career.
''Hogan Knows Best'' presented her father as strict with her dating. On the show, Hulk placed a GPS tracker on Brooke's vehicle that enabled him to track her whereabouts and shut down the engine of her car remotely. However, Brooke said in a later interview that her father loosened up after her eighteenth birthday.
2006–2008: ''Undiscovered'' and ''Brooke Knows Best''
In 2006, Hogan changed record labels and became the first artist signed to Scott Storch's label, initially called Storchaveli Records, but later named Storch Music Company. She also signed with ''SoBe Entertainment''.Hogan made a special appearance with her father on Saturday Night's Main Event on July 15, 2006, shortly before the release of her first album. On the program, her father was challenged to a match by Randy Orton at SummerSlam, who had previously mentioned Brooke in a sexual manner on WWE television.
Hogan's first single, "About Us", premiered on the season two finale of ''Hogan Knows Best''. The album, ''Undiscovered'', was released October 24, 2006. The album debuted at #28 on the Billboard 200, selling 30,000 copies in its first week. The album went on to sell 127,000 copies. In 2006 Hogan won a Teen Choice Award for Best Choice Grill for the music video for "About Us".
Hogan appeared in the November 2006 edition of ''FHM'', becoming the first FHM Cover Model under 21 years old. As a result, the November issue had no liquor advertising: "In the very rare instance that you might have a cover star under the age of 21, they don't want to be in the position of seeming to market to anyone under age."
In December 2006, Hogan began working on new material but stated that she was only doing it for fun. Then in January 2007, her label decided that they would re-release her debut album the next month. Hogan decided against it and opted to record her second album. By August 2007, Hogan confirmed that she would be departing from one of her labels, ''SMC'', and soon confirmed that she had signed a dual contract with ''SoBe Entertainment'' and ''Fontana Records'' and was at work on her second album.
Hogan appeared as a panel judge in ''America's Prom Queen'' in early 2008. A spin-off series of ''Hogan Knows Best'' called ''Brooke Knows Best'' premiered July 13, 2008 on VH1. Two seasons have aired.
2009–present: Film debut and ''The Redemption''
In 2009, Hogan made her film debut in the low budget live action film ''Little Hercules in 3D'' not in 3D. The filming of the movie was shown on the second season of ''Hogan Knows Best''. In November 2009 Hogan was featured in Toni Braxton's music video for "Yesterday".On March 31, 2009, she released the lead single from her second album, "Falling", featuring the rapper Stacks. She revealed during a visit to Power 96 in March that the name of her second album would be ''The Redemption''. Hogan later stated the album was due for a June 30, 2009 release, and that the second single would be released on June 9 and would be "Hey Yo!". The second single was later released on June 30, 2009 instead and the album was announced for a July 21, 2009 release. The album debuted at #144 on the Billboard 200.
She was released from her four-year contract with SoBe Entertainment a year early after the promotion for the album concluded. She is now only signed to Fontana Records. To date, she is the only artist signed to the label.
On November 10, 2009, Brooke Hogan released a new song, "User Friendly", on her YouTube account, BrookeStarTV.
In January 2010, Hogan appeared on ''TNA Impact!'' and at Final Resolution in support of her father, who was making his first appearances with the company. Hogan was in attendance on the Monday, March 8 edition of ''Impact!'' before her father faced Ric Flair and A.J. Styles. In 2010 and early 2011 Brooke recorded her third official studio album.
Filmography
| Film | |||
| ! Year | ! Film | ! Role | ! Notes |
| 2009 | ''Little Hercules in 3D'' | Robin, Cameo Role | IMDB, Not actually in 3D |
| 2011 | ''Sand Sharks'' | Sandy Powers | |
| 2011 | ''Devour'' | Britney Baer | |
| 2012 | ''2 Headed Shark Attack'' | Currently in production | |
| Television | |||
| ! Year | ! Film | ! Role | ! Notes |
| 2005–2007 | ''Hogan Knows Best'' | Herself | |
| 2007 | ''Wild 'n Out'' | Herself | |
| 2008 | ''American Prom Queen'' | Herself/Panelist | |
| 2008–2009 | ''Brooke Knows Best'' | Herself | |
Discography
;Studio albums| Year | Album details | Peak chartpositions | US Sales | |||||
| ! width="40" | ! width="40" | |||||||
| 2006 | align="left" | * Released: October 24, 2006 | * Label: SoBe Entertainment | , music download>digital download | 28 | 1 | * US sales: 127,000 | |
| 2009 | * Released: July 21, 2009 | Fontana Records>Fontana | * Format: CD, digital download | 144 | 27 | |||
;Singles {|class="wikitable" |- !width="25" rowspan="2"| Year !width="250" rowspan="2"| Title !colspan="5"| U.S. Billboard Chart positions !width="150" rowspan="2"| Album |- !width="36"| U.S. !width="36"| U.S. Pop !width="36"| U.S. Dance !width="36"| Rhythmic Top 40 !width="36"| Top Videoclip Tracks |- |rowspan="1"|2004 |"Everything to Me" |
References
External links
Category:1988 births Category:Living people Category:American child singers Category:American pop singers Category:American people of Italian descent Category:American dance musicians Category:Participants in American reality television series Category:American socialites Category:American female models Category:American film actors Category:American television actors Category:People from Tampa, Florida Category:People from Miami, Florida Category:Musicians from Florida Category:American musicians of Italian descent
cs:Brooke Hogan da:Brooke Hogan de:Brooke Hogan es:Brooke Hogan fr:Brooke Hogan it:Brooke Hogan nl:Brooke Hogan ja:ブルック・ホーガン no:Brooke Hogan pl:Brooke Hogan pt:Brooke Hogan simple:Brooke Hogan fi:Brooke Hogan sv:Brooke HoganThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Width | 200 |
|---|---|
| Position | Shooting guard / Small forward |
| Height ft | 6|height_in 6 |
| Weight lbs | 216 |
| Number | 23, 45, 9, 12 |
| Birth date | February 17, 1963 |
| Birth place | Brooklyn, New York |
| High school | Emsley A. Laney |
| League | |
| Career start | 1984 |
| Career end | 2003 |
| Draftyear | 1984 |
| Draftround | 1 |
| Draftpick | 3 |
| Draftteam | Chicago Bulls |
| College | North Carolina (1981–1984) |
| Years1 | –, – |team1 Chicago Bulls |
| Years2 | – |team2 Washington Wizards |
| Stat1label | Points |
| Stat1value | 32,292 (30.1 ppg) |
| Stat2label | Rebounds |
| Stat2value | 6,672 (6.2 rpg) |
| Stat3label | Assists |
| Stat3value | 5,633 (5.3 apg) |
| Letter | j |
| Bbr | jordami01 |
| Highlights | |
| Hof player | michael-jordan }} |
Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17, 1963) is a former American professional basketball player, active businessman, and majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats. His biography on the National Basketball Association (NBA) website states, "By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time." Jordan was one of the most effectively marketed athletes of his generation and was instrumental in popularizing the NBA around the world in the 1980s and 1990s.
After a standout career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Tar Heels' National Championship team in 1982, Jordan joined the NBA's Chicago Bulls in 1984. He quickly emerged as a league star, entertaining crowds with his prolific scoring. His leaping ability, illustrated by performing slam dunks from the free throw line in slam dunk contests, earned him the nicknames "Air Jordan" and "His Airness". He also gained a reputation for being one of the best defensive players in basketball. In 1991, he won his first NBA championship with the Bulls, and followed that achievement with titles in 1992 and 1993, securing a "three-peat". Although Jordan abruptly retired from basketball at the beginning of the 1993–94 NBA season to pursue a career in baseball, he rejoined the Bulls in 1995 and led them to three additional championships (1996, 1997, and 1998) as well as an NBA-record 72 regular-season wins in the 1995–96 NBA season. Jordan retired for a second time in 1999, but returned for two more NBA seasons from 2001 to 2003 as a member of the Washington Wizards.
Jordan's individual accolades and accomplishments include five MVP awards, ten All-NBA First Team designations, nine All-Defensive First Team honors, fourteen NBA All-Star Game appearances, three All-Star Game MVP awards, ten scoring titles, three steals titles, six NBA Finals MVP awards, and the 1988 NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award. He holds the NBA records for highest career regular season scoring average (30.12 points per game) and highest career playoff scoring average (33.45 points per game). In 1999, he was named the greatest North American athlete of the 20th century by ESPN, and was second to Babe Ruth on the Associated Press's list of athletes of the century. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.
Jordan is also noted for his product endorsements. He fueled the success of Nike's Air Jordan sneakers, which were introduced in 1985 and remain popular today. Jordan also starred in the 1996 feature film ''Space Jam'' as himself. He is the majority owner and head of basketball operations for the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats, having won a bidding war to buy controlling interest in the team from founding owner Robert L. Johnson.
Early years
Jordan was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Deloris (née Peoples), who worked in banking, and James R. Jordan, Sr., an equipment supervisor. His family moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, when he was a toddler. Jordan attended Emsley A. Laney High School in Wilmington, where he anchored his athletic career by playing baseball, football, and basketball. He tried out for the varsity basketball team during his sophomore year, but at 5'11" (1.80 m), he was deemed too short to play at that level. His taller friend, Harvest Leroy Smith, was the only sophomore to make the team.Motivated to prove his worth, Jordan became the star of Laney's junior varsity squad, and tallied several 40 point games. The following summer, he grew four inches (10 cm) and trained rigorously. Upon earning a spot on the varsity roster, Jordan averaged about 20 points per game over his final two seasons of high school play. As a senior, he was selected to the McDonald's All-American Team During his three seasons at North Carolina, he averaged 17.7 ppg on 54.0% shooting, and added 5.0 rebounds per game (rpg). He was selected by consensus to the NCAA All-American First Team in both his sophomore (1983) and junior (1984) seasons. After winning the Naismith and the Wooden College Player of the Year awards in 1984, Jordan left North Carolina one year before his scheduled graduation to enter the 1984 NBA Draft. The Chicago Bulls selected Jordan with the third overall pick, after Hakeem Olajuwon (Houston Rockets) and Sam Bowie (Portland Trail Blazers). Jordan returned to North Carolina to complete his degree in 1986.
Professional career
During his first season in the NBA, Jordan averaged 28.2 ppg on 51.5% shooting. He quickly became a fan favorite even in opposing arenas, and appeared on the cover of ''Sports Illustrated'' with the heading "A Star is Born" just over a month into his professional career. Jordan was also voted in as an All-Star starter by the fans in his rookie season. Controversy arose before the All-Star game when word surfaced that several veteran players, led by Isiah Thomas, were upset by the amount of attention Jordan was receiving. This led to a so called "freeze-out" on Jordan, where players refused to pass him the ball throughout the game. The controversy left Jordan relatively unaffected when he returned to regular season play, and he would go on to be voted Rookie of the Year. The Bulls finished the season 38–44, and lost in the first round of the playoffs in four games to the Milwaukee Bucks.Jordan's second season was cut short by a broken foot which caused him to miss 64 games. Despite Jordan's injury and a 30–52 record, the Bulls made the playoffs. Jordan recovered in time to participate in the playoffs and performed well upon his return. Against a 1985–86 Boston Celtics team that is often considered one of the greatest in NBA history, Jordan set the still-unbroken record for points in a playoff game with 63 in Game 2. The Celtics, however, managed to sweep the series.
Jordan had recovered completely by the 1986–87 season, and had one of the most prolific scoring seasons in NBA history. He became the only player other than Wilt Chamberlain to score 3,000 points in a season, averaging a league high 37.1 points on 48.2% shooting. In addition, Jordan demonstrated his defensive prowess, as he became the first player in NBA history to record 200 steals and 100 blocks in a season. Despite Jordan's success, Magic Johnson won the league's Most Valuable Player Award. The Bulls reached 40 wins, and advanced to the playoffs for the third consecutive year. However, they were again swept by the Celtics.
Mid-career: Pistons roadblock
Jordan led the league in scoring again in the 1987–88 season, averaging 35.0 ppg on 53.5% shooting and won his first league MVP award. He was also named the Defensive Player of the Year, as he had averaged 1.6 blocks and a league high 3.16 steals per game. The Bulls finished 50–32, and made it out of the first round of the playoffs for the first time in Jordan's career, as they defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers in five games. However, the Bulls then lost in five games to the more experienced Detroit Pistons, who were led by Isiah Thomas and a group of physical players known as the "Bad Boys".In the 1988–89 season, Jordan again led the league in scoring, averaging 32.5 ppg on 53.8% shooting from the field, along with 8 rpg and 8 assists per game (apg). The Bulls finished with a 47–35 record, and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals, defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks along the way. The Cavaliers series included a career highlight for Jordan when he hit a series-winning shot over Craig Ehlo in the closing moments of the deciding fifth game of the series. However, the Pistons again defeated the Bulls, this time in six games, by utilizing their "Jordan Rules" method of guarding Jordan, which consisted of double and triple teaming him every time he touched the ball.
