title: AustinShow

text: Austin began streaming "Runescape" on Twitch in 2013. He streamed under the name RajjPatel, which he coined himself. He also spoke in a faux Indian accent. Austin would later begin hosting various talk and dating shows on his stream. He created "The Rajjchelor", a dating show inspired by "The Bachelor", and "Rajj Royale", a debate show, both of which are presented in an elimination-type format. Notable guests that have appeared on the shows include James Charles, Pokimane, Hasan Piker, Mia Malkova, and Lil Nas X.


title: AustinShow

text: Due to the live, unscripted nature of Austin's broadcasts, a number of controversial incidents have occurred during the shows. In March 2018, a streamer by the name of Aqualadora admitted to intentionally killing a dog after Austin asked her to reveal the worst thing she had ever done. In March 2020, Twitch banned streamer Kaceytron after she made insensitive comments regarding the COVID-19 pandemic during one of Austin's broadcasts.


title: AustinShow

text: On June 12, 2020, Austin announced that he would be dropping the RajjPatel moniker entirely. The name had generated controversy in the past due to his portrayal of Indian people as a white-passing man. In a statement released on Twitter, he stated, "I don't want any part of my image, name, or persona to be inappropriately borrowed from a culture that I don't have the right to represent. So, moving forward, I will be going by my first name, Austin, and rebranding everything as a derivative of that." His flagship shows "The Rajjchelor" and "Rajj Royale" were renamed to "Love or Host" and "The Royale" respectively.


title: AustinShow

text: In July 2020, it was announced that Austin would be the host of a game show titled "Dare Package" on streaming media channel VENN.


title: AustinShow

text: On July 11, 2020, Austin, along with rapper Wiz Khalifa hosted a charity stream for Rise Above the Disorder, a non-profit that focuses on providing mental health services to people of color.


title: AustinShow

text: At GlitchCon 2020, a virtual version of TwitchCon, Austin hosted a talent show featuring celebrity judges Andy Milonakis and T-Pain.


title: AustinShow

text: On February 3, 2022, Austin signed with G4 to host "Name Your Price", a 1970s-themed game show inspired by "The Price Is Right", with Will Neff and JustaMinx. On February 10, it premiered on Austin's Twitch channel.


title: AustinShow

text: Austin is openly gay. He came out via Twitter in April 2020, saying, "My sexuality isn't a meme. I identify as what I would say 'mostly' gay, but maybe bisexual because sometimes I find some women attractive."


title: AustinShow

text: Austin describes himself as "fairly liberal". He supported Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Richard Sorge (; 4 October 1895 – 7 November 1944) was a German-Azerbaijani journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. His codename was "Ramsay" (). A number of famous personalities considered him one of the most accomplished spies.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge is most famous for his service in Japan in 1940 and 1941, when he provided information about Adolf Hitler's plan to attack the Soviet Union. Then, in mid-September 1941, he informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. A month later, Sorge was arrested in Japan for espionage. He was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944. Stalin declined to intervene on his behalf with the Japanese.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge was born on 4 October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Baku, Azerbaijan). He was the youngest of the nine children of Gustav Wilhelm Richard Sorge (1852–1907), a German mining engineer employed by the and the Caucasian oil company Branobel and his Russian wife, Nina Semionovna Kobieleva. His father moved back to Germany with his family in 1898, after his lucrative contract expired. In Sorge's own words:


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge attended when he was six. He described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man. However, the cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin". Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, but he was actually Sorge's great-uncle.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. At 18, he was posted to a field artillery battalion with the 3rd Guards Division. He served on the Western Front and was severely wounded there in March 1916. Shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to the rank of corporal, received the Iron Cross and was later medically discharged. While fighting in the war, Sorge, who had started out in 1914 as a right-wing nationalist, became disillusioned by what he called the "meaninglessness" of the war and moved to the left.


title: Richard Sorge

text: During his convalescence he read Marx, Engels and Rudolf Hilferding and eventually became a communist, mainly by the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the remainder of the war studying economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg. In Kiel, he witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party. He subsequently moved on to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge received his doctorate in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from Hamburg in August 1919. By this time he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and was engaged as an activist for the party in Hamburg and subsequently Aachen. His political views got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge was recruited as an agent for Soviet intelligence. With the cover of a journalist, he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist revolutions.


title: Richard Sorge

text: From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was joined there by Christiane Gerlach, the ex-wife of Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy communist and professor of political science in Kiel, who had taught Sorge. Christiane Gerlach later remembered about meeting Sorge for the first time: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable...".


