title: Brixton

text: On 29 September 2011, the Brixton pound launched an electronic version of the currency where users can pay by text message. A second issue of the paper currency was launched, featuring a new set of well-known people with Brixton connections: On the B£1, the Black Cultural Archives founder Len Garrison, on the B£5, NBA basketball player Luol Deng (the reverse was inspired by the Ark Evelyn Grace Academy), David Bowie on the B£10 and World War II secret agent Violette Szabo on the B£20.


title: Brixton

text: The reverse of the notes, designed by a Brixton creative agency This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, feature notable local landmarks such as the Stockwell Skatepark, public art on Electric Avenue, Nuclear Dawn (one of the Brixton murals), and the Stirling Prize-winning Ark Evelyn Grace Academy. All four notes feature a design motif inspired by Coldharbour Lane's Southwyck House (or "Barrier Block").


title: Brixton

text: In 2015, to celebrate the Brixton pound's fifth anniversary, the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller was commissioned to design a limited-edition B£5 note. It was described as "psychedelic and political", with the front featuring bright colors and the back with a quotation from Karl Marx’s "Das Kapital" ("Capital is money, capital is commodities...By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.")


title: Brixton

text: Other towns and cities in the UK that have used their own currency include the city of Bristol, Totnes in Devon, Stroud in Gloucestershire and Lewes in Sussex.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton is home to several particularly large housing estates: Stockwell Park Estate off Stockwell and Brixton Roads respectively; Myatt's Fields South and North off Vassall Road; Angell Town off Brixton Road on the boundary with Camberwell; Cowley on Cowley and Vassall Roads, Loughborough in the centre of Brixton, Tulse Hill estate, Somerleyton estate and Moorlands Estate, situated off Coldharbour Lane. There are also smaller estates such as Blenheim Gardens, Caldwell Gardens, Church Manor and Hertford. These estates account for a large part of the Brixton residence.


title: Brixton

text: Estates like the Stockwell Park Estate and the Angell Town Estate were originally designed to accommodate high-level walkways which were envisaged to link the whole of Brixton. The ground-floor garages of these estates have proved to be a major security problem. The Somerleyton Estate is dominated by Southwyck House (known locally as "Barrier Block"), a large horseshoe-shaped brick and concrete 1970s structure that backs onto Coldharbour Lane. The 176-apartment block was originally constructed in this shape to provide a noise barrier against Ringway 1, a proposed inner-London motorway that was planned to pass through Brixton and Camberwell, later abandoned.


title: Brixton

text: Some housing estates have been linked with urban decay and crime. New gates and iron bars have been constructed for the Loughborough Estate around Loughborough Road and Minet Road in response to a number of murders around the estate. The Loughborough Estate is home to more than 3,000 families and a mix of 1940s low-rise buildings and 1960s/1970s tower blocks and houses. Problems of urban decay have been reported around Loughborough Junction, the catchment area for Loughborough Estate, the Angell Town Estate and the Moorlands Estate.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton Market is open every day, selling a range of African-Caribbean products and reflects other communities in the local area with Indian and Vietnamese supermarkets and South American butchers amongst the shops and stalls.. London Farmers' Markets opened a farmers market on Brixton Station Road in September 2009. It is open every Sunday from 9.30am to 2pm.


title: Brixton

text: After the riots in 1981 a series of murals were funded by the council. The murals portray nature, politics, community and ideas. The surviving murals include the Brixton Academy Mural (Stockwell Park Walk) by Stephen Pusey (1982) showing a mixed group of young people, intended to portray the natural harmony that could be found between children of mixed backgrounds in the local schools.


title: Brixton

text: Recent contributions towards Brixton's mural tradition include the portrait of Michael Johns on Popes Road by Dreph, created as part of Brixton Design Trail in September 2017 and the temporary installation of "Remain, Thriving" by Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Brixton tube station, a commission by Art on the Underground. In 2018 Dreph completed a large mural depicting Michelle Obama in Dorrell Place.


title: Brixton

text: The Ritzy Cinema, Coldharbour Lane, is a formerly independent cinema now owned by Picturehouse Cinemas. The building was designed as the Electric Pavilion in 1910 by E. C. Homer and Lucas, one of England's first purpose-built cinemas.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton has a significant clubbing and live music scene. Large venues include Brixton Academy and Electric Brixton. A range of smaller venues such as The Windmill, Jamm, and Phonox are a major part of London's live music scene. The Brixton Splash is an annual one-day street party held since 2006. The event is community run, showcasing local talent and celebrating the cultural diversity and history of Brixton.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton has had a number of popular record shops. Desmond's Hip City on Atlantic Road existed from the 1970s until its closure in 1989. A record by the band Skydiggers; Desmond's Hip City is named after the shop. In 2018, filmmaker Molly Dineen made a film about the owner of Blacker Dread Muzik Store called "Being Blacker". Brixton's current record shops include Supertone Records (opened in 1983) selling soundsystem reggae and Container Records which sells dance music.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton is also home to a 1970s purpose-built skatepark, named Stockwell Skatepark, its own Dominoes team, the Brixton Immortals started by the community's Windrush Generation and bicycle co-operative Brixton Cycles.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton is served by two local news blogs - Brixton Blog running since 2010 which also prints a monthly newspaper, and Brixton Buzz formed in 2011


title: Brixton

text: Choice FM was an independent local radio station broadcasting from studios in Trinity Gardens from 1990 to 2004. It is now replaced by Capital XTRA. Reprezent Radio is a community radio station that broadcasts from Pop Brixton to the local area on 107.3FM. Brixton has always been served by a number of long-running community pirate radio stations including Lightning and Vibes FM.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton lies within the Anglican Diocese of Southwark. The grade II*listed St Matthew's Church, located on Brixton Green, was built in 1822 by the architect C. F. Porden in the Greek Revival style. It is one of the "Waterloo churches" built to celebrate Britain's victory at the Battle of Waterloo.


title: Brixton

text: St. Saviour's Church was a location filming site of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in 1955, identified in the film as Ambrose Chapel.


title: Brixton

text: The 1868 parish church of St Jude, located on Dulwich Road, was designed by the architect John Kirk of Woolwich. It closed in 1975, and the parish merged with St Matthew's. The church building is today used as business premises by a publishing company.


title: Brixton

text: Christ Church on Brixton Road is an Art Nouveau and Byzantine-style Grade II*listed building built in 1902 by Beresford Pite, and St Paul's church on Ferndale Road was originally built in 1958 as a Seventh-day Adventist church by John Soper.


title: Brixton

text: Corpus Christi Church in Brixton comes under the remit of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark.


title: Brixton

text: The Masjid ibn Taymeeyah, or Brixton Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre, is located in Gresham Road, close to Brixton Police Station. The mosque has facilities for both men and women and space for 400 worshippers during prayer. Opened in 1990 it is one of the oldest mosques in south London. The mosque provides religious, social and financial support to its members.


title: Brixton

text: The mosque made international headlines when it was reported that Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber", had attended the mosque. Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton Mosque, told the BBC that Reid came to the mosque to learn about Islam but soon fell in with what he called "more extreme elements". Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the US as part of 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks, made his initial steps into radical indoctrination in Brixton Mosque, where he met Reid, though he was expelled from the mosque after he turned up wearing combat fatigues and a backpack, and pressured the cleric to give him information on joining the "jihad". Abdullah el-Faisal, a radical Muslim cleric who preached in the UK until imprisoned for stirring up hatred and later deported to Jamaica in 2007, was associated with the Brixton Mosque and began preaching to crowds of up to 500 people, but was ousted by its Salafi administration in 1993. Afterward, he gave a lecture he called "The Devil's Deception of the Saudi Salafis", scorning the Salafi Muslims (especially the members of the Brixton Mosque), calling them hypocrites and apostates ("takfir").


title: Brixton

text: Brixton Synagogue at 49 Effra Road opened in 1913 and closed in 1986, with the congregation then amalgamating with the nearby Streatham Synagogue. The front of the building still exists.


title: Brixton

text: Before the 1981 riot was the centre of "Operation Swamp 81" aimed at reducing street crime mainly through the heavy use of the so-called sus law, which allowed police to stop and search individuals on the basis of a "suspicion" of wrongdoing. Plainclothes police officers were dispatched into Brixton, and in five days almost 1,000 people were stopped and searched. The local community was not consulted about the operation and tensions between the black community and the police on the streets of Brixton reached breaking point. Local residents complained about young, inexperienced police officers being sent on the streets, provoking confrontation.