The Bulls entered the 1989–90 season as a team on the rise, with their core group of Jordan and young improving players like Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, and under the guidance of new coach Phil Jackson. Jordan averaged a league leading 33.6 ppg on 52.6% shooting, to go with 6.9 rpg and 6.3 apg in leading the Bulls to a 55–27 record. They again advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals beating the Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers en route. However, despite pushing the series to seven games, the Bulls lost to the Pistons for the third consecutive season.
First three-peat
In the 1990–91 season, Jordan won his second MVP award after averaging 31.5 ppg on 53.9% shooting, 6.0 rpg, and 5.5 apg for the regular season. The Bulls finished in first place in their division for the first time in 16 years and set a franchise record with 61 wins in the regular season. With Scottie Pippen developing into an All-Star, the Bulls had elevated their play. The Bulls defeated the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia 76ers in the opening two rounds of the playoffs. They advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals where their rival, the Detroit Pistons, awaited them. However, this time the Bulls beat the Pistons in a surprising sweep. In an unusual ending to the fourth and final game, Isiah Thomas led his team off the court before the final minute had concluded. Most of the Pistons went directly to their locker room instead of shaking hands with the Bulls.The Bulls compiled an outstanding 15–2 record during the playoffs, and advanced to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history, where they beat the Los Angeles Lakers four games to one. Perhaps the best known moment of the series came in Game 2 when, attempting a dunk, Jordan avoided a potential Sam Perkins block by switching the ball from his right hand to his left in mid-air to lay the shot in. In his first Finals appearance, Jordan posted per game averages of 31.2 points on 56% shooting from the field, 11.4 assists, 6.6 rebounds, 2.8 steals and 1.4 blocks. Jordan won his first NBA Finals MVP award, and he cried while holding the NBA Finals trophy.
Jordan and the Bulls continued their dominance in the 1991–92 season, establishing a 67–15 record, topping their franchise record from 1990 to 91. Jordan won his second consecutive MVP award with averages of 30.1 points, 6.4 rebounds and 6.1 assists per game on 52% shooting. After winning a physical 7-game series over the New York Knicks in the second round of the playoffs and finishing off the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Conference Finals in 6 games, the Bulls met Clyde Drexler and the Portland Trail Blazers in the Finals. The media, hoping to recreate a Magic-Bird rivalry, highlighted the similarities between "Air" Jordan and Clyde "The Glide" during the pre-Finals hype. In the first game, Jordan scored a Finals-record 35 points in the first half, including a record-setting six three-point field goals. After the sixth three-pointer, he jogged down the court shrugging as he looked courtside. Marv Albert, who broadcast the game, later stated that it was as if Jordan was saying, "I can't believe I'm doing this." The Bulls went on to win Game 1, and defeat the Blazers in six games. Jordan was named Finals MVP for the second year in a row and finished the series averaging 35.8 ppg, 4.8 rpg, and 6.5 apg, while shooting 53% from the floor.
In 1992–93, despite a 32.6 ppg, 6.7 rpg and 5.5 apg campaign, Jordan's streak of consecutive MVP seasons ended as he lost the award to his friend Charles Barkley. Coincidentally, Jordan and the Bulls met Barkley and his Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals. The Bulls captured their third consecutive NBA championship on a game-winning shot by John Paxson and a last-second block by Horace Grant, but Jordan was once again Chicago's catalyst. He averaged a Finals-record 41.0 ppg during the six-game series, and became the first player in NBA history to win three straight Finals MVP awards. He scored more than 30 points in every game of the series, including 40 or more points in 4 consecutive games. With his third Finals triumph, Jordan capped off a seven-year run where he attained seven scoring titles and three championships, but there were signs that Jordan was tiring of his massive celebrity and all of the non-basketball hassles in his life.
Gambling controversy
During the Bulls' playoff run in 1993, controversy arose when Jordan was seen gambling in Atlantic City, New Jersey the night before a game against the New York Knicks. In that same year, he admitted to having to cover $57,000 in gambling losses, and author Richard Esquinas wrote a book claiming he had won $1.25 million from Jordan on the golf course. In 2005, Jordan talked to Ed Bradley of the CBS evening show ''60 Minutes'' about his gambling and admitted that he made some reckless decisions. Jordan stated, "Yeah, I've gotten myself into situations where I would not walk away and I've pushed the envelope. Is that compulsive? Yeah, it depends on how you look at it. If you're willing to jeopardize your livelihood and your family, then yeah." When Bradley asked him if his gambling ever got to the level where it jeopardized his livelihood or family, Jordan replied, "No."
First retirement and baseball career
On October 6, 1993, Jordan announced his retirement, citing a loss of desire to play the game. Jordan later stated that the murder of his father earlier in the year shaped his decision. James R. Jordan, Sr. was murdered on July 23, 1993, at a highway rest area in Lumberton, North Carolina, by two teenagers, Daniel Green and Larry Martin Demery. The assailants were traced from calls they made on James Jordan's cellular phone, caught, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Jordan was close to his father; as a child he had imitated his father's proclivity to stick out his tongue while absorbed in work. He later adopted it as his own signature, displaying it each time he drove to the basket. In 1996 he founded a Chicago area Boys & Girls Club and dedicated it to his father.In his 1998 autobiography ''For the Love of the Game'', Jordan wrote that he had been preparing for retirement as early as the summer of 1992. The added exhaustion due to the Dream Team run in the 1992 Olympics solidified Jordan's feelings about the game and his ever-growing celebrity status. Jordan's announcement sent shock waves throughout the NBA and appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world.
Jordan then further surprised the sports world by signing a minor league baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox. He reported to spring training and was assigned to the team's minor league system on March 31, 1994. Jordan has stated this decision was made to pursue the dream of his late father, who had always envisioned his son as a Major League Baseball player. The White Sox were another team owned by Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who continued to honor Jordan's basketball contract during the years he played baseball. In 1994, Jordan played for the Birmingham Barons, a Double-A minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, batting .202 with three home runs, 51 runs batted in, 30 stolen bases, and 11 errors. He also appeared for the Scottsdale Scorpions in the 1994 Arizona Fall League, batting .252 against the top prospects in baseball.
"I'm back": Return to the NBA
In the 1993–94 season, the Bulls, without Jordan, achieved a 55–27 record, and lost to the New York Knicks in the second round of the playoffs. But the 1994–95 version of the Bulls was a shell of the championship squad of just two years earlier. Struggling at mid-season to ensure a spot in the playoffs, Chicago was 31–31 at one point in mid-March. The team received a lift, however, when Jordan decided to return to the NBA for the Bulls.On March 18, 1995, Jordan announced his return to the NBA through a pithy press release: "I'm back." The next day, Jordan donned jersey number 45 (his number with the Barons), as his familiar 23 had been retired in his honor following his first retirement. He took to the court with the Bulls to face the Indiana Pacers in Indianapolis, scoring 19 points. The game had the highest Nielsen rating of a regular season NBA game since 1975.
Although he had not played in an NBA game in a year and a half, Jordan played well upon his return, making a game-winning jump shot against Atlanta in his fourth game back. He then scored 55 points in his fifth game back against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on March 28, 1995 (his first appearance at Madison Square Garden since retiring). Boosted by Jordan's comeback, the Bulls went 13-4 to make the playoffs and advanced to the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Orlando Magic. At the end of the first game of the series, though, Orlando's Nick Anderson would strip Jordan from behind, leading to the game-winning basket for the Magic; he would later comment that Jordan "didn't look like the old Michael Jordan", after which Jordan returned to wearing his old number (23). Jordan averaged 31 points per game in that series, but Orlando prevailed in six games.
Second three-peat
Freshly motivated by the playoff defeat, Jordan trained aggressively for the 1995–96 season. Strengthened by the addition of rebound specialist Dennis Rodman, the Bulls dominated the league, starting the season 41–3, and eventually finishing with the best regular season record in NBA history: 72–10. Jordan led the league in scoring with 30.4 ppg, and won the league's regular season and All-Star Game MVP awards. In the playoffs, the Bulls lost only three games in four series, defeating the Seattle SuperSonics in the NBA Finals to win the championship. Jordan was named Finals MVP for a record fourth time, surpassing Magic Johnson's three Finals MVP awards. He also achieved only the second sweep of the MVP Awards in the All-Star Game, regular season and NBA Finals, Willis Reed having achieved the first, during the 1969–70 season. Because this was Jordan's first championship since his father's death, and it was won on Father's Day, Jordan reacted very emotionally upon winning the title, including a memorable scene of him sobbing on the locker room floor with the game ball.In the 1996–97 season, the Bulls started out 69–11, but narrowly missed out on a second consecutive 70-win season by losing their final two games to finish 69–13. However, this year Jordan was beaten for the NBA MVP Award by Karl Malone. The team again advanced to the Finals, where they faced Malone and the Utah Jazz. The series against the Jazz featured two of the more memorable clutch moments of Jordan's career. He won Game 1 for the Bulls with a buzzer-beating jump shot. In Game 5, with the series tied 2–2, Jordan played despite being feverish and dehydrated from a stomach virus. In what is known as the "flu game", Jordan scored 38 points including the game-deciding three-pointer with less than a minute remaining. The Bulls won 90–88 and went on to win the series in six games. For the fifth time in as many Finals appearances, Jordan received the Finals MVP award. During the 1997 NBA All-Star Game, Jordan posted the first triple double in All-Star Game history in a victorious effort; however, he did not receive the MVP award.
Jordan and the Bulls compiled a 62–20 record in the 1997–98 season. Jordan led the league with 28.7 points per game, securing his fifth regular-season MVP award, plus honors for All-NBA First Team, First Defensive Team and the All-Star Game MVP. The Bulls captured the Eastern Conference Championship for a third straight season, including surviving a grueling seven-game series with Reggie Miller's Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals; it was the first time Jordan had played in a Game 7 since the 1992 series with the Knicks. After prevailing, they moved on for a rematch with the Jazz in the Finals.
The Bulls returned to Utah for Game 6 on June 14, 1998 leading the series 3–2. Jordan executed a series of plays, considered to be one of the greatest clutch performances in NBA Finals history. With the Bulls trailing 86–83 with 40 seconds remaining, coach Jackson called a timeout. When play resumed, Jordan received the inbound pass, drove to the basket, and hit a layup over several Jazz defenders. The Jazz brought the ball upcourt and passed the ball to forward Karl Malone, who was set up in the low post and was being guarded by Rodman. Malone jostled with Rodman and caught the pass, but Jordan cut behind him and swatted the ball out of his hands for a steal. Jordan then slowly dribbled upcourt and paused at the top of the key, eyeing his defender, Jazz guard Bryon Russell. With fewer than 10 seconds remaining, Jordan started to dribble right, then crossed over to his left, possibly pushing off Russell, although the officials did not call a foul. Jordan then made what would become the climactic shot of his career. After a desperation three-point shot by John Stockton missed, Jordan and the Bulls claimed their sixth NBA championship, and secured a second three-peat. Once again, Jordan was voted the Finals MVP, having led all scorers by averaging 33.5 points per game, including 45 in the deciding Game 6. Jordan's six Finals MVPs is a record; Shaquille O'Neal, Magic Johnson, and Tim Duncan are tied for second place with three apiece. The 1998 Finals holds the highest television rating of any Finals series in history, and Game 6 holds the highest television rating of any game in NBA history.
Second retirement
With Phil Jackson's contract expiring, the pending departures of Scottie Pippen (who stated his desire to be traded during the season) and Dennis Rodman (who would sign with the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent) looming, and being in the latter stages of an owner-induced lockout of NBA players, Jordan retired for the second time on January 13, 1999.On January 19, 2000, Jordan returned to the NBA not as a player, but as part owner and President of Basketball Operations for the Washington Wizards. Jordan's responsibilities with the Wizards were comprehensive. He controlled all aspects of the Wizards' basketball operations, and had the final say in all personnel matters. Opinions of Jordan as a basketball executive were mixed. He managed to purge the team of several highly paid, unpopular players (such as forward Juwan Howard and point guard Rod Strickland), but used the first pick in the 2001 NBA Draft to select high schooler Kwame Brown, who did not live up to expectations and was traded away after four seasons.