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. In the summer of 1923, he took part in the "Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche" ("First Marxist Work Week") Conference in Ilmenau. Sorge continued his work as a journalist and also helped organize the library of the Institute for Social Research, a new Marxist think tank in Frankfurt.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1924, he was made responsible for the security of a Soviet delegation attending the KPD's congress in Frankfurt. He caught the attention of one of the delegates, Osip Piatnitsky, a senior official with the Communist International, who recruited him. That year, he and Christiane moved to Moscow, where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, which was also an OGPU intelligence-gathering body. Apparently, Sorge's dedication to duty led to his divorce. After several years he became enmeshed in the factional struggles in the Communist movement that occurred between the death of Vladimir Lenin and the consolidation of power by Joseph Stalin, being accused of supporting Stalin's last factional opponent, Nikolai Bukharin, alongside three of his German comrades. However, in 1929, Sorge was invited to join the Red Army's Fourth Department (the later GRU, or military intelligence) by department head Yan Karlovich Berzin. He remained with the Department for the rest of his life.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1929, Sorge went to the United Kingdom to study the labour movement there, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the country's political and economic conditions. He was instructed to remain undercover and to stay out of politics. In November 1929, Sorge was sent to Germany. He was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with any left-wing activists. As cover, he got a job with the agricultural newspaper "Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung".


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1930, Sorge was sent to Shanghai. His cover was his work as the editor of a German news service and for the "Frankfurter Zeitung". He contacted another agent, Max Christiansen-Clausen. Sorge also met German Soviet agent Ursula Kuczynski and well-known American left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley, who also worked for the "Frankfurter Zeitung". She introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki of the Japanese newspaper "Asahi Shimbun" (a future Sorge recruit) and to Hanako Ishii, with whom he would become romantically involved. Sorge recruited Kuczynski as a Soviet agent and become romantically involved with her.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Shortly after his arrival in China, he was able to send intelligence regarding plans by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government for a new offensive against the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War, based largely on information gathered from German military advisors to the Nationalists.


title: Richard Sorge

text: As a journalist, Sorge established himself as an expert on Chinese agriculture. In that role, he travelled around the country and contacted members of the Chinese Communist Party. In January 1932, Sorge reported on fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops in the streets of Shanghai. In December, he was recalled to Moscow. His performance as an agent in Shanghai had been judged as successful by Berzin, having ensured that he and his agents had escaped detection and expanded the Soviet intelligence network.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge returned to Moscow, where he wrote a book about Chinese agriculture. He also married Ekaterina Maximova ("Katya"), a woman he had met in China and brought back with him to Russia.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In May 1933, the GRU decided to have Sorge organize an intelligence network in Japan. He was given the codename "Ramsay" ("Рамзай" "Ramzai" or "Ramzay"). He first went to Berlin, to renew contacts in Germany and to obtain a new newspaper assignment in Japan as cover. In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army had seized the Manchuria region of China, which gave Japan another land border in Asia with the Soviet Union (previously, the Soviet Union and Japan had shared only the island of Sakhalin). At the time, several Kwantung Army generals advocated following up the seizure of Manchuria by invading the Soviet Far East, and as the Soviets had broken the Japanese Army codes, Moscow was aware of that and caused a "major Japanese war scare" in the winter of 1931–1932. Until the mid-1930s, it was Japan, rather than Germany, that was considered to be the main threat by Moscow.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Elsa Poretsky, the wife of Ignace Reiss, a fellow GRU agent, commented: "His joining the Nazi Party in his own country, where he had a well documented police record was hazardous, to say the least... his staying in the very lion's den in Berlin, while his application for membership was being processed, was indeed flirting with death".