title: Brixton

text: In 2003 "The Independent" reported that around 200 "hardcore Yardies" are based in Lambeth, some operating as members of "Firehouse Posse" or Brixton's "Kartel Crew". Yardies were historically associated with Jamaican immigrants and had a recognised stronghold in Brixton. Parts of Brixton were referred to as "Little Tivoli" after "Tivoli Gardens", a notorious "garrison community" in Jamaica ruled by gunmen. In 1999 a scandal broke over Metropolitan Police detectives allowing two known Jamaican Yardies to stay in Britain as an intelligence tool. Eaton Green, one of the Yardies, escaped bail in Jamaica in 1991 and settled in Brixton, dealing in crack cocaine. Three months later Green was arrested by a Brixton constable, Steve Barker, and became a paid informer. Green provided intelligence about Yardie activity for two years, continuing the use of firearms and the dealing of crack throughout this time.


title: Brixton

text: Several gangs are headquartered in the Brixton area. The "Murderzone" (MZ) gang, which is involved in illegal drug dealing, hail from the Somerleyton Estate. The "Poverty Driven Children"/"Peel Dem Crew" (PDC) are located in the Angell Town and Loughborough Junction area. "Organised Crime" (OC), a gang linked with various shootings and an ongoing rivalry with the Peckham Boys, are based in the Myatts Field Estate. GAS Gang, which stands for "Guns and Shanks", "Grind and Stack", "Grip and Shoot", or "Gangsters Always Shoot", was located mainly in Angell Town.


title: Brixton

text: In 2011, five of the most prominent members of the GAS Gang—Ricardo Giddings, Helder Demorais, Jamal Moore, Shaquille Haughton and Kyle Kinghorn—were sentenced to a total of 76 years in prison for the murder of rival gang member, fifteen-year-old Zac Olumegbon.


title: Brixton

text: Members of local gangs are mostly in their late teens or early 20s, with gang leaders usually being childhood friends. Brought up in some of London's poorest areas some gang members reportedly move from house to house on an almost nightly basis, making it hard to track them. According to the Metropolitan Police, these youth gangs are far from organised criminal masterminds; however, they continue to evade the police and have been responsible for numerous offences of homicide. Operation Trident officers stated that it is a "struggle" to persuade local people to testify, because of fear of reprisals. Trident officers stated that some gang members were "inept at handling powerful guns", and that gangs have machine guns, in 9 mm. According to the detective many of the deactivated guns are shipped in from the Balkans and then reactivated. Brixton has been noted as one of the most significant origins of UK drill.


title: Brixton

text: Some media commentators persistently call Brixton "the drugs capital of London". Val Shawcross, Labour representative on the London Assembly for Lambeth and Southwark, runs a "Brixton Drug Crime" campaign and she states on her website:


title: Brixton

text: I have been raising the disgraceful state of Brixton and the existence of an open drugs market in the centre – with the Council, Mayor and the Metropolitan police... The police, the Drugs and Firearms Unit and Transport Operational Unit officers have been undertaking long-term surveillance of the area (Brixton Town Centre) culminating in a three-day operation at the end of June to arrest those dealing Class A drugs... The police will be carrying out continuing covert operations in Brixton and patrolling with drug detection dogs. This is a long-term crackdown with the aim on cleaning the dealers out of Brixton.(retrieved July 2008)


title: Brixton

text: For many decades, Brixton has had a reputation for cannabis use and the BBC has quoted a local resident as saying "People have always smoked cannabis in Brixton – everyone knows that, people have walked down the street smoking spliffs for years." This reputation was amplified by the "softly softly" police approach to cannabis that was piloted in Brixton in 2001 to 2005. Concerns were raised about "drug tourism" to the area. The "softly-softly" pilot occurred in the context of a wider debate in Britain about the classification of cannabis. Despite the pilot being stopped and replaced by a "no deal" policy, the Metropolitan Police was in favour of a reclassification of cannabis from class B to class C. Cannabis was officially reclassified in Britain from a class B down to a class C drug in early 2004. In January 2009 the UK government reclassified cannabis back to a class B drug.


title: Brixton

text: From 2001 to 2004, Brockwell Park hosted the annual Cannabis Festival, or JayDay, organised by the Cannabis Coalition. The police reportedly maintained a low profile, tolerating the smoking of cannabis. In 2005 the London Borough of Lambeth rejected the application for a further Cannabis Festival on the following grounds:


title: Brixton

text: ""While Lambeth Council supports freedom of speech and the right to take part in a legitimate campaign, the council cannot condone illegal activities such as cannabis use and drug pushing – both of which have taken place at a previous festival held by the Cannabis Coalition. Indeed council officers monitoring the event in the past were approached by drug dealers who offered them drugs.""


title: Brixton

text: In 2001, Brian Paddick, then Police Commander for the London Borough of Lambeth, became subject of newspaper headlines due to the implementation of a pilot cannabis programme in Brixton, also known as the "softly softly" approach, as well as his posts made on the Brixton-based Urban75 internet forum. Police officers were instructed not to arrest or charge people who were found to be in possession of cannabis. They were instead to issue on-the-spot warnings and confiscate the drugs. Although Paddick is credited with the idea, the pilot programme was sanctioned by the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, Sir John Stevens. Paddick asserts that he implemented the policy because he wanted his officers to deal with cannabis quickly and informally so that they could concentrate on heroin and crack cocaine offences, and street robbery and burglary, which were affecting the quality of life in Lambeth to a greater extent. The pilot was ended December 2005 and was replaced by a so-called "no deal" policy on cannabis in Brixton following complaints about increasing numbers of dealers openly selling the drug.


title: Brixton

text: Paddick had been a sergeant on the front line during the 1981 Brixton riot, an experience which shaped his attitudes about confrontational police action and strengthened his belief in community policing. In December 2000 he was appointed Police Commander for Lambeth, where he worked until December 2002, fulfilling his ambition of becoming head of policing in Brixton. Paddick gained much support from the local community for his approach to policing and addressed a rally in his support in March 2002, leading Dominic Casciani from the BBC to comment:


title: Brixton

text: If someone had said just five years ago that black, white, young and old, straight and gay, liberal and anarchist would all be standing together giving a standing ovation to a police commander in Brixton, people might have said they had smoked one spliff too many.


title: Brixton

text: In June 1998, gun crime in Brixton was reported on widely in connection with the linked murders of Avril Johnson and Michelle Carby, in Brixton and Stratford respectively. Both women were shot in their homes in separate, but connected, attacks; in addition, both victims were shot in the head. In 2008 Tony Thompson, a former "Time Out" news editor, reported that ""Gun crime began to escalate following a series of south London gang executions in the late 1990s."" Thompson states that "Previous Met operations were seen as putting down the black community. Trident, from the start, was intelligence-led and had strong links with the black community."


title: Brixton

text: In 2001 the Metropolitan Police raised concerns over rapidly increasing gun crime in London. At the time Lambeth had the highest rate of robberies in London. In July 2001 two armed police officers shot dead black 29-year-old Derek Bennett in Brixton, Angell Town Estate, after Bennett brandished a gun-shaped cigarette lighter. The verdict of the subsequent inquest ruled that Bennett had been "lawfully killed", the verdict was upheld in a subsequent appeal.


title: Brixton

text: In December 2004 Operation Trident officers and armed officers were assisting Lambeth police in a number of stop and search operations targeting "suspected gunmen or vehicles that have been associated with firearms" and called "Operation Trident Swoop" by the police. The Metropolitan Police hoped that "the searches will deter suspects from carrying weapons and prevent shootings taking place, as well as possibly recovering weapons and leading to arrests." Superintendent Jerry Savill, Lambeth Police has responsibility for policing in the Brixton area, stated:


title: Brixton

text: This operation is aimed very specifically at people we have information to suggest may be involved in gun crime or other offences. We want to send out a very clear message to those who carry guns in Lambeth, don't. It is time to stop the vast majority of people in this borough feeling afraid to be on the street and make it the gunmen who are fearful of their community helping the police to arrest them.


title: Brixton

text: In September 2006 Brixton was the scene of a widely reported shooting, involving two boys being shot in the packed McDonald's on Brixton Road/Acre Lane.


title: Brixton

text: In 2007 firearm offences rose by 4 percent in London, totalling 3,459 "gun-enabled" crimes, including 30 gun murders of which nine victims were aged 18 or under. A series of gun crimes in the Brixton, Clapham and Streatham, including the Murders of three boys in one week, led some media commentators to call the area "gun capital".


title: Brixton

text: A 2022 article from "Complex" named Brixton as the "mecca of UK drill" due to two original UK drill groups - 150 and 67 - originating in the borough.


title: Brixton

text: References to Brixton in song started with the release of "Whoppi King" by Laurel Aitken in 1968 and "Brixton Cat" by Dice the Boss in 1969. This was later followed in August 1975 by a popular novelty song written and sung by Geraint Hughes and Jeff Calvert (who billed themselves as "Typically Tropical"): two white men who told the story of a Brixton bus-driver "going to Barbados" with "Coconut Airways" to escape the rain of London.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton is served by London Buses routes 2, 3, 35, 37, 45, 59, 109, 118, 133, 159, 196, 250, 322, 333, 345, 355, 415, 432, P4, P5, N2, N3, N35, N109, N133


title: Brixton

text: The nearest station is Brixton on the Victoria line. Around the corner from it is the National Rail station.