Despite his January 1999 claim that he was "99.9% certain" that he would never play another NBA game, in the summer of 2001 Jordan expressed interest in making another comeback, this time with his new team. Inspired by the NHL comeback of his friend Mario Lemieux the previous winter, Jordan spent much of the spring and summer of 2001 in training, holding several invitation-only camps for NBA players in Chicago. In addition, Jordan hired his old Chicago Bulls head coach, Doug Collins, as Washington's coach for the upcoming season, a decision that many saw as foreshadowing another Jordan return.
Washington Wizards comeback
On September 25, 2001 Jordan announced his return to professional play with the Wizards, indicating his intention to donate his salary as a player to a relief effort for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. In an injury-plagued 2001–02 season, he led the team in scoring (22.9 ppg), assists (5.2 apg), and steals (1.42 spg). However, torn cartilage in his right knee ended Jordan's season after only 60 games, the fewest he had played in a regular season since playing 17 games after returning from his first retirement during the 1994–95 season.Playing in his 14th and final NBA All-Star Game in 2003, Jordan passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the all-time leading scorer in All-Star game history. That year, Jordan was the only Washington player to play in all 82 games, starting in 67 of them. He averaged 20.0 points, 6.1 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.5 steals per game. He also shot 45% from the field, and 82% from the free throw line. Even though he turned 40 during the season, he scored 20 or more points 42 times, 30 or more points nine times, and 40 or more points three times. On February 21, 2003, Jordan became the first 40-year-old to tally 43 points in an NBA game. During his stint with the Wizards, all of Jordan's home games at the MCI Center were sold out, and the Wizards were the second most-watched team in the NBA, averaging 20,172 fans a game at home and 19,311 on the road. However, neither of Jordan's final two seasons resulted in a playoff appearance for the Wizards, and Jordan was often unsatisfied with the play of those around him. At several points he openly criticized his teammates to the media, citing their lack of focus and intensity, notably that of the number one draft pick in the 2001 NBA Draft, Kwame Brown.
With the recognition that 2002–03 would be Jordan's final season, tributes were paid to him throughout the NBA. In his final game at his old home court, the United Center in Chicago, Jordan received a four-minute standing ovation. The Miami Heat retired the number 23 jersey on April 11, 2003, even though Jordan had never played for the team. At the 2003 All-Star Game, Jordan was offered a starting spot from Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson, but refused both; in the end, however, he accepted the spot of Vince Carter, who decided to give it up under great public pressure.
Jordan's final NBA game was on April 16, 2003 in Philadelphia. After scoring only 13 points in the game, Jordan went to the bench with 4 minutes and 13 seconds remaining in the third quarter and with his team trailing the Philadelphia 76ers, 75–56. Just after the start of the fourth quarter, the First Union Center crowd began chanting "We want Mike!". After much encouragement from coach Doug Collins, Jordan finally rose from the bench and re-entered the game for Larry Hughes with 2:35 remaining. At 1:45, Jordan was intentionally fouled by the 76ers' Eric Snow, and stepped to the line to make both free throws. After the second foul shot, the 76ers in-bounded the ball to rookie John Salmons, who in turn was intentionally fouled by Bobby Simmons one second later, stopping time so that Jordan could return to the bench. Jordan received a three-minute standing ovation from his teammates, his opponents, the officials and a crowd of 21,257 fans.
Olympic career
Jordan played on two Olympic gold medal-winning American basketball teams. As a college player he participated, and won the gold, in the 1984 Summer Olympics. Jordan led the team in scoring averaging 17.1 ppg for the tournament.
In the 1992 Summer Olympics he was a member of the star-studded squad that included Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and David Robinson and was dubbed the "Dream Team". Playing limited minutes due to the frequent blowouts, Jordan averaged 12.7 ppg, finishing fourth on the team in scoring. Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and fellow Dream Team member Chris Mullin are the only American men's basketball players to win Olympic gold as amateurs (all in 1984) and professionals.
In addition, Jordan and fellow Dream Team member (and Bulls teammate) Scottie Pippen are the only players to have won both NBA championship and Olympic gold medal in the same year (1992).
After retiring as a player
After his third retirement, Jordan assumed that he would be able to return to his front office position of Director of Basketball Operations with the Wizards. However, his previous tenure in the Wizards' front office had produced the aforementioned mixed results and may have also influenced the trade of Richard "Rip" Hamilton for Jerry Stackhouse (although Jordan was not technically Director of Basketball Operations in 2002). On May 7, 2003, Wizards owner Abe Pollin fired Jordan as Washington's President of Basketball Operations. Jordan later stated that he felt betrayed, and that if he knew he would be fired upon retiring he never would have come back to play for the Wizards.Jordan kept busy over the next few years by staying in shape, playing golf in celebrity charity tournaments, spending time with his family in Chicago, promoting his Jordan Brand clothing line, and riding motorcycles. Since 2004, Jordan has owned Michael Jordan Motorsports, a professional closed-course motorcycle road racing team that competes with two Suzukis in the premier Superbike class sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). Jordan and his then-wife Juanita pledged $5 million to Chicago's Hales Franciscan High School in 2006, and the Jordan Brand has made donations to Habitat for Humanity and a Louisiana branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. On June 15, 2006, Jordan bought a minority stake in the Charlotte Bobcats, becoming the team's second-largest shareholder behind majority owner Robert L. Johnson. As part of the deal, Jordan was named "Managing Member of Basketball Operations," with full control over the basketball side of the operation. Despite Jordan's previous success as an endorser, he has made an effort not to be included in Charlotte's marketing campaigns.
In February 2010, it was reported that Jordan was seeking majority ownership of the Bobcats. As February wore on, it emerged that the leading contenders for the team were Jordan and former Houston Rockets president George Postolos. On February 27, the Bobcats announced that Johnson had reached an agreement with Jordan and his group, MJ Basketball Holdings, to buy the team pending NBA approval. On March 17, the NBA Board of Governors unanimously approved Jordan's purchase, making him the first former NBA player ever to become the majority owner of a league franchise.
Player profile
Jordan was a shooting guard who was also capable of playing small forward (the position he would primarily play during his second return to professional basketball with the Washington Wizards). Jordan was known throughout his career for being a strong clutch performer. He decided numerous games with last-second plays (e.g., The Shot) and performed at a high level even under adverse circumstances (e.g., Flu Game). His competitiveness was visible in his prolific trash-talk and well-known work ethic.Jordan had a versatile offensive game. He was capable of aggressively driving to the basket, as well as drawing fouls from his opponents at a high rate; his 8,772 free throw attempts are the ninth highest total of all time. As his career progressed, Jordan also developed the ability to post up his opponents and score with his trademark fadeaway jump shot, using his leaping ability to "fade away" from block attempts. According to Hubie Brown, this move alone made him nearly unstoppable. Despite media criticism as a "selfish" player early in his career, Jordan's 5.3 assists per game also indicate his willingness to defer to his teammates. In later years, the NBA shortened its three-point line to 22 feet (from 23 feet, 9 inches), which coupled with Jordan's extended shooting range to make him a long-range threat as well—his 3-point stroke developed from a low 9 / 52 rate (.173) in his rookie year into a stellar 111 / 260 (.427) shooter in the 1995–96 season. For a guard, Jordan was also a good rebounder (6.2 per game).
In 1988, Jordan was honored with the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year Award and became the first NBA player to win both the Defensive Player of the Year and MVP awards in a career (since equaled by Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Kevin Garnett; Olajuwon is the only player other than Jordan to win both during the same season). In addition he set both seasonal and career records for blocked shots by a guard, and combined this with his ball-thieving ability to become a standout defensive player. His 2,514 steals are the second highest total of all-time behind John Stockton, while his steals per game average is third all-time. Jerry West often stated that he was more impressed with Jordan's defensive contributions than his offensive ones.
Legacy
Jordan's basketball talent was clear from his rookie season. In his first game in Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks, Jordan received a prolonged standing ovation, a rarity for an opposing player. After Jordan scored a playoff record 63 points against the Boston Celtics in 1986, Celtics star Larry Bird described him as "God disguised as Michael Jordan."Jordan led the NBA in scoring in 10 seasons (NBA record) and tied Wilt Chamberlain's record of seven consecutive scoring titles. He was also a fixture on the NBA All-Defensive First Team, making the roster nine times (NBA record shared with Gary Payton). Jordan also holds the top career regular season and playoff scoring averages of 30.1 and 33.4 points per game, respectively. By 1998, the season of his Finals-winning shot against the Jazz, he was well known throughout the league as a clutch performer. In the regular season, Jordan was the Bulls' primary threat in the final seconds of a close game and in the playoffs, Jordan would always demand the ball at crunch time. Jordan's total of 5,987 points in the playoffs is the highest in NBA history. He retired with 32,292 points in regular season play, placing him third on the NBA's all-time scoring list behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone.
With five regular-season MVPs (tied for second place with Bill Russell; only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has won more, six), six Finals MVPs (NBA record), and three All-Star MVPs, Jordan is the most decorated player ever to play in the NBA. Jordan finished among the top three in regular-season MVP voting a record 10 times, and was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996.
Many of Jordan's contemporaries label Jordan as the greatest basketball player of all time. An ESPN survey of journalists, athletes and other sports figures ranked Jordan the greatest North American athlete of the 20th century, above icons such as Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali. Jordan placed second to Babe Ruth in the Associated Press's list of 20th century athletes. In addition, the Associated Press voted him as the basketball player of the 20th century. Jordan has also appeared on the front cover of ''Sports Illustrated'' a record 49 times. In the September 1996 issue of ''Sport'', which was the publication's 50th anniversary issue, Jordan was named the greatest athlete of the past 50 years.
Jordan's athletic leaping ability, highlighted in his back-to-back slam dunk contest championships in 1987 and 1988, is credited by many with having influenced a generation of young players. Several current NBA All-Stars have stated that they considered Jordan their role model while growing up, including LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. In addition, commentators have dubbed a number of next-generation players "the next Michael Jordan" upon their entry to the NBA, including Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway, Grant Hill, Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Vince Carter, and Dwyane Wade. Although Jordan was a well-rounded player, his "Air Jordan" image is also often credited with inadvertently decreasing the jump shooting skills, defense, and fundamentals of young players, a fact which Jordan himself has lamented. Although Jordan has done much to increase the status of the game, some of his impact on the game's popularity in America appears to be fleeting. Television ratings in particular increased only during his time in the league and have subsequently lowered each time he left the game.
In August 2009, the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, opened a Michael Jordan exhibit containing items from his college and NBA careers, as well as from the 1992 "Dream Team". The exhibit also has a batting glove to signify Jordan's short career in baseball. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in September 2009, with former Bulls teammates Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Charles Oakley, Ron Harper, Steve Kerr, and Toni Kukoc in attendance.
Personal life
Jordan is the fourth of five children. He has two older brothers, Larry Jordan and James R. Jordan, Jr., one older sister, Deloris, and a younger sister, Roslyn. Jordan's brother James retired in 2006 as the Command Sergeant Major of the 35th Signal Brigade of the XVIII Airborne Corps in the U.S. Army.He married Juanita Vanoy in September 1989, and they have two sons, Jeffrey Michael and Marcus James, and a daughter, Jasmine. Jordan and Vanoy filed for divorce on January 4, 2002, citing irreconcilable differences, but reconciled shortly thereafter. They again filed for divorce and were granted a final decree of dissolution of marriage on December 29, 2006, commenting that the decision was made "mutually and amicably". It is reported that Juanita received a $168 million settlement, making it the largest celebrity divorce settlement in history at the time on public record.
On July 21, 2006, a Cook County, Illinois judge determined that Jordan did not owe his alleged former lover Karla Knafel $5 million. Jordan had allegedly paid Knafel $250,000 to keep their relationship a secret. Knafel claimed Jordan promised her $5 million for remaining silent and agreeing not to file a paternity suit after Knafel learned she was pregnant in 1991. A DNA test showed Jordan was not the father of the child.
As of 2007, Jordan lived in Highland Park, Illinois, and both of his sons attended Loyola Academy, a private Roman Catholic high school located in Wilmette, Illinois. Jeffrey graduated as a member of the 2007 graduating class and played his first collegiate basketball game on November 11, 2007, for the University of Illinois. After two seasons, Jeffrey left the Illinois basketball team in 2009. He later rejoined the team for a third season, then received a release to transfer to the University of Central Florida, where Marcus was attending. Marcus transferred to Whitney Young High School after his sophomore year and graduated in 2009. He began attending UCF in the fall of 2009.