title: Richard Sorge

text: In Berlin, he insinuated himself into the Nazi Party and read Nazi propaganda, particularly Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Sorge attended so many beer halls with his new acquaintances that he gave up drinking to avoid saying anything inappropriate. His abstinence from drinking did not make his Nazi companions suspicious. It was an example of his devotion to and absorption in his mission, as he had been a heavy drinker. He later explained to Hede Massing, "That was the bravest thing I ever did. Never will I be able to drink enough to make up for this time". Later, his drinking came to undermine his work.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In Germany, he received commissions from two newspapers, the "Berliner Börsen Zeitung" and the "Tägliche Rundschau", to report from Japan and the Nazi theoretical journal "Geopolitik". Sorge was so successful at establishing his cover as an intensely-Nazi journalist that when he departed Germany, Joseph Goebbels attended his farewell dinner. He went to Japan via the United States, passing through New York in August 1933.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge arrived in Yokohama on 6 September 1933. After landing in Japan, Sorge became the Japan correspondent for the "Frankfurter Zeitung". As it was the most prestigious newspaper in Germany, Sorge's status as the Tokyo correspondent for the "Frankfurter Zeitung" made him, in many ways, the most senior German reporter in Japan. Sorge's reputation as a Nazi journalist who detested the Soviet Union served as an excellent cover for his espionage work. His task in Japan was more challenging than that in China: the Soviets had very little intelligence capacity in Japan, so Sorge would have to build a network of agents from nothing, under much tighter surveillance than he had faced in Shanghai. Sorge was told by his GRU superiors that his mission in Japan was to "give very careful study to the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the USSR". After his arrest in 1941, Sorge told his captors:


title: Richard Sorge

text: This was for many years the most important duty assigned to me and my group; it would not be far wrong to say that it was the sole object of my mission in Japan... The USSR, as it viewed the prominent role and attitude taken by the Japanese military in foreign policy after the Manchurian incident, had come to harbor a deeply implanted suspicion that Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union, a suspicion so strong that my frequently expressed opinions to the contrary were not always fully appreciated in Moscow...


title: Richard Sorge

text: He was warned by his commanders not to have contact with either the underground Japanese Communist Party or the Soviet embassy in Tokyo. His intelligence network in Japan included the Red Army officer and radio operator Max Clausen, Hotsumi Ozaki and two other Comintern agents, Branko Vukelić, a journalist working for the French magazine, "Vu", and a Japanese journalist, Miyagi Yotoku, who was employed by the English-language newspaper, the "Japan Advertiser". Max Clausen's wife, Anna, acted as ring courier from time to time. From summer 1937, Clausen operated under the cover of his business, M Clausen Shokai, suppliers of blueprint machinery and reproduction services. The business had been set up with Soviet funds and became a commercial success. Ozaki was a Japanese man from an influential family who had grown up in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony. He was an idealistic Sinophile who believed that Japan, which had started its modernisation with the Meiji Restoration, had much to teach China. However, Ozaki was shocked by the racism of Japanese policy towards China, with the Chinese being depicted as a people fit only to be slaves. Ozaki believed that the existing political system of Japan, with the emperor being worshipped as a living god, was obsolete, and that saving Japan from fascism would require Japan being "reconstructed as a socialist state".


title: Richard Sorge

text: Between 1933 and 1934, Sorge formed a network of informants. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and obtained information on Japanese foreign policy. His agent Ozaki developed a close contact with Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.


title: Richard Sorge

text: As he appeared to be an ardent Nazi, Sorge was welcome at the German embassy. One Japanese journalist who knew Sorge described him in 1935 as "a typical, swashbuckling, arrogant Nazi... quick-tempered, hard-drinking". As the Japan correspondent for the "Frankfurter Zeitung", Sorge developed a network of sources in Japanese politics, and soon German diplomats, including the ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, came to depend upon Sorge as a source of intelligence on the fractious and secretive world of Japanese politics. The Japanese values of "honne" and "tatemae" (the former literally means "true sound", roughly "as things are", and the latter literally means "façade" or roughly "as things appear"), the tendency of the Japanese to hide their real feelings and profess to believe in things that they do not, made deciphering Japan's politics difficult. Sorge's fluency in Japanese enhanced his status as a Japanologist. Sorge was interested in Asian history and culture, especially those of China and Japan, and when he was sober, he tried to learn as much as he could. Meanwhile, Sorge befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attaché to Japan and seduced his wife, Helma. Ott sent reports back to Berlin containing his assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army, which Helma Ott copied and passed on to Sorge, who passed them on to Moscow (Helma Ott believed Sorge to be working merely for the Nazi Party). As the Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, German influence was strong and Ott had good contacts with Japanese officers.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In October 1934, Ott and Sorge made an extended visit to the puppet "Empire of Manchukuo", which was actually a Japanese colony, and Sorge, who knew the Far East far better than Ott, wrote the report describing Manchukuo that Ott submitted to Berlin under his name. As Ott's report was received favourably at both the Bendlerstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse, Sorge soon became one of Ott's main sources of information about the Japanese Empire, which created a close friendship between the two. In 1935, Sorge passed on to Moscow a planning document provided to him by Ozaki, which strongly suggested that Japan was not planning on attacking the Soviet Union in 1936. Sorge guessed correctly that Japan would invade China in July 1937 and that there was no danger of a Japanese invasion of Siberia.