title: Brixton

text: The nearest station is Brixton for Southeastern services towards London Victoria and Orpington. It is located around just around the corner from the Underground station.


title: Brixton

text: Brixton is located on several main roads. The A203, A204 and A2217 links the area to Vauxhall Bridge and the A23 London to Brighton road runs through the area from the north to the south. Brixton was due to be a major interchange of the South Cross Route, part of the London Ringways plan, which was cancelled in the 1970s.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Ernest Thorwald Johnson Jr. (born August 7, 1956) is an American sportscaster for Turner Sports. Johnson is currently the television voice and a studio host for Major League Baseball on TBS, hosts "Inside the NBA" for TNT, and NBA TV and contributes to the joint coverage of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament for Turner and CBS Sports. His father was Ernie Johnson Sr., a Major League Baseball pitcher and Atlanta Braves play-by-play announcer.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson was born in 1956 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Ernie Johnson Sr. (1924–2011), was a Major League Baseball player who later became a television sports commentator. Johnson's family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, after his father's retirement from professional baseball in 1959.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson attended high school at the Marist School, a private Catholic school in Brookhaven, Georgia, and graduated in 1974. He then went to the University of Georgia and majored in journalism. Johnson played first base on the Bulldogs baseball team his freshman year. He graduated from Georgia in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts, "summa cum laude".


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: During college, Johnson got his first sportscasting job as the news and sports director for the radio station WAGQ-FM in Athens, Georgia.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In 1979, Johnson was hired as a news anchor at WMAZ-TV in Macon, Georgia. He worked there as a news anchor until 1981, when he worked as a news reporter in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at WSPA-TV. Johnson worked in Atlanta at WSB-TV as a general assignment news reporter in 1982. He became the station's weekend sports anchor and reporter in 1983. He held those jobs until 1989, when he left to join Turner Sports.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: From 1993 to 1996, Johnson called Atlanta Braves baseball games for SportSouth (now Bally Sports South) with his father, Ernie Johnson Sr.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Known as "E.J.", Johnson works as the studio host for TNT's coverage of the NBA, including pregame and halftime shows, and the network's famous postgame studio show that airs after each NBA doubleheader, "Inside the NBA". He has hosted the show since 1990.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: At the end of each broadcast, Ernie presents "E.J.'s Neat-O Stat of the Night", which has become a popular part of the show but is sponsored by no one, hence the sign that says "Your logo here". This changed in May 2007 when vitaminwater stepped in as a sponsor for the segment, replaced by Panasonic's Viera line of televisions for 2008. For the 2005–2006 season, his segments were sponsored by Intel Centrino and most recently Suzuki. In the 2008 NBA Playoffs, his segments were presented by Geico and vitaminwater.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: For all NBA-related shows, Johnson is joined by former NBA stars Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal and, on occasion, Chris Webber, Grant Hill, or Reggie Miller. In the 2012–2013 regular season he was joined by Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway and Dennis Scott while Smith and Barkley covered March Madness on CBS.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson is also the host of "Tuesday Fan Night" on sister station NBA TV, alongside Webber and Greg Anthony. He is also the host and moderator of NBA TV's "Open Court", a basketball-panel show featuring Johnson and a rotation of six panelists (all of whom are made up of TNT's NBA analysts) discussing various topics, ranging from the history of the NBA to the current day scene of the league.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In October 2022, Johnson signed a long-term contract extension with Warner Bros. Discovery Sports to continue as a host on "Inside the NBA."


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In addition to working basketball, Johnson is also the play-by-play announcer for TNT's PGA Tour coverage. At TBS, Johnson worked as the studio host for their coverage of college football. In 2002, Johnson was co-winner of the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Sports Personality, Studio Host, tying with Bob Costas of NBC and HBO. It was the first time Johnson had been nominated for a Sports Emmy. In 2006, Johnson won the award again, this time on his own, snapping Costas's six-year stranglehold on it, including the year the two shared the honor. From 2007 to 2009, Johnson worked as the studio host alongside Cal Ripken Jr. for TBS's coverage of Major League Baseball. In 2010, he moved into a play-by-play role for the network, serving as the lead broadcaster for TBS's playoff coverage, including the 2010 ALCS. He also broadcast 40 Atlanta Braves games on sister channel Peachtree TV. In 2020, Johnson moved back into a studio host for the network's pregame and postgame show while continuing his play-by-play role for TBS's coverage of Major League Baseball.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson's past work at TNT included roles as studio host for The Championships, Wimbledon, from 2000 to 2002, studio host for its National Football League coverage from 1990 to 1997, and various duties at the 1994, 1998, and 2001 Goodwill Games, as well as the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, and the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. He was the studio host for TNT's coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup. He also co-hosted Barkley's now-defunct talk show, "Listen Up!" Past work at TBS also included working as studio host for their NBA coverage. Johnson also called weightlifting for NBC's coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. He also serves as a studio host for the NCAA tournament for CBS and Turner Sports alternating with Greg Gumbel.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In 2015, Johnson won his third Sports Emmy for Best Studio Host, and gave his award to the daughters of the late Stuart Scott, who died in January 2015.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson is also a sportscaster on "NBA Live 98", "NBA 2K15", "NBA 2K16", "NBA 2K17", "NBA 2K18," "NBA 2K19, NBA 2K20" and "NBA 2K21".


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson and his wife, Cheryl, a licensed professional counselor, live in Braselton, Georgia. The Johnsons have two biological children (Eric and Maggie) and four adopted children: a son named Michael, who was adopted from Romania, had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and died in 2021; a daughter named Carmen, who was adopted from Paraguay; and daughters Ashley and Allison, adopted domestically through foster care.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Raised Catholic, Johnson now identifies as an evangelical and works on a regular basis with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), Athletes in Action (AIA), and Samaritan's Feet.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: Johnson is a devoted Atlanta Braves fan. Though he was born in Milwaukee, Johnson's family moved to the Atlanta area when he was nine, and he considers it to be his hometown. He attended high school at the private Marist School in nearby Brookhaven, Georgia.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: On the November 10, 2016, edition of "Inside the NBA", Johnson and co-hosts were discussing the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the stunning upset of Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton. While giving his remarks, Johnson talked about the build-up to Election Day, and how he would lean on his Christian faith and pray for the transition of power and for the division in the country. He also revealed that he wrote in his vote for Ohio governor John Kasich, who was one of the 17 Republican candidates and the last to suspend his campaign.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In April 2017, he released his memoir, "Unscripted: The Unpredictable Moments That Make Life Extraordinary".


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: In 2003, Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but continued his work through June 2006, when he began treatment. Due to his cancer, Johnson missed TNT's coverage of the British Open and PGA Championship, the last two golf major tournaments in 2006. Johnson returned to "Inside the NBA" on October 31, 2006, while continuing his chemotherapy treatments.


title: Ernie Johnson Jr.

text: On October 1, 2018, Johnson announced that he would not be a part of the 2018 MLB postseason on TBS after being diagnosed with blood clots in both of his legs, which affects his ability to travel by air.


title: Phonology

text: Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:


title: Phonology

text: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ('chereme' instead of 'phoneme', etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages.


title: Phonology

text: The word 'phonology' (as in 'phonology of English') can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax, its morphology and its vocabulary. The word "phonology" comes from Ancient Greek , "phōnḗ", "voice, sound," and the suffix "-logy" (which is from Greek , "lógos", "word, speech, subject of discussion").


title: Phonology

text: Phonology is typically distinguished from phonetics, which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language. Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics and phonology to theoretical linguistics, but establishing the phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. Note that the distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, which result in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.


title: Phonology

text: Definitions of the field of phonology vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in "Grundzüge der Phonologie" (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between "language" and "speech" being basically Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between "langue" and "parole"). More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items." According to Clark "et al." (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying that use.


title: Phonology

text: Early evidence for a systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE "Ashtadhyayi", a Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini. In particular, the "Shiva Sutras", an auxiliary text to the "Ashtadhyayi", introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics.


title: Phonology

text: Ibn Jinni of Mosul, a pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as "Kitāb Al-Munṣif, Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab," and " ".


title: Phonology

text: The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in the Kazan School) shaped the modern usage of the term "phoneme" in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The word "phoneme" had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes. In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris, Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for "phoneme" to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German "Sprachlaut". Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner.


title: Phonology

text: An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school. One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose "Grundzüge der Phonologie" ("Principles of Phonology"), published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from that period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the "archiphoneme". Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics also contributed with a focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics.


title: Phonology

text: In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published "The Sound Pattern of English" (SPE), the basis for generative phonology. In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems.