Media figure and business interests
Jordan is one of the most marketed sports figures in history. He has been a major spokesman for such brands as Nike, Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Gatorade, McDonald's, Ball Park Franks, Rayovac, Wheaties, Hanes, and MCI. Jordan has had a long relationship with Gatorade, appearing in over 20 commercials for the company since 1991, including the "Like Mike" commercials in which a song was sung by children wishing to be like Jordan.Nike created a signature shoe for him, called the ''Air Jordan''. One of Jordan's more popular commercials for the shoe involved Spike Lee playing the part of Mars Blackmon. In the commercials Lee, as Blackmon, attempted to find the source of Jordan's abilities and became convinced that "it's gotta be the shoes". The hype and demand for the shoes even brought on a spate of "shoe-jackings" where people were robbed of their sneakers at gunpoint. Subsequently Nike spun off the Jordan line into its own division named the "Jordan Brand". The company features an impressive list of athletes and celebrities as endorsers. The brand has also sponsored college sports programs such as those of North Carolina, Cincinnati, Cal, St. John's, Georgetown, and North Carolina A&T;.
Jordan also has been associated with the Looney Tunes cartoon characters. A Nike commercial shown during the 1993 Super Bowl XXVII featured Jordan and Bugs Bunny playing basketball against a group of Martian characters. The Super Bowl commercial inspired the 1996 live action/animated movie ''Space Jam'', which starred Jordan and Bugs in a fictional story set during his first retirement. They have subsequently appeared together in several commercials for MCI.
Jordan's yearly income from the endorsements is estimated to be over forty million dollars. In addition, when Jordan's power at the ticket gates was at its highest point the Bulls regularly sold out every game they played in, whether home or away. Due to this, Jordan set records in player salary by signing annual contracts worth in excess of $30 million US$ per season. An academic study found that Jordan’s first NBA comeback resulted in an increase in the market capitalization of his client firms of more than $1 billion.
Most of Jordan's endorsement deals, including the first deal with Nike, were engineered by his agent, David Falk. Jordan has said of Falk that "he's the best at what he does", and that "marketing-wise, he's great. He's the one who came up with the concept of 'Air Jordan.'"
In June 2010, Jordan was ranked by Forbes Magazine as the 20th most powerful celebrity in the world with $55 million earned between June 2009 and June 2010. According to the Forbes article, Brand Jordan generates $1 billion in sales for Nike.
Honors and awards
Jordan won numerous awards and set many records during his career. The following are some of his achievements:
See also
References
Further reading
External links
Category:1963 births Category:ACC Athlete of the Year Category:African American basketball players Category:African American sports executives Category:Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees Category:Basketball players at the 1983 Pan American Games Category:Basketball players at the 1984 Summer Olympics Category:Basketball players at the 1992 Summer Olympics Category:Basketball players from North Carolina Category:Birmingham Barons players Category:Charlotte Bobcats executives Category:Charlotte Bobcats owners Category:Chicago Bulls draft picks Category:Chicago Bulls players Category:Living people Category:McDonald's High School All-Americans Category:Minor league baseball players Category:National Basketball Association executives Category:National Basketball Association owners Category:NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award winners Category:NBA Finals MVP Award winners Category:NBA Slam Dunk Contest champions Category:North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball players Category:National Basketball Association players with retired numbers Category:Olympic basketball players of the United States Category:Olympic gold medalists for the United States Category:Parade High School All-Americans (boys' basketball) Category:Sportspeople from Brooklyn Category:Sportspeople from Chicago, Illinois Category:People from Highland Park, Illinois Category:People from Wilmington, North Carolina Category:Shooting guards Category:Basketball players from New York Category:Sportspeople of multiple sports Category:United States men's national basketball team members Category:Washington Wizards executives Category:Washington Wizards players Category:Olympic medalists in basketball
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| Name | Mitt Romney |
|---|---|
| Alt | Portrait of Mitt Romney |
| Order | 70th |
| Office | Governor of Massachusetts |
| Term start | January 2, 2003 |
| Term end | January 4, 2007 |
| Lieutenant | Kerry Healey |
| Predecessor | Paul Cellucci (Governor)Jane Swift (acting) |
| Successor | Deval Patrick |
| Birth date | March 12, 1947 |
| Birth place | Detroit, Michigan |
| Birthname | Willard Mitt Romney |
| Nationality | American |
| Party | Republican |
| Residence | Belmont, MassachusettsWolfeboro, New HampshireSan Diego, California |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Tagg (b. 1970) Matt (b. 1971) Josh (b. 1975) Ben (b. 1978) Craig (b. 1981) |
| Alma mater | Brigham Young University (B.A.)Harvard Law School (J.D.)Harvard Business School (M.B.A.) |
| Profession | Businessman, politician, author |
| Religion | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) |
| Signature | Mitt Romney Signature.svg }} |
Romney is the son of George W. Romney (the former Governor of Michigan) and Lenore Romney. He was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and then served as a Mormon missionary in France. He received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University, and thereafter earned Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration joint degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Romney entered the management consulting business which led to a position at Bain & Company, eventually serving as its CEO to lead it out of crisis. He was also co-founder and head of the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm which became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation, and the wealth Romney accumulated there would help fund all of his future political campaigns. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts but lost to incumbent Ted Kennedy. Romney organized and steered the 2002 Winter Olympics as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, and helped turn the troubled Games into a financial success.
Romney won the election for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, but did not seek reelection in 2006. During his term, he presided over a series of spending cuts and increases in fees that eliminated a projected $3 billion deficit. He also signed into law the Massachusetts health care reform legislation, which provided near-universal health insurance access via subsidies and state-level mandates and was the first of its kind in the nation. During the course of his political career, his positions or rhetorical emphasis have shifted more towards American conservatism in several areas.
Romney ran for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, winning several caucus and primary contests, though he ultimately lost the nomination to John McCain. In the following years he published ''No Apology: The Case for American Greatness'' and gave speeches and raised campaign funds on behalf of fellow Republicans. On June 2, 2011, Romney announced that he would seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Political observers and public opinion polls place him as a front-runner in the race.
Early life
Romney was born in Detroit. He is the youngest child of George W. Romney, a man of humble upbringing who by 1948 had become an automobile executive, and Lenore Romney (née LaFount). His mother was a native of Logan, Utah and his father had been born in Mexico to American parents. The three siblings before him were Margo Lynn, Jane LaFount, and G. Scott, followed by Mitt after a gap of six years. Romney was named after hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, his father's best friend, and his father's cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, 1925–1929 quarterback for the Chicago Bears.|group="nb"}}When he was five, the family moved from Detroit to the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills. His father became CEO of American Motors and turned the company around from the brink of bankruptcy; by the time he was twelve, his father had become a nationally known figure in print and on television. Romney idolozed his father, read automotive trade magazines, kept abreast of automotive developments, and aspired to be an executive in the industry himself one day. His father also presided over the Detroit Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to which the family belonged. Romney went to public elementary schools and then from seventh grade on, attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a private boys preparatory school of the classic mold where he was the lone Mormon and where many students came from even more privileged backgrounds. He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel at academics. While a sophomore, he participated in the campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan. George Romney was re-elected twice; Mitt worked for him as an intern in the governor's office, and was present at the 1964 Republican National Convention when his moderate father battled conservative party nominee Barry Goldwater over issues of civil rights and ideological extremism. Romney had a steady set of chores and worked summer jobs, including being a security guard at a Chrysler plant.
Initially a manager for the ice hockey team and a pep squad member, during his final year at Cranbook, Romney joined the cross country running team and improved academically, but was still not a star pupil. His social skills were strong, however, and he won an award for those "whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through already existing channels." Romney was an energetic child who enjoyed pranks.|group="nb"}} In March of his senior year, he began dating Ann Davies, two years behind him, whom he had once known in elementary school; she attended the private Kingswood School, the sister school to Cranbrook. The two informally agreed to marriage around the time of his June 1965 graduation.
Experiences from 1965 to 1975
Romney attended Stanford University for a year. Although the campus was becoming radicalized with the beginnings of 1960s social and political movements, he kept a well-groomed appearance and enjoyed traditional campus events. In May 1966, he was part of a counter-protest against a group staging a sit-in in the university administration building in opposition to draft status tests.In July 1966, Romney left for 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary, a traditional duty that his father and other relatives had done. He arrived in Le Havre with ideas about how to change and promote the French Mission, while facing physical and economic deprivation in their cramped quarters. Rules against drinking, smoking, and dating were strictly enforced. Like most Mormon missionaries, he did not gain many converts, with the nominally Catholic but secular, wine-loving French people proving especially resistant to a religion that prohibits alcohol. He became demoralized, and later recalled it as the only time when "most of what I was trying to do was rejected." In Nantes, Romney was bruised defending two female missionaries against a horde of local rugby players. He continued to work hard; having grown up in Michigan rather than the more insular Utah world, Romney was better able to interact with the French. He was promoted to zone leader in Bordeaux in early 1968 and subsequently became assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for a missionary. Romney's support for the U.S. role in the Vietnam War were only reinforced when the French greeted him with hostility over the matter and he debated them in return. He also witnessed the May 1968 general strike and student uprisings.
In June 1968, an automobile Romney was driving in southern France was hit by another vehicle, seriously injuring him and killing one of his passengers, the wife of the mission president. As they drove through the village of Bernos-Beaulac, a Mercedes that was passing a truck missed a curve and suddenly swerved into the opposite lane and hit the Citroën DS Romney was driving in a head-on collision. Trapped between the steering wheel and door, the unconscious and seriously injured Romney had to be pried from the car; a French police officer mistakenly wrote ''Il est mort'' in his passport. The wife of the mission president was killed and other passengers were seriously injured as well. George Romney relied on his friend Sargent Shriver, the U.S. Ambassador to France, to go to the local hospital and discover that Mitt had survived. The fault for the accident was attributed completely to the driver of the other vehicle. Romney had suffered broken ribs, a fractured arm, a concussion, and facial injuries, but recovered quickly without needing surgery.|name="nb-acc"|group="nb"}} Fault for the accident was attributed completely to the other driver. After recovering, Romney became co-acting president of a mission demoralized and disorganized by the May civil disturbances and the car accident. Romney rallied and motivated the others and they met an ambitious goal of 200 baptisms for the year, the most for the mission in a decade. By the end of his stint in December 1968, Romney was overseeing the work of 175 fellow members. The experience in France changed Romney. It showed him the fragility of life and the need for a seriousness of purpose, and he gained a capacity for organization and a record of success that he had theretofore lacked. It also represented a crucible, after having been only a half-hearted Mormon growing up: "On a mission, your faith in Jesus Christ either evaporates or it becomes much deeper. For me it became much deeper."
While he was away, Ann Davies had converted to the LDS Church, guided by George Romney, and had begun attending Brigham Young University. Mitt was nervous that she had been wooed by others while he was away, and indeed she had dated others, but at their first meeting following his return they reconnected and agreed to quickly get married. That happened on March 21, 1969, in a Bloomfield Hills civil ceremony presided over by a church elder; the following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple.
Romney began attending Brigham Young too. He had missed much of the tumultuous American anti-Vietnam War movement while away, and was surprised to learn that his father had turned against the war during his ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Regarding the military draft, Romney had initially gotten a student deferment, then like most other Mormon missionaries had received a ministerial deferment while in France, then got another student deferment. When those ran out, his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery (300) meant he would not be selected.
At culturally conservative Brigham Young, Romney continued to be separated from much of the upheaval of the era, and did not join the few protests against the war or the LDS Church's policy against giving full membership to blacks. He became president and successful fundraiser for the all-male Cougar Club and showed a new-found discipline in his studies. In his senior year he took leave to work as driver and advance man for his mother Lenore Romney's eventually unsuccessful 1970 campaign for U.S. Senator from Michigan. He graduated from Brigham Young in 1971, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English and giving commencement addresses to both his own College of Humanities and to the whole university.
The Romneys' first son, Tagg, was born in 1970 while both were undergraduates at Brigham Young and living in a basement apartment. They subsequently welcomed Matt (1971), Josh (1975), Ben (1978), and Craig (1981). Ann Romney's work as a stay-at-home mom would enable her husband to pursue his career.
Romney still wanted to pursue a business path, but his father, by now serving in President Richard Nixon's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advised that a law degree would be valuable. Thus Romney became one of only 15 students to enroll at the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Fellow students noted Romney's strong work ethic and buttoned-down appearance; he lived in a Belmont, Massachusetts house with Ann and by now two children. He graduated in 1975 ''cum laude'' from the law school, in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.