title: Richard Sorge

text: On 26 February 1936, an attempted military coup took place in Tokyo. It was meant to achieve a mystical "Shōwa Restoration" and led to several senior officials being murdered by the rebels. Dirksen, Ott and the rest of the German embassy were highly confused as to why it was happening and were at a loss as to how to explain the coup to the Wilhelmstrasse. They turned to Sorge, the resident Japan expert, for help. Using notes supplied to him by Ozaki, Sorge submitted a report stating that the Imperial Way Faction in the Japanese Army, which had attempted the coup, was younger officers from rural backgrounds. They were upset at the impoverishment of the countryside, and that the faction was not communist or socialist but just anticapitalist and believed that big business had subverted the emperor's will. Sorge's report was used as the basis of Dirksen's explanation of the coup attempt, which he sent back to the Wilhelmstrasse, which was satisfied at the ambassador's "brilliant" explanation of the coup attempt.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge lived in a house in a respectable neighborhood in Tokyo, where he was noted mostly for heavy drinking and his reckless way of riding his motorcycle. In the summer of 1936, a Japanese woman, Hanako Ishii, a waitress at a bar frequented by Sorge, moved into Sorge's house to become his common-law wife. Of all of Sorge's various relationships with women, his most durable and lasting one was with Ishii. She tried to curb Sorge's heavy drinking and his habit of recklessly riding his motorcycle in a way that everyone viewed as almost suicidal. An American reporter who knew Sorge later wrote that he "created the impression of being a playboy, almost a wastrel, the very antithesis of a keen and dangerous spy".


title: Richard Sorge

text: Ironically, Sorge's spying for the Soviets in Japan in the late 1930s was probably safer for him than if he had been in Moscow. Claiming too many pressing responsibilities, he disobeyed Josef Stalin's orders to return to the Soviet Union in 1937 during the Great Purge, as he realised the risk of arrest because of his German citizenship. In fact, two of Sorge's earliest GRU handlers, Yan Karlovich Berzin and his successor, Artur Artuzov, were shot during the purges. In 1938, the German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop was promoted to foreign minister, and to replace Ribbentrop, Dirksen was sent to London. Ribbentrop promoted Ott to be Dirksen's replacement. Ott, now aware that Sorge was sleeping with his wife, let his friend Sorge have "free run of the embassy night and day", as one German diplomat later recalled: he was given his own desk at the embassy. Ott tolerated Sorge's affair with his wife on the grounds that Sorge was such a charismatic man that women always fell in love with him and so it was only natural that Sorge would sleep with his wife. Ott liked to call Sorge Richard der Unwiderstehliche ("Richard the Irresistible"), as his charm made him attractive to women. Ott greatly valued Sorge as a source of information about the secretive world of Japanese politics, especially Japan's war with China, since Ott found that Sorge knew so many things about Japan that no other Westerner knew that he chose to overlook Sorge's affair with his wife.


title: Richard Sorge

text: After Ott became the ambassador to Japan in April 1938, Sorge had breakfast with him daily and they discussed German–Japanese relations in detail, and Sorge sometimes drafted the cables that Ott sent under his name to Berlin. Ott trusted Sorge so much that he sent him out as a German courier to carry secret messages to the German consulates in Canton, Hong Kong and Manila. Sorge noted about his influence in the German embassy: "They would come to me and say, 'we have found out such and such a thing, have you heard about it and what do you think'?"