title: Phonology

text: Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and, more explicitly, in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; those that are active and those that are suppressed is language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously, but the output of one process may be the input to another. The second most prominent natural phonologist is Patricia Donegan, Stampe's wife; there are many natural phonologists in Europe and a few in the US, such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded natural morphology.


title: Phonology

text: In 1976, John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on "one" linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involving "some parallel sequences" of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry, which became the standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology and optimality theory.


title: Phonology

text: Government phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, but parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, and John Harris.


title: Phonology

text: In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory, an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince and has become a dominant trend in phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of 'substance-free phonology', especially by Mark Hale and Charles Reiss.


title: Phonology

text: An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns was initiated with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years.


title: Phonology

text: An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound in "pot" is aspirated (pronounced ) while that in "spot" is not aspirated (pronounced ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated were interchanged with the unaspirated in "spot", native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai, Bengali, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one).


title: Phonology

text: Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well.


title: Phonology

text: The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, and , two sounds that have the same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics.


title: Phonology

text: The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception.


title: Phonology

text: Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in the extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language.


title: Phonology

text: Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at a more abstract level, as a component of morphemes; these units can be called "morphophonemes", and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology.


title: Phonology

text: In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs, as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, tone, and intonation.


title: Phonology

text: Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding,) as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation.


title: Phonology

text: The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to the analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: The Sugarhill Gang is an American hip hop trio. Their 1979 hit "Rapper's Delight" was the first rap single to become a top 40 hit on the "Billboard" Hot 100; reaching a peak position of number 36 on January 12, 1980. This was the trio's only U.S. hit, though they did have further success in Europe until the mid-1980s. The trio reformed in 1994 and did a world tour in 2016.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: The members, all from Englewood, New Jersey, consisted of Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson, and Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien. The three were assembled into a group by producer Sylvia Robinson, who founded Sugar Hill Records with her husband, record producer Joe Robinson. The group and the record company were named after the Sugar Hill, Harlem, neighborhood.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: Their 1979 hit "Rapper's Delight" was the first rap single to become a top 40 hit on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The group never had another U.S. hit, though it had multiple European hits, such as "Apache", "8th Wonder" (which was performed on the American music show "Soul Train" in 1981), "Rapper's Reprise (Jam Jam)", and "Showdown" (with the Furious Five). The trio wound down over the next five years and disbanded in 1985.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: After Wonder Mike and Hen Dogg left Sugarhill Records in 2005, the original members of Sugarhill Gang (besides Jackson) have performed as the Original Sugar and as Rapper's Delight Featuring Wonder Mike and Master Gee. This is largely due to a string of legal cases against them regarding the use of 'Sugarhill Gang' as their name.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: In 2016, the remaining living members of the original Sugarhill Gang, including Wonder Mike, Hen Dogg and Master Gee embarked on their first world tour in over a decade under the name The Sugarhill Gang. During this, they performed as the Sugarhill Gang for the Art of Rap festival tour in 2016, and at V Festival in Hylands Park and Weston Park in the UK as part of their world tour in 2016. Other places included, the Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong on November 27, 2016, and they headlined at the Depot in the Park Festival in Cardiff, United Kingdom on August 5, 2017. In July 2019 they played the North Nibley Festival in Gloucestershire.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: In 2019, The Sugarhill Gang celebrated the 40th anniversary of the release of "Rapper's Delight" and the group's formation. They went on a worldwide tour called "Rapper's Delight 40th Anniversary World Tour". The gang made new music in early 2019. The tour lasted from May 24th to July 26, 2019. They are still going on tours to this day despite the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: The Sugarhill Gang

text: The discography of The Sugarhill Gang includes five studio albums, nine compilations and fifteen singles.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The Union Pacific Big Boy is a type of simple articulated 4-8-8-4 steam locomotive manufactured by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) between 1941 and 1944 and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad in revenue service until 1962.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The 25 Big Boy locomotives were built to haul freight over the Wasatch Range between Ogden, Utah, and Green River, Wyoming. In the late 1940s, they were reassigned to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where they hauled freight over Sherman Hill to Laramie, Wyoming. They were the only locomotives to use a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement: four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves, two sets of eight driving wheels and a four-wheel trailing truck to support the large firebox.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: Today, eight Big Boys survive, with most on static display at museums across the USA. One of them, No. 4014, was re-acquired by Union Pacific, and between 2014 to 2019 it was rebuilt to operating condition for the 150th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad. It thus regained the title as the largest and most powerful operating steam locomotive in the world.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: In 1936, Union Pacific introduced the Challenger-type (4-6-6-4) locomotives on its main line over the Wasatch Range between Green River and Ogden. For most of the route, the maximum grade is 0.82% in either direction, but the climb eastward from Ogden, into the Wasatch Range, reached 1.14%. Hauling a freight train demanded double heading and helper operations, which slowed service. So Union Pacific decided to design a new locomotive that could handle the run by itself: faster and more powerful than the compound 2-8-8-0s that UP tried after World War I, able to pull long trains at a sustained speed of once past mountain grades.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: A Union Pacific design team led by Otto Jabelmann, the head of the Research and Mechanical Standards section of the Union Pacific's Mechanical Department, worked with ALCO (the American Locomotive Company) to re-examine their Challenger locomotives. The team found that the railroad's goals could be achieved by enlarging the Challenger firebox to about (about ), increasing boiler pressure to 300 psi, adding four driving wheels, and reducing the size of the driving wheels from . The new locomotive was carefully designed not to exceed an axle loading of , and achieved the maximum possible starting tractive effort with a factor of adhesion of 4.0. It was designed to travel smoothly and safely at 80 miles per hour.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: To achieve these new engineering goals, the Challenger locomotive was "comprehensively redesigned from first principles," wrote locomotive historian Tom Morrison. The overall design simplified some aspects of previous locomotive designs and added complexity elsewhere. Compounding, booster, and feed water heaters were eliminated, as were Baker valve gear and limited cut-off. But the "proliferation of valves and gauges on the backhead showed that running a Big Boy was an altogether more complicated and demanding task for the crew than running previous existing locomotives," Morrison wrote.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The 4-8-8-4 class series, originally rumored to be called the "Wasatch", after the Wasatch Mountains, acquired its nickname after an unknown ALCO worker scrawled "Big Boy" in chalk on the front of No. 4000's smokebox door, then under construction as the first of its class.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The Big Boys were articulated, like the Mallet locomotive design, though lacking the compounding of the Mallet. They were built with a wide margin of reliability and safety, and normally operated well below in freight service. Peak drawbar horsepower was reached at about . The maximum drawbar pull measured during 1943 tests was while starting a train.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The Big Boy has the longest engine body of any reciprocating steam locomotive, longer than two 40-foot buses. They were also the heaviest reciprocating steam locomotives ever built, the combined weight of the engine and tender outweighed a Boeing 747. There was some speculation that the first series of Chesapeake and Ohio 2-6-6-6 “Allegheny” locomotives, built by the Lima Locomotive Works in 1941, may have weighed as much as , exceeding the Big Boys, but subsequent re-weighs of early-production H8s, under close scrutiny by the builder and the railroad, found them to be less than .


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The American Locomotive Company manufactured 25 Big Boy locomotives for Union Pacific: 20 in 1941 and five in 1944. Along with the Challengers, the Big Boys arrived on the scene just as traffic was surging in preparation for American participation in World War II.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The Big Boy locomotives had large grates to burn the low-quality bituminous coal supplied by Union Pacific-owned mines in Wyoming. Coal was carried from the tender to the firebox by a Standard Stoker Company type MB automatic stoker capable of supplying slightly over per hour. Water was injected into the boiler by a Nathan type 4000C Automatic Restarting injector (up to 12,500 gallons per hour) on the right side and an Elesco T.P. 502 exhaust steam injector (up to 14,050 gallons per hour) on the left side. A Big Boy could consume 11 tons of coal and 12,000 gallons of water an hour operating at maximum power.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: As an experiment, No. 4005 was converted to burn oil in 1946. Unlike a similar effort with the Challengers, the conversion failed due to uneven heating in the Big Boy's large, single-burner firebox. The locomotive was converted back to coal in 1948. (Decades later, No. 4014 would be successfully converted to oil during its restoration.) Another experiment saw No. 4007 being modified with a single stack in October 1948. The results were unsatisfactory, and the locomotive was reverted back to double stack after testing. One final short-term experiment was the fitting of smoke deflectors on locomotive 4019, similar to those found on the railroad's FEF Series, as well as some of their Challengers. These were later removed, as the Big Boys' nozzle and blower in the smoke box could blow smoke high enough to keep engineers’ lines of sight clear.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: The locomotives were held in high regard by crews, who found them sure-footed and more “user friendly” than other motive power. They were capable machines, and their rated hauling tonnage was increased several times over the years. But postwar increases in the price of coal and labor, along with the advent of efficient, cost-effective diesel-electric power, spelled the end of their operational lives. Nonetheless, they were among the last steam locomotives withdrawn from service on the Union Pacific. The last revenue train hauled by a Big Boy ended its run early in the morning on July 21, 1959. Most were stored operational until 1961; four remained in operational condition at Green River, Wyoming until 1962. Their duties were assumed by diesel locomotives and gas turbine-electric locomotives.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: In 2019, Union Pacific completed the restoration of No. 4014 and placed it in excursion service. The locomotive was sent on a tour in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the completion of the First transcontinental railroad.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: On April 27, 1953, No. 4005 was pulling a freight train through southern Wyoming when it jumped a switch track at , throwing the engine onto its left side and derailing its tender and the first 18 freight cars of its 62-car train. The engineer and fireman were killed on impact; the brakeman died of severe burns in a hospital a few days later. The tender destroyed the cab of the locomotive, and the loads from the 18 derailed cars were scattered. The locomotive was repaired by Union Pacific at its Cheyenne facility and returned to service until 1962.