Business career
Romney was heavily recruited and, after graduation, chose to remain in Massachusetts and go to work for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), thinking that working as a management consultant to a variety of companies would prepare him for a future job as a chief executive. | author=Heinlein, Gary | newspaper=The Detroit News | date=February 14, 2007}} but never worked as a lawyer. |group="nb"}} Romney's legal and business education proved valuable in this role, and he quickly became a rising star while applying BCG principles such as the growth-share matrix.In 1977, he was hired away by Bain & Company, a management consulting firm in Boston that had been formed a few years earlier by Bill Bain and other former BCG employees. Bain would later say of the thirty-year-old Romney, "He had the appearance of confidence of a guy who was maybe ten years older." With Bain & Company, Romney proved adept at learning the "Bain way", which consisted of immersing itself in each client's business, and not simply to issue recommendations, but to stay with the company until they were effectively changed for the better. With a record of success with clients such as the Monsanto Company, Outboard Marine Corporation, Burlington Industries, and Corning Incorporated, Romney became a vice president of the firm in 1978 and within a few years one of its best consultants. Romney became a firm believer in Bain's methods; he later said, "The idea that consultancies should not measure themselves by the thickness of their reports, or even the elegance of their writing, but rather by whether or not the report was effectively implemented was an inflection point in the history of consulting."
thumb|right|Logo of company that Romney co-foundedRomney was restless for a company of his own to run, and in 1983 Bill Bain offered him the chance to head a new venture that would buy into companies, have them benefit from Bain techniques, and then reap higher rewards than just consulting fees. Romney was initially cautious about accepting the offer, and Bain re-arranged the terms in a complicated partnership structure so that there was no financial or professional risk to Romney. Thus, in 1984, Romney left Bain & Company to co-found the spin-off private equity investment firm, Bain Capital. Bain and Romney spent a year raising the $37 million in investment money needed to start the new operation, which had fewer than ten employees. As general partner of the new firm, Romney was frugal and cautious, spending little on office appearance and finding the weak spots in so many potential deals that by 1986, very few had been done. At first, Bain Capital focused on venture capital opportunities. Their first big success came with a 1986 investment to help start Staples Inc., after founder Thomas G. Stemberg convinced Romney of the market size for office supplies; Bain Capital eventually reaped a nearly sevenfold return on its investment, and Romney sat on the Staples board of directors for over a decade.
Romney soon switched Bain Capital's focus from startups to the relatively new business of leveraged buyouts: buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed against their assets, partnering with existing management to apply the "Bain way" to their operations (rather than the hostile takeovers practiced in other leverage buyout scenarios), and then selling them off in a few years. Bain Capital lost most of its money in many of its early leveraged buyouts, but then started finding successes with spectacular returns. Indeed, during the 14 years Romney headed the company, Bain Capital's average annual internal rate of return on realized investments was 113 percent. Romney excelled at presenting and selling the deals the company made. The firm initially gave a cut of its profits to Bain & Company, but Romney later persuaded Bain to give that up.
The firm successfully invested in or acquired many well-known companies such as Accuride, Brookstone, Domino's Pizza, Sealy Corporation, Sports Authority, and Artisan Entertainment, as well as lesser-known companies in the industrial and medical sectors. Romney's cautious instincts were still in force at times; he wanted to drop a Bain Capital hedge fund that initially lost money, but other partners prevailed and it eventually gained billions. He also personally opted out of the Artisan Entertainment deal, not wanting to profit from a studio that produced R-rated films. Romney was on the board of directors of Damon Corporation, a medical testing company later found guilty of defrauding the government; Bain Capital tripled its investment before selling off the company, with the fraud being discovered by the new owners (Romney was never implicated). In some cases Romney had little involvement with a company once acquired.
Bain Capital's leveraged buyouts sometimes led to layoffs, either soon after acquisition or later after the firm had left. Bain Capital officials later said that overall, more jobs were added than lost due to these buyouts. In any case, maximizing the value of acquired companies and the return to Bain's investors, not job creation, was the firm's fundamental goal, as it was for most private equity operations. Regarding job losses, Romney later said, "Sometimes the medicine is a little bitter but it is necessary to save the life of the patient. My job was to try and make the enterprise successful, and in my view the best security a family can have is that the business they work for is strong." Bain Capital's acquisition of Ampad exemplified a deal where it profited handsomely from early payments and management fees, even though the subject company itself ended up going into bankruptcy. Bain was among the private equity firms that took the most such fees, and more cases happened as Romney was leaving the firm. He said in retrospect, "It is one thing that if I had a chance to go back I would be more sensitive to. It is always a balance. Great care has got to be taken not to take a dividend or a distribution from a company that puts that company at risk. [Having taken a big payment from a company that later failed] would make me sick, sick at heart."
In 1990, Romney was asked to return to Bain & Company, which was facing financial collapse. He was announced as its new CEO in January 1991 (but drew only a symbolic salary of one dollar). Romney managed an effort to restructure the firm's employee stock-ownership plan, real-estate deals and bank loans, while rallying the firm's thousand employees, imposing a new governing structure that included Bain and the other founding partners giving up control, and increasing fiscal transparency. Within about a year, he had led Bain & Company through a highly successful turnaround and returned the firm to profitability without further layoffs or partner defections. He turned Bain & Company over to new leadership and returned to Bain Capital in December 1992.
During his years in business, Romney tithed by giving millions of dollars to the LDS Church. He served as ward bishop for Belmont from 1984 to 1986, acting as the ecclesiastical and administrative head of his congregation. From 1986 to 1994 he presided over the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen congregations in eastern Massachusetts.
Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee. By that time, Bain Capital was on its way to being one of the top private equity firms in the nation, having increased its number of partners from 5 to 18, having 115 employees overall, and having $4 billion under its management. Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry. His experience at Bain & Company and Bain Capital gave Romney a business-oriented world view – centering around a hate of waste and inefficiency, a love for data and charts and analysis and presentation, and a belief in keeping an open mind and seeking opposing points of view – that he would take with him to the public sector. As a result of his business career, by 2007 Romney and his wife had a net worth of between $190 and $250 million, most of it held in blind trusts. Although gone, Romney received a passive profit share as a retired partner in some Bain Capital entities. An additional blind trust existed in the name of the Romneys' children and grandchildren that was valued at between $70 and $100 million as of 2007. The couple's net worth remained in the same range as of 2011, and was still held in blind trusts.
1994 U.S. senatorial campaign
Romney had been thinking about entering politics for a while. He decided to take on longtime incumbent Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, who was more vulnerable than usual in 1994 – in part because of the unpopularity of the Democratic Congress as a whole and also because this was Kennedy's first election since the William Kennedy Smith trial in Florida, in which Kennedy had taken some public relations hits regarding his character. Romney changed his affiliation from Independent to Republican in October 1993 and formally announced his candidacy in February 1994. He stepped down from his position at Bain Capital during the run.Romney came from behind to win the Massachusetts Republican Party's nomination for U.S. Senate after buying substantial television time to get out his message, gaining overwhelming support in the state party convention, and then defeating businessman John Lakian in the September 1994 primary with over 80 percent of the vote. In the general election, Kennedy faced the first serious re-election challenger of his career in the young, telegenic, and very well-funded Romney. Romney ran as a fresh face, as a successful entrepreneur who stated he had created ten thousand jobs, and as a Washington outsider with a strong family image and moderate stands on social issues. Romney stated: "Ultimately, this is a campaign about change." After two decades out of public view, his father George re-emerged during the campaign as well.
Romney's campaign was effective in portraying Kennedy as soft on crime, but had trouble establishing its own positions in a consistent manner. By mid-September 1994, polls showed the race to be approximately even. Kennedy responded with a series of attack ads, which focused both on Romney's seemingly shifting political views on issues such as abortion and on the treatment of workers at a paper products plant owned by Romney's Bain Capital. Kennedy and Romney held a widely watched late October debate without a clear winner, but by then Kennedy had pulled ahead in polls and stayed ahead afterward. Romney spent over $7 million of his own money, with Kennedy spending more than $10 million from his campaign fund, mostly in the last weeks of the campaign (this was the second-most expensive race of the 1994 election cycle, after the Dianne Feinstein–Michael Huffington Senate race in California).
In the November general election, despite a disastrous showing for Democrats overall, Kennedy won the election with 58 percent of the vote to Romney's 41 percent, the smallest margin in Kennedy's eight re-election campaigns for the Senate.
2002 Winter Olympics
Romney returned to Bain Capital the day after the election, but still smarted from the loss, and told his brother, "I never want to run for something again unless I can win." His father died in 1995 and his mother in 1998, and Romney felt restless as the decade neared a close; the goal of just making more money was losing its appeal to him. He had stepped down as Boston Stake president in order to run for the Senate, and while still teaching Sunday School, was largely uninvolved in the long and somewhat controversial construction of a Mormon temple in Belmont. Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998; Romney described watching her fail a series of neurological tests as the worst day of his life. After two years of severe difficulties with the disease, she found in Park City, Utah (where the couple had built a vacation home) a mixture of mainstream, alternative, and equestrian therapies that gave her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. When the offer came for Romney to take over the troubled 2002 Olympic Winter Games, to be held in Salt Lake City in Utah, she urged him to take it, and eager for a new challenge, he did. On February 11, 1999, Romney was hired as the new president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.Before Romney came on, the event was running $379 million short of its revenue benchmarks. Plans were being made to scale back the games to compensate for the fiscal crisis and there were fears the games might be moved away entirely. The Games had also been damaged by allegations of bribery involving top officials, including prior Salt Lake Olympic Committee president and CEO Frank Joklik. Joklik and committee vice president Dave Johnson were forced to resign. Romney's appointment faced some initial criticism from non-Mormons, and fears from Mormons, that it represented cronyism or gave the games too Mormon an image.
Romney revamped the organization's leadership and policies, reduced budgets, and boosted fund raising. He soothed worried corporate sponsors and recruited many new ones. He admitted past problems, listened to local critics, and rallied Utah's citizenry with a sense of optimism. Romney worked to ensure the safety of the Games following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by ignoring those who suggested the games be called off and coordinating a $300 million security budget. He became the public face of the Olympic effort, appearing in countless photographs and news stories and even on Olympics souvenir pins. Romney's omnipresence irked those who thought he was taking too much of the credit for the success, or had exaggerated the state of initial distress, or was primarily looking to improve his own image. Overall he oversaw a $1.32 billion budget, 700 employees, and 26,000 volunteers.
Despite the initial fiscal shortfall, the Games ended up clearing a profit of $100 million, not counting the $224.5 million in security costs contributed by outside sources. Romney broke the record for most private money raised by any individual for an Olympics games, summer or winter. His performance as Olympics head was rated positively by 87 percent of Utahns. Romney and his wife contributed $1 million to the Olympics, and he donated to charity the $1.4 million in salary and severance payments he received for his three years as president and CEO.
Romney was widely praised for his successful efforts with the 2002 Winter Olympics including by President George W. Bush, and it solidified his reputation as a turnaround artist. Harvard Business School taught a case study based around Romney's successful actions. Romney wrote a book about his experience titled ''Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games'', published in 2004. The role gave Romney experience in dealing with federal, state, and local entities, a public persona he had previously lacked, and the chance to re-launch his political aspirations. Indeed, he was mentioned as a possible candidate for statewide office in both Massachusetts and Utah, and also as possibly joining the Bush administration.
Governor of Massachusetts
2002 gubernatorial campaign
In 2002, Republican Acting Governor Jane Swift's administration was plagued by political missteps and personal scandals. Many Republicans viewed her as a liability and considered her unable to win a general election against a Democrat. Prominent GOP activists campaigned to persuade Romney to run for governor. One poll taken at that time showed Republicans favoring Romney over Swift by more than 50 percentage points. In March 2002, Swift decided not to seek her party's nomination, and so Romney was unopposed in the Republican party primary.Massachusetts Democratic Party officials contested Romney's eligibility to run for governor, citing residency issues involving Romney's time in Utah as president of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee. In June 2002, the Massachusetts State Ballot Law Commission unanimously ruled that Romney was eligible to run for office.
Romney ran as a political outsider again. Supporters of Romney hailed his business record, especially his success with the 2002 Olympics, as the record of someone who would be able to bring a new era of efficiency into Massachusetts politics. The campaign was the first to use microtargeting techniques, in which fine-grained groups of voters were reached with narrowly tailored messaging. Romney contributed over $6 million to his own campaign during the election, a state record at the time. Romney was elected Governor in November 2002 with 50 percent of the vote over his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, who received 45 percent.