title: Union Pacific Big Boy

text: Most of the 25 Big Boys were scrapped, but seven remain on static display—two indoors and five outdoors, under the elements—and an eighth, Union Pacific 4014, was rebuilt to operating condition by Union Pacific's steam program.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual. Economic sanctions are not necessarily imposed because of economic circumstances—they may also be imposed for a variety of political, military, and social issues. Economic sanctions can be used for achieving domestic and international purposes.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The efficacy of sanctions is debatable—there are many failures—and sanctions can have unintended consequences. Economic sanctions may include various forms of trade barriers, tariffs, and restrictions on financial transactions. Since the mid-1990s, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions have tended to target individuals and entities, in contrast to the comprehensive embargoes of earlier decades.


title: Economic sanctions

text: An embargo is similar, but usually implies a more severe sanction. An embargo (from the Spanish "embargo", meaning hindrance, obstruction, etc. in a general sense, a trading ban in trade terminology and literally "distraint" in juridic parlance) is the partial or complete prohibition of commerce and trade with a particular country/state or a group of countries. Embargoes are considered strong diplomatic measures imposed in an effort, by the imposing country, to elicit a given national-interest result from the country on which it is imposed. Embargoes are generally considered legal barriers to trade, not to be confused with blockades, which are often considered to be acts of war. Embargoes can mean limiting or banning export or import, creating quotas for quantity, imposing special tolls, taxes, banning freight or transport vehicles, freezing or seizing freights, assets, bank accounts, limiting the transport of particular technologies or products (high-tech) for example CoCom during the Cold War.


title: Economic sanctions

text: In response to embargoes, a closed economy often develops in an area subjected to heavy embargoes. The effectiveness of embargoes is thus in proportion to the extent and degree of international participation. Embargoes can be an opportunity for some countries to develop self-sufficiency.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Sanctions in the form of blockades were prominent during World War I. Debates about implementing sanctions through international organizations, such as the League of Nations, became prominent after the end of World War I. The League Covenant permitted the use of sanctions in five cases:


title: Economic sanctions

text: The Abyssinia Crisis in 1935 resulted in League sanctions against Mussolini's Italy under Article 16 of the Covenant. Oil supplies, however, were not stopped, nor the Suez Canal closed to Italy, and the conquest proceeded. The sanctions were lifted in 1936 and Italy left the League in 1937.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Economic sanctions are used as a tool of foreign policy by many governments. Economic sanctions are usually imposed by a larger country upon a smaller country for one of two reasons: either the latter is a perceived threat to the security of the former nation or that country treats its citizens unfairly. They can be used as a coercive measure for achieving particular policy goals related to trade or for humanitarian violations. Economic sanctions are used as an alternative weapon instead of going to war to achieve desired outcomes.


title: Economic sanctions

text: According to a 2015 working paper by Neuenkirch and Neumeier, UN economic sanctions had a statistically significant impact on targeted states by reducing their GDP growth by an average of 2.3%-3.5% per year—and more than 5% per year in the case of comprehensive UN embargoes—with the negative effects typically persisting for a period of ten years. By contrast, unilateral US sanctions had a considerably smaller impact on GDP growth, restricting it by 0.5%-0.9% per year, with an average duration of seven years.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Imposing sanctions on an opponent also affects the economy of the imposing country to a degree. If import restrictions are promulgated, consumers in the imposing country may have restricted choices of goods. If export restrictions are imposed or if sanctions prohibit companies in the imposing country from trading with the target country, the imposing country may lose markets and investment opportunities to competing countries.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot (2008) argue that regime change is the most frequent foreign-policy objective of economic sanctions, accounting for just over 39 percent of cases of their imposition. Hufbauer "et al." claimed that in their studies, 34 percent of the cases studied were successful. When Robert A. Pape examined their study, he claimed that only 5 of their reported 40 successes were actually effective, reducing the success rate to 4%. In either case, the difficulty and unexpected nuances of measuring the actual success of sanctions in relation to their goals are both increasingly apparent and still under debate. In other words, it is difficult to determine "why" a regime or country changes (i.e., if it was the sanction or inherent instability) and doubly so to measure the full political effect of a given action.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Offering an explanation as to why sanctions are still imposed even when they may be marginally effective, British diplomat Jeremy Greenstock suggests sanctions are popular not because they are known to be effective, but because "there is nothing else [to do] between words and military action if you want to bring pressure upon a government". Critics of sanctions like Belgian jurist Marc Bossuyt argue that in nondemocratic regimes, the extent to which this affects political outcomes is contested, because by definition such regimes do not respond as strongly to the popular will.


title: Economic sanctions

text: A strong connection has been found between the effectiveness of sanctions and the size of veto players in a government. Veto players represent individual or collective actors whose agreement is required for a change of the status quo, for example parties in a coalition, or the legislature's check on presidential powers. When sanctions are imposed on a country, it can try to mitigate them by adjusting its economic policy. The size of the veto players determines how many constraints the government will face when trying to change status quo policies, and the larger the size of the veto players, the more difficult it is to find support for new policies, thus making the sanctions more effective.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Francesco Giumelli writes that the "set of sanctions ... that many observers would be likely to consider the most persuasive (and effective)," namely UN sanctions against "central bank assets and sovereign wealth funds," are "of all the types of measures applied ... the one least frequently used." Giumelli also distinguishes between sanctions against international terrorists, in which "the nature of the request is not as important as the constraining aspect," and sanctions imposed in connection with "post-conflict scenarios", which should "include flexible demands and the potential for adaptation if the situation changes".


title: Economic sanctions

text: Sanctions have been criticized on humanitarian grounds, as they negatively impact a nation's economy and can also cause collateral damage on ordinary citizens. Peksen implies that sanctions can degenerate human rights in the target country. Some policy analysts believe imposing trade restrictions only serves to hurt ordinary people as opposed to government elites, and others have likened the practice to siege warfare. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has generally refrained from imposing comprehensive sanctions since the mid-1990s, in part due to the controversy over the efficacy and civilian harms attributed to the Sanctions against Iraq.


title: Economic sanctions

text: There is an importance, especially with relation to financial loss, for companies to be aware of embargoes that apply to their intended export or import destinations. Properly preparing products for trade, sometimes referred to as an embargo check, is a difficult and timely process for both importers and exporters.


title: Economic sanctions

text: There are many steps that must be taken to ensure that a business entity does not accrue unwanted fines, taxes, or other punitive measures. Common examples of embargo checks include referencing embargo lists, cancelling transactions, and ensuring the validity of a trade entity.


title: Economic sanctions

text: This process can become very complicated, especially for countries with changing embargoes. Before better tools became available, many companies relied on spreadsheets and manual processes to keep track of compliance issues. Today, there are software based solutions that automatically handle sanctions and other complications with trade.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The United States Embargo of 1807 involved a series of laws passed by the US Congress (1806–1808) during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson. Britain and France were engaged in the War of the Fourth Coalition; the US wanted to remain neutral and to trade with both sides, but both countries objected to American trade with the other. American policy aimed to use the new laws to avoid war and to force both France and Britain to respect American rights. The embargo failed to achieve its aims, and Jefferson repealed the legislation in March 1809.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The United States embargo against Cuba began on March 14, 1958, during the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution. At first, the embargo applied only to arms sales, however it later expanded to include other imports, eventually extending to almost all trade on February 7, 1962. Referred to by Cuba as ""el bloqueo"" (the blockade), the US embargo on Cuba remains one of the longest-standing embargoes in modern history. Few of the United States' allies embraced the embargo, and many have argued it has been ineffective in changing Cuban government behavior. While taking some steps to allow limited economic exchanges with Cuba, American President Barack Obama nevertheless reaffirmed the policy in 2011, stating that without the granting of improved human rights and freedoms by Cuba's current government, the embargo remains "in the national interest of the United States".


title: Economic sanctions

text: Russia has been known to utilize economic sanctions to achieve its political goals. Russia's focus has been primarily on implementing sanctions against the pro-Western governments of former Soviet Union states. The Kremlin's aim is particularly on states that aspire to join the European Union and NATO, such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. Russia has enacted a law, the Dima Yakovlev Law, that defines sanctions against US citizens involved in "violations of the human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens". It lists US citizens who are banned from entering Russia.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Viktor Yushchenko, the third president of Ukraine who was elected in 2004, lobbied during his term to gain admission to NATO and the EU. Soon after Yushchenko entered office, Russia demanded Kyiv pay the same rate that it charged Western European states. This quadrupled Ukraine's energy bill overnight. Russia subsequently cut off the supply of natural gas in 2006, causing significant harm to the Ukrainian and Russian economies. As the Ukrainian economy began to struggle, Yushchenko's approval ratings dropped significantly; reaching the single digits by the 2010 election; Viktor Yanukovych, who was more supportive of Moscow won the election in 2010 to become the fourth president of Ukraine. After his election, gas prices were reduced substantially.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The Rose Revolution in Georgia brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power as the third president of the country. Saakashvili wanted to bring Georgia into NATO and the EU and was a strong supporter of the US-led war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia would soon implement a number of different sanctions on Georgia, including natural gas price raises through Gazprom and wider trade sanctions that impacted the Georgian economy, particularly Georgian exports of wine, citrus fruits, and mineral water. In 2006, Russia banned all imports from Georgia which was able to deal a significant blow to the Georgian economy. Russia also expelled nearly 2,300 Georgians who worked within its borders.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The United Nations issues sanctions by consent of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and/or General Assembly in response to major international events, receiving authority to do so under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. The nature of these sanctions may vary, and include financial, trade, or weaponry restrictions. Motivations can also vary, ranging from humanitarian and environmental concerns to efforts to halt nuclear proliferation. Over two dozen sanctions measures have been implemented by the United Nations since its founding in 1945.


title: Economic sanctions

text: Most UNSC sanctions since the mid-1990s have targeted individuals and entities rather than entire governments, a change from the comprehensive trade sanctions of earlier decades. For example, the UNSC maintains lists of individuals indicted for crimes or linked to international terrorism, which raises novel legal questions regarding due process. According to a dataset covering the years 1991 to 2013, 95% of UNSC sanction regimes included "sectoral bans" on aviation and/or the import (or export) of arms or raw materials, 75% included "individual/group" sanctions such as asset freezes or restrictions on travel, and just 10% targeted national finances or included measures against central banks, sovereign wealth funds, or foreign investment. The most frequently used UNSC sanction documented in the dataset is an embargo against imported weapons, which applied in 87% of all cases and was directed against non-state actors more often than against governments. Targeted sanctions regimes may contain hundreds of names, a handful, or none at all.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The UN implemented sanctions against Somalia beginning in April 1992, after the overthrow of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 during the Somali Civil War. UNSC Resolution 751 forbade members to sell, finance, or transfer any military equipment to Somalia.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The UNSC passed Resolution 1718 in 2006 in response to a nuclear test that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted in violation of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The resolution banned the sale of military and luxury goods and froze government assets. Since then, the UN has passed multiple resolutions subsequently expanding sanctions on North Korea. Resolution 2270 from 2016 placed restrictions on transport personnel and vehicles employed by North Korea while also restricting the sale of natural resources and fuel for aircraft.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The efficacy of such sanctions has been questioned in light of continued nuclear tests by North Korea in the decade following the 2006 resolution. Professor William Brown of Georgetown University argued that "sanctions don't have much of an impact on an economy that has been essentially bankrupt for a generation".


title: Economic sanctions

text: On February 26, 2011, the UNSC issued an arms embargo against the Libya through Security Council Resolution 1970 in response to humanitarian abuses occurring in the First Libyan Civil War. The embargo was later extended to mid-2018. Under the embargo, Libya has suffered severe inflation because of increased dependence on the private sector to import goods. The sanctions caused large cuts to health and education, which caused social conditions to decrease. Even though the sanctions were in response to human rights, their effects were limited.


title: Economic sanctions

text: In effort to punish South Africa for its policies of apartheid, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a voluntary international oil-embargo against South Africa on November 20, 1987; that embargo had the support of 130 countries. South Africa, in response, expanded its Sasol production of synthetic crude.


title: Economic sanctions

text: All United Nations sanctions on South Africa ended over the Negotiations to end Apartheid, Resolution 919 and the 1994 South African elections, in which Nelson Mandela was elected as the first post-Apartheid president.


title: Economic sanctions

text: One of the most comprehensive attempts at an embargo occurred during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815. Aiming to cripple the United Kingdom economically, Emperor Napoleon I of France in 1806 promulgated the Continental System—which forbade European nations from trading with the UK. In practice the French Empire could not completely enforce the embargo, which proved as harmful (if not more so) to the continental nations involved as to the British.


title: Economic sanctions

text: The United States, Britain, the Republic of China and the Netherlands imposed sanctions against Japan in 1940–1941 in response to its expansionism. Deprived of access to vital oil, iron-ore and steel supplies, Japan started planning for military action to seize the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, which required a preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor, triggering the American entry into the Pacific War.


title: Economic sanctions

text: In 1973–1974, OAPEC instigated the 1973 oil crisis through its oil embargo against the United States and other industrialized nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The results included a sharp rise in oil prices and in OPEC revenues, an emergency period of energy rationing, a global economic recession, large-scale conservation efforts, and long-lasting shifts toward natural gas, ethanol, nuclear and other alternative energy sources. Israel continued to receive Western support, however.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: 1984 (stylized in Roman numerals as MCMLXXXIV) is the sixth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on January 9, 1984. It was the last Van Halen studio album until "A Different Kind of Truth" (2012) to feature lead singer David Lee Roth, who left the band in 1985 following creative differences. This is the final full-length album to feature all four original members (Van Halen brothers, Roth, and Michael Anthony), although they reunited briefly in 2000 to start work on what would much later become 2012's "A Different Kind of Truth". Roth returned in 2007, but Eddie's son Wolfgang replaced Anthony in 2006. "1984" and Van Halen's debut are Van Halen's bestselling albums, each having sold more than 10 million copies.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: "1984" was well received by music critics. "Rolling Stone" ranked the album number 81 on its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s. It reached number two on the "Billboard" 200 album chart and remained there for five weeks, behind Michael Jackson's "Thriller", on which guitarist Eddie Van Halen made a guest performance. "1984" produced four singles, including "Jump", Van Halen's only number-one single on the "Billboard" Hot 100; the top-20 hits "Panama" and "I'll Wait"; and the MTV favorite "Hot for Teacher". The album was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1999, signifying ten million shipped copies.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Following the tour in support of their fourth studio album, "Fair Warning", the band initially wanted to slow down and take a break. They released just one song, "(Oh) Pretty Woman," intended to be a stand-alone song. However, the band's label asked for another album due to the song's success and the band recorded their fifth studio album, "Diver Down" very quickly. Following the recording of the album, guitarist Eddie Van Halen was dissatisfied by the concessions he had made to Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth and Warner Bros. producer Ted Templeman. Both discouraged Eddie from making keyboards a prominent instrument in the band's music.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: By 1983, Eddie was in the process of building his own studio, naming it 5150 after the California law code for the temporary, involuntary psychiatric commitment of individuals (who present a danger to themselves or others due to signs of mental illness), with Donn Landee, the band's longtime engineer (and later, producer on the "5150" and "OU812" recordings). While boards and tape machines were being installed, Eddie began working on synthesizers to pass the time. "There were no presets," said Templeman. "He would just twist off until it sounded right." There, he composed Van Halen's follow-up to "Diver Down" without as much perceived "interference" from Roth or Templeman. The result was a compromise between the two creative factions in the band: a mixture of keyboard-heavy songs, and the intense hard rock for which the band was known. Unlike the first five albums, "1984" took almost a year to create and produce. Most of their previous LPs had taken less than 2 weeks, while their first LP was recorded in just 5 days, all at Sunset Studios.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: In "Rolling Stone"'s retrospective review of 1984 in its '100 Best Albums of the Eighties' list, Templeman said, "It's real obvious to me [why 1984 won Van Halen a broader and larger audience]. Eddie Van Halen discovered the synthesizer."