Tenure, 2003–2007
Romney was sworn in as the 70th governor of Massachusetts on January 2, 2003. Both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature held large Democratic majorities. He picked his cabinet and advisors more on managerial abilities than partisan affiliation. Upon entering office in the middle of a fiscal year, Romney faced an immediate $650 million shortfall and a projected $3 billion deficit for the next year. Unexpected revenue of $1.0–1.3 billion from a previously enacted capital gains tax increase and $500 million in unanticipated federal grants decreased the deficit to $1.2–1.5 billion. Through a combination of spending cuts, increased fees, and removal of corporate tax loopholes, by 2006 the state had a $600–700 million surplus.thumb|left|upright|alt=Mitt Romney resting on a wooden desk, flanked by an American flag, a picture of his wife, a lamp, and a painting of mountains|Official Massachusetts State House portrait of Governor Mitt Romney, by artist [[Richard Whitney (artist)|Richard Whitney]]Romney supported raising various fees by more than $300 million, including those for driver's licenses, marriage licenses, and gun licenses. Romney increased a special gasoline retailer fee by 2 cents per gallon, generating about $60 million per year in additional revenue. (Opponents said the reliance on fees sometimes imposed a hardship on those who could least afford them.) Romney also closed tax loopholes that brought in another $181 million from businesses over the next two years. The state legislature, with Romney's support, also cut spending by $1.6 billion, including $700 million in reductions in state aid to cities and towns. The cuts also included a $140 million reduction in state funding for higher education, which led state-run colleges and universities to increase tuition by 63 percent over four years. Romney sought additional cuts in his last year as Massachusetts governor by vetoing nearly 250 items in the state budget, but all of them were overridden by the Democratic-dominated legislature.
The cuts in state spending put added pressure on local property taxes; the share of town and city revenues coming from property taxes rose from 49 percent to 53 percent. The combined state and local tax burden in Massachusetts increased during Romney's governorship but still was below the national average. According to the Tax Foundation, that per capita burden was 9.8 percent in 2002 (below the national average of 10.3 percent), and 10.5 percent in 2006 (below the national average of 10.8 percent).
Romney was at the forefront of a movement to bring near-universal health insurance coverage to the state, after a business executive told him at the start of his term that doing so would be the best way he could help people and after the federal government, due to the rules of Medicaid funding, threatened to cut $385 million in those payments to Massachusetts if the state did not reduce the number of uninsured recipients of health care services. Despite not having campaigned on the idea of universal health insurance, Romney decided that because people without insurance still received expensive health care, the money spent by the state for such care could be better used to subsidize insurance for the poor.
After positing that any measure adopted not raise taxes and not resemble the previous decade's failed "Hillarycare" proposal, Romney formed a team of consultants from different political backgrounds that beginning in late 2004 came up with a set of innovative proposals more ambitious than an incremental one from the Massachusetts Senate and more acceptable to him than one from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that incorporated a new payroll tax. In particular, Romney successfully pushed for incorporating an individual mandate at the state level. Past rival Ted Kennedy, who had made universal heath coverage his life's work and who over time developed a warm relationship with Romney, gave Romney's plan a positive reception, which encouraged Democratic legislators to work with it. The effort eventually gained the support of all major stakeholders within the state, and Romney helped break a logjam between rival Democratic leaders in the legislature.
On April 12, 2006, Romney signed the resulting Massachusetts health reform law, which requires nearly all Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance coverage or face escalating tax penalties such as the loss of their personal income tax exemption. The bill also establishes means-tested state subsidies for people who do not have adequate employer insurance and who make below an income threshold, by using funds previously designated to compensate for the health costs of the uninsured. He vetoed eight sections of the health care legislation, including a controversial $295-per-employee assessment on businesses that do not offer health insurance and provisions guaranteeing dental benefits to Medicaid recipients. The legislature overrode all eight vetoes; Romney's communications director Eric Fehrnstrom responded by saying, "These differences with the Legislature are not essential to the goal of getting everyone covered with insurance." Romney said of the measure overall, "There really wasn't Republican or Democrat in this. People ask me if this is conservative or liberal, and my answer is yes. It's liberal in the sense that we're getting our citizens health insurance. It's conservative in that we're not getting a government takeover." The law was the first of its kind in the nation and became the signature achievement of Romney's term in office.|group="nb"}}
At the beginning of his governorship, Romney opposed same-sex marriage and civil unions, but advocated tolerance and supported some domestic partnership benefits. Faced with the dilemma of choosing between same-sex marriage or civil unions after the November 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision legalizing same-sex marriages (''Goodridge v. Department of Public Health''), Romney reluctantly backed a state constitutional amendment in February 2004 that would have banned same-sex marriage but still allow civil unions, viewing it as the only feasible way to ban same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. In May 2004 Romney instructed town clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but citing a 1913 law that barred out-of-state residents from getting married in Massachusetts if their union would be illegal in their home state, no marriage licenses were to be issued to out-of-state same-sex couples not planning to move to Massachusetts. In June 2005, Romney abandoned his support for the compromise amendment, stating that the amendment confused voters who oppose both same-sex marriage and civil unions. Instead, Romney endorsed a petition effort led by the Coalition for Marriage & Family that would have banned same-sex marriage and made no provisions for civil unions. In 2004 and 2006 he urged the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment.
In 2005, Romney revealed a change of view regarding abortion, moving from an "unequivocal" pro-choice position expressed during his 2002 campaign to a pro-life one where he opposed ''Roe v. Wade''. He vetoed a bill on pro-life grounds that would expand access to emergency contraception in hospitals and pharmacies.
Romney generally used the bully pulpit approach towards promoting his agenda, staging well-organized media events to appeal directly to the public rather than pushing his proposals in behind-doors sessions with the state legislature. Romney was especially effective in dealing with a crisis of confidence in Boston's Big Dig project following a fatal ceiling collapse in 2006, wresting control of the project from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and helping ensure that it would eventually complete.
During 2004, Romney spent considerable effort trying to bolster the state Republican Party, but it failed to gain any seats in the state legislative elections that year. Given a prime-time appearance at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Romney was already being discussed as a potential 2008 presidential candidate. Midway through his term, Romney decided that he wanted to stage a full-time run for president, and on December 14, 2005, Romney announced that he would not seek re-election for a second term as governor. As chair of the Republican Governors Association, Romney traveled around the country, meeting prominent Republicans and building a national political network; he spent part or all of more than 200 days out of state during 2006, preparing for his run. Romney's frequent out-of-state travel contributed towards his approval rating declining in public polls towards the end of his term. He conceded that 2006 would be a difficult year for Republicans and that they would likely lose gubernatorial seats, including possibly his own. The weak condition of the Republican state party was one of several factors that led to Democrat Deval Patrick's lopsided win over Republican Kerry Healey in the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial election.
Romney filed to register a presidential campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission on his penultimate day in office as governor. Romney's term ended January 4, 2007.
2008 presidential campaign
Romney formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination for president on February 13, 2007, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In his speech, Romney frequently invoked his father and his own family and stressed experiences in the private, public, and voluntary sectors that had brought him to this point. He said, "Throughout my life, I have pursued innovation and transformation," and casting himself as a political outsider, said, "I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by a lifelong politician."thumb|left|alt=Mitt Romney addressing an audience from atop a stage|Romney holding an "Ask Mitt Anything" session in [[Ames, Iowa|Ames, Iowa, in May 2007]]The assets that Romney's campaign began with included his résumé of success in the business world and his rescuing of the Salt Lake Olympics, which matched the commonly held notion that American industry had star players who could straighten out what was wrong in the nation's capital. Romney also had solid political experience as governor together with a political pedigree courtesy of his father, a strong work ethic and energy level, and a large, wholesome-looking family that seemed so perfect as to be off-putting to some voters. Ann Romney, who had become an outspoken advocate for those with multiple sclerosis, was in remission and would be an active participant in his campaign, helping to soften his political personality. Moreover, with his square jaw, handsome face, and ample hair graying at the temples, Mitt Romney matched one of the common images of what a president should look like. Romney's liabilities included having run for senator and served as governor in one of the nation's most liberal states, having taken some positions there that were opposed by the party's conservative base, and subsequently shifting those positions. The candidate's Mormon religion was also viewed with suspicion and skepticism by some in the Evangelical portion of the party.
Romney assembled for his campaign a veteran group of Republican staffers, consultants, and pollsters. He was little-known nationally, though, and stayed around the 10 percent range in Republican preference polls for the first half of 2007. Romney's strategy was to win the first two big contests, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and carry the momentum and visibility gained through the big Super Tuesday primaries and on to the nomination. He proved the most effective fundraiser of any of the Republican candidates, with his Olympics ties helping him with fundraising from Utah residents and from sponsors and trustees of the games. He also partly financed his campaign with his own personal fortune. These resources, combined with his August 2007 win in the Iowa Straw Poll and the mid-year near-collapse of nominal front-runner John McCain's campaign, made Romney a threat to win the nomination and the focus of the other candidates' attacks. Romney's staff suffered from internal strife and the candidate himself was indecisive at times, constantly asking for more data before making a decision. Persistent questions about the role of religion in Romney's life, as well as Southern Baptist minister and former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls based upon an explicitly Christian-themed campaign, led to the December 6, 2007, "Faith in America" speech.
thumb|upright|right|alt=Mitt and Ann Romney standing side by side against an American flag|Mitt and Ann Romney in late December 2007 at a campaign event in Londonderry, New HampshireIn the January 3, 2008, Iowa Republican caucuses, the first contest of the primary season, Romney received 25 percent of the vote and placed second to the vastly outspent Huckabee, who received 34 percent. Of the 60 percent of caucus-goers who were evangelical Christians, Huckabee was supported by about half of them while Romney by only a fifth. A couple of days later, Romney won the lightly contested Wyoming Republican caucuses. At a Saint Anselm College debate, Huckabee and McCain pounded away at Romney's image as a flip flopper. Indeed, this label would stick to Romney through the campaign (but was one that Romney rejected as unfair and inaccurate, except for his acknowledged change of mind on abortion). Romney seemed to approach the campaign as a management consulting exercise, and showed a lack of personal warmth and political feel; journalist Evan Thomas wrote that Romney "came off as a phony, even when he was perfectly sincere." Romney's staff would conclude that competing as a candidate of social conservatism and ideological purity rather than of pragmatic competence had been a mistake.
Romney finished in second place by five percentage points to the resurgent McCain in the next-door-to-his-home-state New Hampshire primary on January 8. Romney rebounded to win the January 15 Michigan primary over McCain by a solid margin, capitalizing on his childhood ties to the state and his vow to bring back lost automotive industry jobs which was seen by several commentators as unrealistic.|group="nb"}} On January 19, Romney won the lightly contested Nevada caucuses, but placed fourth in the intense South Carolina primary, where he had effectively ceded the contest to his rivals. McCain gained further momentum with his win in South Carolina, leading to a showdown between him and Romney in the Florida primary.
thumb|left|alt=Mitt Romney surrounded by people, holding a microphone and smiling|Romney at a rally in Michigan in mid-January 2008For ten days, Romney campaigned intensively on economic issues and the burgeoning subprime mortgage crisis, while McCain repeatedly and inaccurately asserted that Romney favored a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.|group="nb"}} McCain won key last-minute endorsements from Florida Senator Mel Martinez and Governor Charlie Crist, which helped push him to a five percentage point victory on January 29. Although many Republican officials were now lining up behind McCain, Romney persisted through the nationwide Super Tuesday contests on February 5. There he won primaries or caucuses in several states, including Massachusetts, Alaska, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah, but McCain won more, including large states such as California and New York. Trailing McCain in delegates by a more than two-to-one margin, Romney announced the end of his campaign on February 7 during a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Altogether, Romney had won 11 primaries and caucuses, received about 4.7 million total votes, and garnered about 280 delegates.
Romney endorsed McCain for president a week later. He soon founded the Free and Strong America PAC, a political action committee whose stated mission was to raise money for other Republican candidates and to promote Republican policies. Romney became one of the McCain campaign's most visible surrogates, appearing on behalf of the GOP nominee at fundraisers, state Republican party conventions, and on cable news programs. His efforts earned McCain's respect and the two developed a warmer relationship; he was on the nominee's short list for the vice presidential running mate slot, where his experience in matters economic would have balanced one of McCain's weaknesses. McCain, behind in the polls, opted instead for a high-risk, high-reward "game changer" and selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Romney continued to work for McCain's eventually unsuccessful general election campaign.