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: The album's original release credits all songs to Edward Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony, and David Lee Roth. The UK single release for "I'll Wait" credited Michael McDonald as a co-writer, but he was not credited on the US version. The ASCAP entry for "I'll Wait" lists Michael McDonald as co-writer with Roth and the Van Halens. Like many bands starting out on their career, Van Halen shared songwriting credit equally between all members (including guitar instrumentals), but subsequent claims would lend credibility to the view that all songs were entirely or predominantly written by Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth, with little input from Van Halen's rhythm section.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: After the release of "Best Of – Volume I" (1996), Van Halen renegotiated their royalties with their label Warner Bros. In 2004, Roth discovered that the rest of the band had renegotiated a royalty rate five times greater than his for releases made during his time as lead singer.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Songs from "1984" that appear on compilations after the royalty renegotiation and Roth's lawsuit were credited to Edward Van Halen, Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth, with Michael Anthony's name removed from the credits, as evident in the end song credits of the 2007 film "Superbad".


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Michael Anthony's longstanding bass technician Kevin Dugan has noted that the opening title track instrumental from the album originates from a Roland bass synthesizer passage created as an intro for Anthony's in-concert bass solos, and has claimed that he and Anthony wrote and programmed it together.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: The cover art was created by graphic artist Margo Nahas. It was not specifically commissioned; Nahas had been asked to create a cover that featured four chrome women dancing, but declined due to the creative difficulties. Her husband brought her portfolio to the band anyway, and from that material they chose the painting of a putto stealing cigarettes that was used. The model was Carter Helm, who was the child of one of Nahas' best friends, whom she photographed holding a candy cigarette. The front cover was censored in the UK at the time of the album's release. It featured a sticker that obscured the cigarette in the putto's hand and the pack of cigarettes. The back cover features all four band members individually with "1984" in a green futuristic typeface.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Musically, "1984" has been described as glam metal, hard rock, heavy metal, synth rock, and pop rock. The album's first two singles, "Jump" and "I'll Wait", feature prominent synthesizers, as does the album's intro track, "1984", a one-minute instrumental. Eddie Van Halen played an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer on the album except for “I’ll Wait” which was recorded with the newer Oberheim OB-8. The reason for this is that Ed's OB-Xa was having an issue staying in tune and while it was being repaired he was sent the newer model OB-8 (which was featured prominently on future Van Halen albums).


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: 1984 saw the release of the album's third single "Panama", which features a heavy guitar riff reminiscent of Van Halen's earlier work. The engine noise was from Eddie revving up his Lamborghini, with microphones used near the tailpipes. Later, a video of "Hot for Teacher" was released and played regularly on MTV, giving the band a fourth hit which sustained sales of the album. Other songs on "1984" included "Girl Gone Bad", parts of which previously had been played during the 1982 Tour amidst performances of "Somebody Get Me a Doctor" (most famously at the US Festival show), the hard rock "Drop Dead Legs" and "Top Jimmy", a tribute to James Paul Koncek of the band Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs. The album concludes with "House of Pain", a fiery, heavy metal song that dates back to the band's early club days of the mid-1970s.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Eddie told an interviewer that "Girl Gone Bad" was written in a hotel room that he and then-wife Valerie Bertinelli had rented. Valerie was asleep, and Eddie woke up during the night with an idea he had to put on tape. Not wanting to wake Valerie, Eddie grabbed a cassette recorder and recorded himself playing guitar in the closet.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Eddie Van Halen stated he wrote the arrangement for "Jump" several years before "1984" was recorded. In a 1995 cover story in "Rolling Stone", the guitarist said Roth had rejected the synth riff for "Jump" for at least two years before agreeing to write lyrics to it. In his memoir "Crazy from the Heat", Roth confirms Eddie's account, admitting a preference for Van Halen's guitar work; however, he says he now enjoys the song. Additionally in his memoir, Roth writes that he wrote the lyrics to "Jump" after watching a man waffle as to whether to commit suicide by jumping off a skyscraper.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: "1984" peaked at number 2 on the "Billboard" album charts (behind Michael Jackson's "Thriller", which featured an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo on "Beat It"), and remained there for 5 straight weeks. It contained the anthems "Jump", "Panama", "I'll Wait" and "Hot for Teacher". "Jump" reached number 1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. "1984" is the second of two Van Halen albums to have achieved RIAA Diamond status, selling over ten million copies in the United States. Their debut "Van Halen" was the first. "Jump" went on to be certified Gold in April 1984, only months after the album's release.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: The album's follow-up singles – the synth-driven "I'll Wait", and "Panama", each peaked at "Billboard" number 13 on the Pop charts, respectively, in March and June. "Hot for Teacher" was a moderate "Billboard" Hot 100 success, reaching number 56; the MTV video for "Hot for Teacher" became even more popular. The "Hot for Teacher" video, which was directed by Roth, stars preteen lookalikes of the four Van Halen band members; a stereotypical nerd named "Waldo"; David Lee Roth as Waldo's bus driver; and numerous teachers stripping.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: To promote the album, the band ran a contest on MTV. The contest was called, "Lost Weekend" with Van Halen. Fans mailed over 1 million postcards to MTV in hopes of winning the contest. In the promo for MTV, David Lee Roth said, "You won't know where you are, you won't know what's going to happen, and when you come back, you're not gonna have any memory of it." Kurt Jeffries won the contest and was flown to Detroit to join the band. Jeffries was allowed to bring along his best friend. He was given a Lost Weekend T-shirt and a hat. He was also brought on stage and had a large sheet cake smashed in his face which was followed by about a dozen people pouring champagne on him.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Reviews for "1984" were generally favorable. Robert Christgau rated the album a B+. He explained that "Side one is pure 'up', and not only that, it sticks to the ears" and that "Van Halen's pop move avoids fluff because they're heavy, and schlock because they're built for speed, finally creating an all-purpose mise-en-scene for Brother Eddie's hair-raising, stomach-churning chops." He also called side two "consolation for their loyal fans—a little sexism, a lot of pyrotechnics, and a standard HM bass attack on something called 'House of Pain'." J.D. Considine, a reviewer for "Rolling Stone", rated "1984" four out of five stars. He called it "the album that brings all of Van Halen's talent into focus." He stated that ""Jump" is not exactly the kind of song you'd expect from Van Halen", but that "once Alex Van Halen's drums kick in and singer David Lee Roth starts to unravel a typically convoluted story line, things start sounding a little more familiar". Although he mentioned "Jump" as having "suspended chords and a pedalpoint bass in a manner more suited to Asia", he went on to state that "Eddie Van Halen manages to expand his repertoire of hot licks, growls, screams and seemingly impossible runs to wilder frontiers than you could have imagined." He concluded that "what really makes this record work is the fact that Van Halen uses all this flash as a means to an end—driving the melody home—rather than as an end in itself" and that "despite all the bluster, Van Halen is one of the smartest, toughest bands in rock & roll. Believe me, that's no newspeak."


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: In a 1984 review, "Billboard" states the album is "funnier and more versatile than most of their metal brethren", calling the production "typically strong". A retrospective review by AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine was extremely positive. He noted that the album caused "a hoopla that was a bit of a red herring since the band had been layering in synths since their third album, "Women and Children First"". He further stated that "Jump"'s "synths played a circular riff that wouldn't have sounded as overpowering on guitar", but that "the band didn't dispense with their signature monolithic, pulsating rock." He also stated that "where [previous] albums placed an emphasis on the band's attack, this places an emphasis on the songs, and they're uniformly terrific, the best set of original tunes Van Halen ever had." He concluded that "it's the best showcase of Van Halen's instrumental prowess as a band, the best showcase for Diamond Dave's glorious shtick, the best showcase for their songwriting, just their flat-out best album overall. [...] [T]here's no way Van Halen could have bettered this album with Dave around (and they didn't better it once Sammy [Hagar] joined, either)."


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: "Guitar Player" magazine writer Matt Blackett praises the "deeper cuts" of the album, "Drop Dead Legs", "House of Pain", and "Girl Gone Bad", calling the guitar work "fresh and vital", noting Eddie's "dark, complex sense of harmony and melody". Len Comaratta from "Consequence of Sound" felt Van Halen reached the pinnacle of its commercial and critical success. At the end of the 1980s, "Rolling Stone", which had previously been critical of Van Halen, ranked "1984" at number 81 on its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s. The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". "Guitar World" magazine placed the album on their list of "New Sensations: 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1984".