Between presidential campaigns
Following the election, Romney paved the way for a possible 2012 presidential campaign by keeping much of his PAC's money to pay for salaries and consulting fees for his existing political staff and to build up a political infrastructure for what might become a $1 billion campaign three years hence. He also had a network of former staff and supporters around the nation who were eager for him to run again. He continued to give speeches and raise campaign funds on behalf of fellow Republicans, but turned down many potential media appearances so as not to become overexposed. He earned over $374,000 in fees for speeches before business, educational, and motivational groups. He served on the board of directors of Marriott International in 2010, earning over $113,000, then stepped down from it in early 2011.The Romneys sold their main home in Belmont and their ski house in Utah, leaving them an estate along Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and an oceanfront home in the La Jolla district of San Diego, California, that they had bought the year before. Both locations were near some of the Romneys' grandchildren, who by 2010 numbered fourteen. The San Diego location was also ideal for Ann Romney's multiple sclerosis therapies and for recovering from her late 2008 diagnosis and lumpectomy for mammary ductal carcinoma in situ. Romney maintained his voting registration in Massachusetts, however, and bought a smaller condominium in Belmont during 2010. Following the August 2009 death of his past rival and sometime ally Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Romney declared that he had no interest in running in the special January 2010 election to replace him. Romney was an early supporter of Scott Brown, the successful Republican candidate in that race. Some of Romney's former aides were used by Brown's campaign and Romney raised funds for Brown. In February 2010, Romney had a minor altercation with LMFAO musical group member Skyler Gordy, known as Sky Blu, on an airplane flight.
Romney's book, ''No Apology: The Case for American Greatness'', was released on March 2, 2010; an 18-state promotional book tour was undertaken. The book, which debuted atop the New York Times Best Seller list, avoided anecdotes about Romney's personal or political life and focused much of its attention on a presentation of his views on economic and geopolitical matters. Earnings from the book were donated to charity.
Polls of various kinds showed Romney remaining in the forefront of possible 2012 presidential contenders. In nationwide opinion polling for the 2012 Republican Presidential primaries, he has often led polls or been in the top three along with Palin and Huckabee. He finished first in the CPAC straw poll in 2009 and second in 2010 and 2011 behind Ron Paul, won the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll in 2010, and won the New Hampshire Straw Poll in 2011. A January 2010 ''National Journal'' poll of political insiders found that a majority of Republican insiders, and a plurality of Democratic insiders, predicted Romney would become the party's 2012 nominee. Pew Research Center and Gallup Poll results showed that during 2009 and 2010, more in the general public were viewing him favorably (36 to 40 percent) than unfavorably (28 to 29 percent); this was a marked improvement from the days of his 2008 presidential campaign, when the reverse had been true.
Romney campaigned heavily for Republican candidates around the nation in the 2010 midterm elections, and raised the most funds of any of the prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidates. Appearances during early 2011 found Romney emphasizing how his experience could be applied towards solving the nation's economic problems and presenting a more relaxed visual image.
2012 presidential campaign
On April 11, 2011, Romney announced in a video taped outdoors at the University of New Hampshire that he had formed an exploratory committee as a first step for a potential run for the Republican presidential nomination, saying "It is time that we put America back on a course of greatness, with a growing economy, good jobs and fiscal discipline in Washington." The announcement represented the culmination of Romney's activities; as one Quinnipiac University political science professor stated, "We all knew that he was going to run. He's really been running for president ever since the day after the 2008 election."Romney stood to possibly gain from the Republican electorate's tendency to nominate candidates who had previously run for president and were "next in line" to be chosen. Perhaps his greatest hurdle in gaining the Republican nomination was opposition to the Massachusetts health care reform law that he had signed five years earlier. The early stages of the race found Romney as the apparent front-runner in a weak field, especially in terms of fundraising prowess and organization. As many potential Republican candidates decided not to run (including Mike Pence, John Thune, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch Daniels), Republican party figures searched for plausible alternatives to Romney.
On June 2, 2011, Romney formally announced the start of his campaign. Speaking on a farm in Stratham, New Hampshire, he stressed economic issues and said that the nation was suffering from "President Obama's own misery index". He said that, "In the campaign to come, the American ideals of economic freedom and opportunity need a clear and unapologetic defense, and I intend to make it – because I have lived it."
Romney took the early fundraising lead, raising four times more in the second quarter of 2011 than his nearest Republican opponent. He ran a low-key, low-profile campaign at first and avoided statements about the ongoing U.S. debt ceiling crisis until the final days, when he said he opposed the Budget Control Act of 2011 that resolved it.
Political positions
For much of his business career, Romney had no tangible record of political positions taken. He followed national politics avidly in college, and the circumstances of his father's presidential campaign loss would grate on him for decades, but his early philosophical influences were often non-political, such as in his missionary days when he read and absorbed Napoleon Hill's pioneering self-help tome ''Think and Grow Rich'' and encouraged his colleagues to do the same. Until his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, he was registered as an Independent. In the 1992 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he had voted for the Democratic former senator from the state, Paul Tsongas.
In the 1994 Senate race, Romney explicitly aligned himself with Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who believed in fiscal conservatism and supported abortion rights and gay rights, saying "I think Bill Weld's fiscal conservatism, his focus on creating jobs and employment and his efforts to fight discrimination and assure civil rights for all is a model that I identify with and aspire to."
As a gubernatorial candidate, and then as the newly elected Governor of Massachusetts, Romney again generally operated in the mold established by Weld and followed by Weld's two other Republican successors, Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift: restrain spending and taxing, be tolerant or permissive on social issues, protect the environment, be tough on crime, try to appear post-partisan.
Romney has been consistent in many of his political positions. However, Romney's position or choice of emphasis on certain social issues, including abortion, some aspects of gay rights,|group="nb"}} some aspects of stem cell research,|group="nb"}} and some aspects of abstinence-only sex education,|group="nb"}} evolved into a more conservative stance during his time as governor. The change in 2005 on abortion drew particular attention and was the result of what Romney described as an epiphany experienced while investigating stem cell research issues. He later said, "Changing my position was in line with an ongoing struggle that anyone has that is opposed to abortion personally, vehemently opposed to it, and yet says, 'Well, I'll let other people make that decision.' And you say to yourself, but if you believe that you're taking innocent life, it's hard to justify letting other people make that decision."
This increased alignment with traditional conservatives on social issues coincided with Romney's becoming a candidate for the 2008 Republican nomination for President, and also included a new-found admiration for the National Rifle Association paired with ineptly attempting to portray himself as a lifelong hunter, rarely mentioning his Massachusetts health care law, being a convert on signing an anti-tax pledge, and displaying bluster or boldness on foreign policy matters (such as wanting to double the number of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp). In response, many skeptics, including a number of Republicans, charged Romney with opportunism and having a lack of core principles. The fervor with which Romney adopted his new stances and attitudes contributed to the perception of inauthenticity which hampered that campaign. Romney generally responds to criticisms of ideological pandering with remarks like, "The older I get, the smarter Ronald Reagan gets."
While there have been many biographical parallels between the lives of George Romney and his son Mitt, There are also obvious differences in their paths, including that George had a hardscrabble upbringing while Mitt's was affluent, and that Mitt far exceeded George's accomplishments in formal education.|group="nb"}} one particular difference is that while George was willing to defy political trends, Mitt has been much more willing to adapt to them. Mitt Romney has said that learning from experience and changing views accordingly is a virtue, and that, "If you're looking for someone who's never changed any positions on any policies, then I'm not your guy." Journalist and author Daniel Gross sees Romney as approaching politics in the same terms as a business competing in markets, in that successful executives do not hold firm to public stances over long periods of time, but rather constantly devise new strategies and plans to deal with new geographical regions and ever-changing market conditions. Political profiler Ryan Lizza sees the same question regarding whether Romney's business skills can be adapted to politics, saying that "while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics". Writer Robert Draper holds a somewhat similar perspective: "The Romney curse was this: His strength lay in his adaptability. In governance, this was a virtue; in a political race, it was an invitation to be called a phony."
Immediately following the March 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Romney attacked the landmark legislation as "an unconscionable abuse of power" and said the act should be repealed. The hostile attention it held among Republicans created a potential problem for the former governor, since the new federal law was in many ways similar to the Massachusetts health care reform passed during Romney's term; as one Associated Press article stated, "Obamacare ... looks a lot like Romneycare." While acknowledging that his plan was not perfect and still was a work in progress, Romney did not back away from it, and has consistently defended the state-level health insurance mandate that underpins it. He has focused on its having had bipartisan support in the state legislature, while the Obama plan received no Republican support at all in Congress, and upon it being the right answer to Massachusetts' specific problems at the time. A Romney spokesperson has stated: "Mitt Romney has been very clear in all his public statements that he is opposed to a national individual mandate. He believes those decisions should be left to the states." While Romney has not explicitly argued for a federally-imposed mandate, during his 1994 Senate campaign he indicated he would vote for an overall health insurance proposal that contained one, and he suggested during his time as governor and during his 2008 presidential campaign that the Massachusetts plan was a model for the nation and that over time mandate plans might be adopted by most or all of the nation.
Throughout his business, Olympics, and political career, Romney's instinct has been to apply the "Bain way" towards problems. Romney has said, "There were two key things I learned at Bain. One was a series of concepts for approaching tough problems and a problem-solving methodology; the other was an enormous respect for data, analysis, and debate." He has written, "There are answers in numbers – gold in numbers. Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow." Romney believes the Bain approach is not only effective in the business realm but also in running for office and, once there, in solving political conundrums such as proper Pentagon spending levels and the future of Social Security. Former Bain and Olympics colleague Fraser Bullock has said of Romney, "He's not an ideologue. He makes decisions based on researching data more deeply than anyone I know." Romney's technocratic instincts have thus always been with him; in his public appearances during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign he sometimes gave PowerPoint presentations rather than conventional speeches. Upon taking office he became, in the words of ''The Boston Globe'', "the state's first self-styled CEO governor". During his 2008 presidential campaign he was constantly asking for data, analysis, and opposing arguments, and has been viewed as a potential "CEO president" should he get that far.
Religious aspects of public image
Romney is a sixth-generation member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church, colloquially known as the Mormon church). He has avoided speaking publicly about specific church doctrines, and pointed out that the U.S. Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office. Polls in 2007 and 2011 indicated that about a quarter of Republican voters, and a quarter of voters overall, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who was a Mormon. Romney's "Faith in America" speech, delivered in December 2007, addressed the matter. In it, Romney said he should neither be elected nor rejected based upon his religion, and echoed Senator John F. Kennedy's famous speech during his 1960 presidential campaign in saying "I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law." Instead of discussing the specific tenets of his faith, he said that he would be informed by it and that, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
One academic study, based upon research conducted throughout the 2008 primaries, showed that a negative perception of Mormonism was widespread during the election, and that perception was often resistant to factual information that would correct mistaken notions about the religion or Romney's relationship to it. The authors concluded that, "For Romney ... religion ''is'' the central story." Another study, analyzing a survey conducted during January 2008 (when an African American, a woman, and a Mormon all had realistic chances of becoming the first president from that group), found that voters had internally accepted the notion of black equality, paving the way for Barack Obama's election; had partially established but not fully internalized the notion of gender equality, making Hillary Rodham Clinton's task somewhat more difficult; but had only selectively internalized the notion of religious equality, and in particular not extended it to Mormons, thus making Romney's run significantly more difficult. Those authors concluded that, "for a Mormon candidate, the road to the presidency remains very rough ... The bias against a Mormon candidate is substantial."
The June 13, 2011, issue of ''Newsweek'' magazine featured a Romney-themed cover based on the popular ''Book of Mormon'' Broadway musical, and dubbed the summer of 2011 "The Mormon Moment". Analysts expect Romney's Mormonism to become an issue again in the 2012 campaign.
Electoral history
Awards and honors
Romney has received four honorary doctorates: an Honorary Doctor of Business from the University of Utah in 1999, an Honorary Doctor of Law from Bentley College in 2002, an Honorary Doctor of Public Administration from Suffolk University Law School in 2004, and an Honorary Doctor of Public Service from Hillsdale College in 2007.''People'' magazine included Romney in its 50 Most Beautiful People list for 2002. In 2004, Romney received the inaugural Truce Ideal Award for his role in the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 2008, he shared with his wife Ann the Canterbury Medal from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, for "refus[ing] to compromise their principles and faith" during the presidential campaign.