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Following the death of lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen in October 2020, "1984" saw a brief resurgence to the charts.


title: 1984 (Van Halen album)

text: Tracks recorded for the album that remain unreleased or were renamed are according to a Warner Bros. memo from August 24, 1983: "Baritone Slide", "Lie to You", "Ripley", "Any Time, Any Place", "Forget It", "5150 Special" and "Anything to Make It Right (synth)". A September 7, 1983 memo adds an 8th title that didn't make the album, "Won't Let Go (needs lyrics)" while dropping "Lie To You" and "5150 Special". "Ripley" is confirmed to have become "Blood and Fire" on the "A Different Kind of Truth" album and as "I'll Wait", "Top Jimmy", "Drop Dead Legs" and "Girl Gone Bad" are not mentioned on either memo the titles may have changed, leaving at least four unreleased tracks from the 1984 sessions.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Stanley Robert Vinton (born April 16, 1935) is a retired American singer and occasional actor. As a teen idol, he became known as "The Polish Prince", as his music paid tribute to his Polish heritage. One of his most popular songs is "Blue Velvet" (a cover of the 1951 song recorded by Tony Bennett) which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963, No. 1 in Canada (5 weeks), and number 2 in the UK in 1990.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Vinton was born in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, the only child of locally popular bandleader Stan Vinton and Dorothy Studzinski Vinton. He is of Polish and Lithuanian descent. The family surname was originally Vintula, and was changed by Vinton's father. Vinton's parents encouraged their son's interest in music by giving him his daily 25-cent allowance after he had practiced the clarinet.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: At 16, Vinton formed his first band, which played clubs around the Pittsburgh area. With the money he earned, he helped finance his college education at Duquesne University, where he graduated with a degree in musical composition. While at Duquesne, he became proficient on all of the instruments in the band: piano, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, drums, and oboe. When Vinton became an active musician, it was common for people to become confused with the bands of father and son, for both were named Stanley. Vinton's father suggested his son use his middle name of Robert professionally to clear up the confusion.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Vinton's birthplace of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, is also the birthplace of Perry Como, Vinton's hometown named two streets, Bobby Vinton Boulevard and the shorter adjoining Bobby Vinton Drive, in his honor. These streets were built in the late 1970s; prior attempts to name a residential street after him failed. The residents had not cared for the singer always claiming Pittsburgh as his home town on TV interviews. Como always claimed Canonsburg as his hometown, so hundreds of people changed their address when the town renamed a street in the east end after Perry Como. The Canonsburg town fathers had plans to erect a statue in Vinton's honour, but Vinton himself vetoed the idea, noting that the $100,000 planned cost could go to far more important town needs.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: According to his autobiography, Bobby was inspired to record his music by the Elvis Presley movie "Jailhouse Rock". He formed his own record label, Bobby Records, in October 1958. His first release was "Twilight Time", backed with "Hallelujah". Bobby sang on the B-side of the 45 rpm release, making this his first commercially released vocal recording. This record did not chart. In March 1959, Bobby recorded for the Melody label out of Philadelphia, listed as "Bobby Vinton and his Orchestra" for the first time. His release of "Harlem Nocturne", backed with "Always in My Heart" with a vocal by Bobby, attracted attention in Pennsylvania. His 'young man with a big band' style was established here, and "Always In My Heart" would be a song he would return to. In August 1959, Bobby moved to another larger record company, Alpine Records. He released two self-written singles for Alpine, the first being "You'll Never Forget" backed by "First Impression". The second Alpine release was "A Freshman and a Sophomore", backed with the self-written "The Sheik"; this was released in February 1960. Both Alpine releases garnered "Billboard" magazine mentions.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: After two years of service in the United States Army, in which he served as a chaplain's assistant, Vinton was signed to Epic Records in 1960 as a bandleader: "A Young Man With a Big Band". The break for the Epic Records contract had come after Vinton and his band appeared on Guy Lombardo's "TV Talent Scouts" program. Since March 20, 1961, his released three singles. Titled "Posin'" "Little lonely one" and "Well I ask ya",these records were his vocal recordings, and the flip sides were credited to "Bobby Vinton And His Orchestra". Despite the big label backing, the three singles were not successful, and two albums, "Bobby Vinton Dancing At The Hop" and "Bobby Vinton Plays for his Lil Darlin's" did not sell well. With Epic ready to drop him from its roster, Vinton found the material for his first hit single literally sitting in a reject pile. The song was titled "Roses Are Red (My Love)". Vinton had to do his own promotion for the song; he bought one thousand copies and hired a young woman to deliver a copy of the record and a dozen red roses to every local DJ. It spent four weeks at number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The song was also a hit on the Country and R&B charts. The success of the song pushed Epic to renew Vinton's contract and change his status from bandleader to solo singer.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Arguably, Vinton's most famous song is 1963's "Blue Velvet", originally a minor hit for Tony Bennett in 1951, that also spent three weeks at the number one positions in "Billboard", "Cash Box", and "Record World" magazines. In 1986, 23 years later, David Lynch named his movie "Blue Velvet" after the song. In 1990, "Blue Velvet" reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart, after being featured in a Nivea commercial. The 1990 reissue also hit number 3 in the Irish Singles Chart and number 7 in Australia.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: In 1964, Vinton had two number 1 hits, "There! I've Said It Again" (a number 1 hit in 1945 for Vaughn Monroe) in January and "Mr. Lonely" in December. Vinton's version of "There! I've Said It Again" is noteworthy for being the last U.S. "Billboard" number-one single of the pre-Beatles era, deposed from the Hot 100 summit by "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Also noteworthy is the fact that Vinton continued to have big hit records during the British Invasion, scoring 16 top-ten hits, while Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, the Shirelles, and other major artists of the early 1960s struggled to reach even the Top 40.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Vinton wrote and composed "Mr. Lonely" during his chaplain's assistant service in the U.S. Army in the late 1950s. The song was recorded during the same 1962 session that produced "Roses Are Red (My Love)", and the two songs launched Vinton's singing career. It was released as an album track on the 1962 "Roses Are Red (and other songs for the young & sentimental)" LP. Despite pressure from Vinton to release it as a single, Epic instead had Buddy Greco release it and it flopped. Two years and millions of records sold later, Bobby prevailed on Epic to include "Mr. Lonely" on his "Bobby Vinton's Greatest Hits" LP. Soon DJs picked up on the song and airplay resulted in demand for a single release. "Mr. Lonely" shot up the charts in the late fall of 1964 to reach number 1 on the Hot 100 on December 12, 1964. Epic then released the LP "Bobby Vinton Mr. Lonely", giving the song a unique claim to fame since it now appeared on three Bobby Vinton albums released within two years. The song continued to spin gold for Vinton, its author-composer, in the 50+ years to date since reaching number 1; Harmony Korine named his 2007 film "Mister Lonely" after the latter and features the song in the film's opening, and it was also the basis for Akon's 2005 hit, "Lonely".


title: Bobby Vinton

text: In 1965, Vinton continued his "Lonely" success streak with the self-written "L-O-N-E-L-Y". "Long Lonely Nights" peaked at number 17 and spawned an album, "Bobby Vinton Sings for Lonely Nights". Vinton's self-written 1966 hit "Coming Home Soldier" hit No. 11 on the Hot 100 and was a favorite on request shows on the American Forces Network during the Cold War and Vietnam era, often called in by soldiers about to board the Freedom Bird that would take them back to the "Land of the Round Doorknobs". Vinton's lush 1967 remake of "Please Love Me Forever", which reached number 6 and sold over a million copies, began a string of twelve consecutive Hot 100 hits, all remakes, over a little less than five and a half years. His 1968 hit "I Love How You Love Me" surged to number 9, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold record by the RIAA.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: In the 1970s, Vinton continued to hit the Top 40, notably with "Ev'ry Day of My Life", a No. 2 Adult Contemporary hit also awarded the Jukebox single of the year award which was produced by Jimmy Bowen and CBS recording engineer Jim Reeves, which peaked at number 24 on April 29, 1972, and "Sealed With a Kiss" hitting number 19 on August 19–26, 1972. Despite the success of the two hits, Epic Records decided to drop Vinton from his contract the following year, claiming that his days of selling records were over.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: Undeterred, Vinton spent $50,000 of his own money on "My Melody of Love", partially self-written and partially sung in Polish. The suggestion for the song came from Vinton's mother. After six major labels turned Vinton down, ABC Records bought Vinton's idea, and the result was a multi-million-selling single of simple lyrics that hit number 3 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, number 2 on the Cashbox Top 100 chart, and number 1 on the AC chart in 1974. A gold album, "Melodies of Love", followed as well as one final Top 40 pop hit (the traditional "Beer Barrel Polka", also sung partially in Polish, b/w "Dick And Jane" in 1975). Vinton would go on to record an additional four albums for ABC Records, three of which hit the Billboard Hot 200 albums chart. Epic Records rediscovered Vinton in the wake of his newfound success, releasing two albums of previously recorded material, both of which hit the top album charts. In addition, in a throwback to his career start in the 1950s, his two albums on Ahed were released in Canada. "Party Music" (1976) went platinum and "100 memories" (1979) was successful. In 1975, Vinton exploded onto televisions across the United States and Canada with a successful half-hour variety show, "The Bobby Vinton Show", which aired from 1975 to 1978 and of which "My Melody of Love" was the theme song; ABC Records subsequently released an album of songs performed on the show.


title: Bobby Vinton

text: In 1978, Vinton wrote his autobiography, titled "The Polish Prince", which became a bestseller. In the same year, CBS-TV aired "Bobby Vinton's Rock N' Rollers", a one-hour special that achieved top ratings.