See also
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
;Official;Other
Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century Mormon missionaries Category:American chief executives Category:American Latter Day Saints Category:American investors Category:American management consultants Category:American Mormon missionaries Category:American political writers Category:Bain Capital Category:Bishops of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Category:Boston Consulting Group people Category:Businesspeople from Massachusetts Category:Brigham Young University alumni Category:Cranbrook Educational Community alumni Category:Governors of Massachusetts Category:Harvard Business School alumni Category:Harvard Law School alumni Category:Massachusetts Republicans Category:Michigan Republicans Category:Mormon missionaries in France Category:People from Belmont, Massachusetts Category:People from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan Category:People from Detroit, Michigan Category:Pratt–Romney family Category:Private equity and venture capital investors Category:Stake presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Category:Stanford University alumni Category:United States presidential candidates, 2008 Category:United States presidential candidates, 2012 Category:Writers from Massachusetts Category:Businesspeople from Michigan
ar:مت رومني br:Mitt Romney cs:Mitt Romney da:Mitt Romney pdc:Mitt Romney de:Mitt Romney et:Mitt Romney es:Mitt Romney fa:میت رامنی fr:Mitt Romney ko:미트 롬니 hr:Mitt Romney is:Mitt Romney it:Mitt Romney he:מיט רומני la:Mitt Romney hu:Mitt Romney nl:Mitt Romney ja:ミット・ロムニー no:Mitt Romney pl:Mitt Romney pt:Mitt Romney ro:Mitt Romney ru:Ромни, Уиллард Митт simple:Mitt Romney sh:Mitt Romney fi:Mitt Romney sv:Mitt Romney th:มิตต์ รอมนีย์ tr:Mitt Romney uk:Мітт Ромні yi:מיט ראמני zh:米特·羅姆尼This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| name | David Bowie |
|---|---|
| background | solo_singer |
| birth name | David Robert Jones |
| birth date | January 08, 1947 |
| birth place | Brixton, London, England |
| occupation | Musician, singer-songwriter,record producer, actor |
| years active | 1964–present |
| instrument | |
| genre | Rock, glam rock, art rock, pop |
| associated acts | The Riot Squad, Tin Machine |
| label | Deram, RCA, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Pye |
| website | davidbowie.com }} |
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.
In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album ''Young Americans'', which the singer characterised as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album ''Low'' (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.
After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" and its parent album, ''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)''. He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with the album ''Let's Dance'', which yielded the hit singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love". Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was ''Reality'' (2003), which was supported by the 2003–2004 Reality Tour.
Biographer David Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and eight Silver, and in the United States, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.
History
1947–62: early years
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent, worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, was a promotions officer for Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.In 1953 the family moved to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His singing voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that." By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet." Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.
It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:
Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician. He received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would lose the sight of the eye, and he was forced to stay out of school for a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation. The damage could not be fully repaired, leaving him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil (the latter producing Bowie's appearance of having different coloured eyes, though each iris has the same blue colour). Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.
1962–68: the Konrads to the Riot Squad
Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument in 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul — "I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall. "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.
Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie re-named himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, ''David Bowie'', an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.
Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus." Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside." Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year. After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.
1969–73: psychedelic folk to glam rock
''Space Oddity'' to ''Hunky Dory''
Because of his lack of commercial success, Bowie was forced to try to earn a living in different ways. He featured in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, but was rejected for another by Kit Kat. Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, ''Love You till Tuesday'', was made. Although not released until 1984, the filming sessions in January 1969 led to unexpected success when Bowie told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He then demoed the song that would provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing. Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street. This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival". "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, to become a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, ''Space Oddity'', followed in November; originally issued in the UK as ''David Bowie'', it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled ''Man of Words/Man of Music''. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence. Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally". The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist. A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. After a brief and disastrous manifestation as the Hype, the group reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist. Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey. Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.
The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, ''The Man Who Sold the World'' (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by ''Space Oddity''. To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including ''Rolling Stone''s John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass". During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol". A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars".
''Hunky Dory'' (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. (His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word ''zoe'', life.) Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time.
''Ziggy Stardust''
With his next venture, Bowie, in the words of biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture". Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972. The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'' (1972), combining the hard rock elements of ''The Man Who Sold the World'' with the lighter experimental rock and pop of ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July ''Top of the Pops'' performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old ''Hunky Dory''. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough ''Transformer'', co-producing the album with Mick Ronson. His own ''Aladdin Sane'' (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. ''Aladdin Sane'' spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".
Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both ''Ziggy Stardust'' and ''Aladdin Sane'', were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film ''Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''.
After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: ''The Man Who Sold the World'' had been re-released in 1972 along with ''Space Oddity''. "Life on Mars?", from ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four. ''Pin Ups'', a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.
1974–1976: Soul, funk and the Thin White Duke
Bowie moved to the United States in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. ''Diamond Dogs'' (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's ''1984'' to music. The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, ''Cracked Actor'', featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems. He later commented that the accompanying live album, ''David Live'', ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory". ''David Live'' nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was ''Young Americans'' (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. ''Young Americans'' yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon would call Bowie's work as "great, but just rock and roll with lipstick on". Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show ''Soul Train'', Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his October single, and that it was offered to Elvis Presley to perform, but Presley declined it. ''Young Americans'' was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US. Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of ''Ziggy Stardust'' alone), existed essentially on loose change." In 1975, in a move echoing Pitt's acrimonious dismissal 15 years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door." Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.
''Station to Station'' (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'' the same year. Developing the funk and soul of ''Young Americans'', ''Station to Station'' also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence." His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.
''Station to Station''s January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in ''NME''. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke. "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...". According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in ''The Times'', "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."
1976–79: the Berlin era
Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use increased; so too did his interest in pursuits outside his musical career. He took up painting, producing a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. [...] Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography".Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy. During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, ''The Idiot'', and its follow-up, ''Lust for Life'', touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977. ''Low'' (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, ''Low'' yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of ''Station to Station'' in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described ''Low'' as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his ''Symphony No. 1 "Low"''; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 ''Symphony No. 4 "Heroes"''. Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".
Echoing ''Low''s minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, ''"Heroes"'' (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like ''Low'', ''"Heroes"'' evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French. Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show ''Marc'', and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.
After completing ''Low'' and ''"Heroes"'', Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends." Recordings from the tour made up the live album ''Stage'', released the same year.
The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", ''Lodger'' (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop. The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's ''Sergeant Pepper'' [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." ''Lodger'' reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ". Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.
1980–89: from superstar to megastar
''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)'' (1980) produced the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time. While ''Scary Monsters'' utilised principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer and Tom Verlaine. As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on 24 September, starring in ''The Elephant Man''.Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German film ''Christiane F.'', a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as ''Christiane F.'' a few months later. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play ''Baal''. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as ''David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal''. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film ''Cat People'' came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.
Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with ''Let's Dance''. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially-censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film ''From Here to Eternity''), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. ''Let's Dance'' was followed by the Serious Moonlight Tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.
''Tonight'' (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of ''The Falcon and the Snowman''. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.
Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film ''Absolute Beginners''. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film ''Labyrinth'', for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's ''Never Let Me Down'', where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album". Supporting ''Never Let Me Down'', and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.
1989–91: Tin Machine
Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, known by Bowie since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album ''Lust For Life''.Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making. The band's album debut, ''Tin Machine'' (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book." EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production". The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK. Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.
In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. ''Tin Machine II''s arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Kouroi statues, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album ''Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby'' failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.
1992–99: electronica
In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part. Four days later, Bowie and Iman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced ''Black Tie White Noise''. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with ''Let's Dance'' producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say". Bowie explored new directions on ''The Buddha of Suburbia'' (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in ''Black Tie White Noise'', and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.
Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial ''Outside'' (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996. Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, ''Earthling'' (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film ''Showgirls'' was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for ''The Rugrats Movie''. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'". The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.
1999–present: Neoclassicist Bowie
Bowie created the soundtrack for ''Omikron'', a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album '''Hours...''' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant. Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica. Sessions for the planned album ''Toy'', intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album ''Heathen''. Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes". 2002 saw the release of ''Heathen'', and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual ''Meltdown'' festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's ''Low'' era. ''Reality'' (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.
Since recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie has reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film ''Shrek 2''. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film ''Stealth''. He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album ''Return to Cookie Mountain'', made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio, and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album ''No Balance Palace''.
Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006. In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums." He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive.
Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event, and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, ''Anywhere I Lay My Head''. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. ''A Reality Tour'', a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.
In late March 2011, ''Toy'', Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for ''Heathen'' and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.
Acting career
Biographer David Buckley writes, "The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream—from art, literature, theatre and film—and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed." Buckley says "Just one person took glam rock to new rarefied heights and invented character-playing in pop, marrying theatre and popular music in one seamless, powerful whole." Bowie's career has also been punctuated by various roles in film and theatre productions, earning him some acclaim as an actor in his own right.The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production ''Pierrot in Turquoise'' (later made into the 1970 television film ''The Looking Glass Murders''). In the black-and-white short ''The Image'' (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him. The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel ''The Virgin Soldiers'' saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra. Bowie starred in ''The Hunger'' (1983), a revisionist vampire film, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, ''Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence'', based on Laurens van der Post's novel ''The Seed and the Sower'', Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in ''Yellowbeard'', a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film ''Into the Night''. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film ''A View to a Kill'' (1985).
''Absolute Beginners'' (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy ''Labyrinth'' found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins. Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film ''The Last Temptation of Christ''. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in ''The Linguini Incident'' (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's ''Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me'' (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in ''Basquiat'', artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western ''Il Mio West'' (1998, released as ''Gunslinger's Revenge'' in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's ''Everybody Loves Sunshine'' (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of ''The Hunger''. In ''Mr. Rice's Secret'' (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in ''Zoolander''.
Bowie portrayed physicist Nikola Tesla in the Christopher Nolan film, ''The Prestige'' (2006), which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the early 20th century. He voice-acted in the animated film ''Arthur and the Invisibles'' as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the ''SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis'' television film. In the 2008 film ''August'', directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for ''The Man Who Fell to Earth''.
Sexual orientation
Buckley writes, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality." Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Michael Watts of ''Melody Maker'' in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust.In a 1983 interview with ''Rolling Stone'', Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made", and on other occasions he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than his own feelings; as described by Buckley, he said he had been driven more by "a compulsion to flout moral codes than a real biological and psychological state of being".
Asked in 2002 by ''Blender'' whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied: }}
Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock", and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'." Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy." Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women."
Musicianship
From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie has employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced not only by rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley but also by the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, ''David Bowie'' (to the disgust of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher). Bowie's music hall fascination continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop.Musicologist James Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, "Space Oddity", and later in the song "Heroes", to dramatic effect; Perone notes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register [...] his voice has an almost crooner-like richness."
Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive". Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect." Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."
Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums and percussion, and string instruments including viola and cello.
Legacy
Bowie's innovative songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie, according to music historians Schinder and Schwartz, has joint responsibility with Marc Bolan for creating the genre. At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock music movement—historian Michael Campbell calls him "one of punk's seminal influences". While punk musicians trashed the conventions of pop stardom, Bowie moved on again—into a more abstract style of music making that would in turn become a transforming influence. Biographer David Buckley writes, "At a time when punk rock was noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation." Bowie's record company sought to convey his unique status in popular music with the slogan, "There is old wave, there is new wave, and there is Bowie..." Musicologist James Perone credits him with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledge the intellectual depth of his work and influence.Buckley writes that, in an early 1970s pop world that was "Bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, ... Bowie challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day." As described by John Peel, "The one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change." Buckley says that Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star", with the result that "After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. ... The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." Buckley concludes that "Bowie is both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced ... has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. ... His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Through perpetual reinvention, he has seen his influence continue to broaden and extend: music reviewer Brad Filicky writes that over the decades, "Bowie has become known as a musical chameleon, changing and dictating trends as much as he has altered his style to fit", influencing fashion and pop culture to a degree "second only to Madonna". Biographer Thomas Forget adds, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."
Awards and recognition
Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality. For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'', he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he has been honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, two Grammy Awards and two BRIT Awards.
In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year. He declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003, stating: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."
Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum, 11 Gold and 8 Silver albums, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time and the 23rd best singer of all time. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.
Discography
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Category:1947 births Category:Bisexual actors Category:Bisexual musicians Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Category:Decca Records artists Category:EMI Records artists Category:English film actors Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English record producers Category:English rock musicians Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Glam rock Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:LGBT musicians from the United Kingdom Category:LGBT parents Category:LGBT people from England Category:Living people Category:Musicians from London Category:People from Brixton Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Singers from London Category:Virgin Records artists Category:Androgyny
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