title: Richard Sorge

text: On 13 May 1938, while he rode his motorcycle in Tokyo, a very-intoxicated Sorge crashed into a wall and was badly injured. As Sorge was carrying around notes given to him by Ozaki at the time, if the police had discovered the documents, his cover would have been blown. However, a member of his spy ring got to the hospital and removed the documents before the police arrived. In 1938, Sorge reported to Moscow that the Battle of Lake Khasan had been caused by overzealous officers in the Kwantung Army and that there were no plans in Tokyo for a general war against the Soviet Union. Unaware that his friend Berzin had been shot as a "Trotskyite" in July 1938, Sorge sent him a letter in October 1938:


title: Richard Sorge

text: Dear Comrade! Don't worry about us. Although we are terribly tired and tense, nevertheless we are disciplined, obedient, decisive and devoted fellows who are ready to carry out the tasks connected with our great mission. I send sincere greetings to you and your friends. I request you to forward the attached letter and greetings to my wife. Please, take the time to see to her welfare.


title: Richard Sorge

text: The two most authoritative sources for intelligence for the Soviet Union on Germany in the late 1930s were Sorge and Rudolf von Scheliha, the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw. Unlike Sorge, who believed in communism, Scheliha's reasons for spying were money problems since he had a lifestyle beyond his salary as a diplomat, and he turned to selling secrets to provide additional income. Scheliha sold documents to the NKVD indicating that Germany was planning from late 1938 to turn Poland into a satellite state, and after the Poles refused to fall into line, Germany planned to invade Poland from March 1939 onward. Sorge reported that Japan did not intend for the border war with the Soviet Union that began in May 1939 to escalate into all-out war. Sorge also reported that the attempt to turn the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance was floundering since the Germans wanted the alliance to be directed against Britain, but the Japanese wanted the alliance to be directed against the Soviets. Sorge's reports that the Japanese did not plan to invade Siberia were disbelieved in Moscow and on 1 September 1939, Sorge was attacked in a message from Moscow:


title: Richard Sorge

text: Japan must have commenced important movements (military and political) in preparation for war against the Soviet Union but you have not provided any appreciable information. Your activity seems to getting slack.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge supplied Soviet intelligence with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Japanese Pact. In 1941, his embassy contacts made him learn of Operation Barbarossa, the imminent Axis invasion of the Soviet Union and the approximate date. On 30 May 1941, Sorge reported to Moscow, "Berlin informed Ott that German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95 percent certain war will commence". On 20 June 1941, Sorge reported: "Ott told me that war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable... Invest [the code name for Ozaki] told me that the Japanese General Staff is already discussing what position to take in the event of war". Moscow received the reports, but Stalin and other top Soviet leaders ultimately ignored Sorge's warnings, as well as those of other sources, including early false alarms. Other Soviet agents who also reported an imminent German invasion were also regarded with suspicion by Stalin.


title: Richard Sorge

text: It has been rumoured that Sorge provided the exact date of "Barbarossa", but the historian Gordon Prange in 1984 concluded that the closest Sorge came was 20 June 1941 and that Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date (22 June) in advance. The date of 20 June was given to Sorge by "Oberstleutnant" (Lieutenant-Colonel) Erwin Scholl, the deputy military attaché at the German embassy. On a dispatch he sent the GRU on 1 June, which read, "Expected start of German-Soviet war around June 15 is based on information Lt. Colonel Scholl brought with him from Berlin... for Ambassador Ott". Despite knowing that Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union sometime in May or June 1941, Sorge was still shocked on 22 June 1941, when he learned of Operation Barbarossa. He went to a bar to get drunk and repeated in English: "Hitler's a fucking criminal! A murderer. But Stalin will teach the bastard a lesson. You just wait and see!" The Soviet press reported in 1964 that on 15 June 1941, Sorge had sent a radio dispatch saying, "The war will begin on June 22". Prange, who despite not having access to material released by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, did not accept the veracity of that report. Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence before "Barbarossa":


title: Richard Sorge

text: In late June 1941, Sorge informed Moscow that Ozaki had learned the Japanese cabinet had decided to occupy the southern half of French Indochina (now Vietnam) and that invading the Soviet Union was being considered as an option, but for the moment, Japanese Prime Minister Konoe had decided on neutrality. On 2 July 1941, an Imperial Conference attended by the emperor, Konoe and the senior military leaders approved occupying all of French Indochina and to reinforce the Kwantung Army for a possible invasion of the Soviet Union. At the bottom of the report, the Deputy Head of Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence wrote, "In consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted". In July 1941, Sorge reported that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered Ott to start pressuring the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union but that the Japanese were resisting the pressure. On 25 August 1941, Sorge reported to Moscow: "Invest [Ozaki] was able to learn from circles closest to Konoye... that the High Command... discussed whether they should go to war with the USSR. They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year". On 6 September 1941, an Imperial Conference decided against war with the Soviet Union and ordered for Japan to start preparations for a possible war against the United States and the British Empire, which Ozaki reported to Sorge. At the same time, Ott told Sorge that all of his efforts to get Japan to attack the Soviet Union had failed. On 14 September 1941, Sorge reported to Moscow, "In the careful judgment of all of us here... the possibility of [Japan] launching an attack, which existed until recently, has disappeared..." Sorge advised the Red Army on 14 September 1941 that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union until:


title: Richard Sorge

text: Various writers have speculated that the information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German Army suffered its first strategic defeat in the war. To that end, Sorge's information might have been the most important military intelligence work in World War II. However, Sorge was not the only source of Soviet intelligence about Japan, as Soviet codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and so Moscow knew from signals intelligence that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Another important item allegedly reported by Sorge may have affected the Battle of Stalingrad. Sorge reported that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga.


title: Richard Sorge

text: As the war progressed, Sorge was in increasing danger but continued his service. His radio messages were enciphered with unbreakable one-time pads, which were always used by the Soviet intelligence agencies and appeared as gibberish. However, the increasing number of the mystery messages made the Japanese begin to suspect that an intelligence ring was operating. Sorge was also coming under increasing suspicion in Berlin. By 1941, the Nazis had instructed SS "Standartenführer" Josef Albert Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw", who was by then the Gestapo resident at the German embassy in Tokyo, to begin monitoring Sorge and his activities. Sorge was able, through one of his lovers, Margarete Harich-Schneider, a German musician living in Japan, to gain the key to Meisinger's apartment since it had once been her apartment. Much to his relief, he learned that Meisinger had concluded that the allegations that Sorge was a Soviet agent were groundless, and Sorge's loyalty was to Germany. Sorge befriended Meisinger by playing on his principal weakness, alcohol, and spent much time getting him drunk, which contributed to Meisinger's favourable evaluation of Sorge. Meisinger reported to Berlin that the friendship between Ott and Sorge "was now so close that all normal reports from attachés to Berlin became mere appendages to the overall report written by Sorge and signed by the Ambassador". The "Kempeitai", the Japanese secret police, intercepted many messages and began to close in against the German Soviet agent. Sorge's penultimate message to Moscow in October 1941 reported, "The Soviet Far East can be considered safe from Japanese attack". In his last message to Moscow, Sorge asked to be sent back to Germany, as there was no danger of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, and he wished to aid the Soviet war effort by providing more intelligence about the German war effort. Ozaki was arrested on 14 October 1941 and immediately interrogated. As the "Kempeitai" trailed Sorge, it discovered that Ott's wife was a regular visitor to Sorge's house and that he had spent his last night as a free man sleeping with her.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge was arrested shortly thereafter, on 18 October 1941, in Tokyo. The next day, a brief Japanese memo notified Ott that Sorge had been swiftly arrested "on suspicion of espionage", together with Max Clausen. Ott was both surprised and outraged as a result and assumed that it was a case of "Japanese espionage hysteria". He thought that Sorge had been discovered to have passed secret information on the Japan-American negotiations to the German embassy and also that the arrest could have been caused by anti-German elements within the Japanese government. Nonetheless, he immediately agreed with Japanese authorities to "investigate the incident fully". It was not until a few months later that Japanese authorities announced that Sorge had actually been indicted as a Soviet agent.


title: Richard Sorge

text: He was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison. Initially, the Japanese believed, because of his Nazi Party membership and German ties, that Sorge had been an "Abwehr" agent. However, the "Abwehr" denied that he had been one of their agents. Under torture, Sorge confessed, but the Soviet Union denied he was a Soviet agent. The Japanese made three overtures to the Soviet Union and offered to trade Sorge for one of their own spies. However, the Soviet Union declined all of the Japanese attempts and maintained that Sorge was unknown to them.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In September 1942, Sorge's wife, Katya Maximova, was arrested by the NKVD on the charges that she was a "German spy" since she was married to the German citizen Sorge (the fact that Sorge was a GRU agent did not matter to the NKVD), and she was deported to the gulag, where she died in 1943. Hanako Ishii, the Japanese woman who loved Sorge and the only woman whom Sorge loved in return, was the only person who tried to visit Sorge during his time in Sugamo Prison. During one of her visits, she expressed concern that Sorge, under torture by the "Kempeitai", would name her as involved in his spy ring, but he promised her that he would never mention her name to the "Kempeitai". The "Kempeitai" was much feared in Japan for its use of torture as an investigation method. Sorge ultimately struck a deal with the "Kempeitai" that if it spared Ishii and the wives of the other members of the spy ring, he would reveal all. Ishii was never arrested by the "Kempeitai" Sorge told his "Kempeitai" captors:


title: Richard Sorge

text: That I successfully approached the German embassy in Japan and won the absolute trust by people there was the foundation of my organisation in Japan... Even in Moscow that fact that I infiltrated into the centre of the embassy and made use of it for my spying activity is evaluated as extremely amazing, having no equivalent in history.


title: Richard Sorge

text: After the arrest of Sorge, Meisinger used the increased spy fear of the Japanese to fraudulently denounce "anti-Nazis" as "Soviet spies" to the Japanese authorities. He was responsible for the persecution, the internment and the torture of the "Schindler" of Tokyo, Willy Rudolf Foerster. Foerster was forced to sell his company, which had employed a sizable number of Jewish refugees from Germany and the countries occupied by Germany. He and his Japanese wife survived, but after the war, the same former German diplomats, who had denounced and persecuted him as an "anti-Nazi", would discredit him.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge was hanged on 7 November 1944, at 10:20 Tokyo time in Sugamo Prison and was pronounced dead 19 minutes later. Hotsumi Ozaki had been hanged earlier in the same day. Sorge's body was not cremated because of wartime fuel shortages. He was buried in a mass grave for Sugamo Prison inmates in the nearby Zoshigaya Cemetery.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Sorge was survived by his mother, then living in Germany, and he left his estate to Anna Clausen, the wife of his radio operator, Max Christiansen-Clausen.


title: Richard Sorge

text: After hounding the American occupation authorities, Sorge's Japanese lover, Hanako Ishii (石井 花子 "Ishii Hanako", 1911 – 1 July 2000), located and recovered his skeleton on 16 November 1949. After identifying him by his distinctive dental work and a poorly-set broken leg, she took his body away and had him cremated at the Shimo-Ochiai Cremation Centre. She kept his own teeth, belt and spectacles and had made a ring of his gold bridgework, which she wore for the rest of her life. After her death, her own ashes were interred beside his. A white memorial stone at the site bears an epitaph in Japanese, the first two lines read: "Here lies a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace".


title: Richard Sorge

text: It was argued that Sorge's biggest coup led to his undoing because Stalin could not afford to let it become known that he had rejected Sorge's warning about the German attack in June 1941. However, nations seldom officially recognise their own undercover agents.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Initially, Sorge's reputation in West Germany in the 1950s was highly negative, with Sorge depicted as a traitor working for the Soviet Union who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of "Wehrmacht" soldiers in the winter of 1941–1942. The 1950s were a transition moment in the German memory of Nazi Germany, as its German supporters sought a version of history that presented them as victims, rather than as followers, of Hitler. They portrayed Nazism as an aberration in German history that had no connections to traditional Prussian virtues, falsely portrayed the "Wehrmacht" as an honourable fighting force that had nothing to do with the Holocaust and presented the Soviets as guilty of crimes that were even more horrific than those committed by the Nazis. That way of remembering the Nazi past in the 1950s caused Operation Barbarossa and Germany's war on the Eastern Front to be seen as a heroic and legitimate war against the Soviet Union of which Germans should be unashamed.


title: Richard Sorge

text: The first tentative efforts at changing the memory of the Nazi past started in the early 1950s, when German President Theodor Heuss gave a speech on 20 July 1954 that praised the "putsch" attempt of 20 July 1944. He argued that "the men of July 20th" were patriots rather than traitors, which was then a bold gesture. The first effort to present Sorge in a positive light occurred in the summer of 1953, when the influential publisher Rudolf Augstein wrote a 17-part series in his magazine, "Der Spiegel". He argued that Sorge was not a Soviet agent but a heroic German patriot opposed to the Nazi regime whose motivation in providing intelligence to the Soviet Union was to bring down Hitler, rather than to support Stalin. Augstein also attacked Willoughby for his book "The Shanghai Conspiracy" that claimed that Sorge had caused the "loss of China" in 1949 and that the Sorge spy ring was in the process of taking over the U.S. government. Augstein argued that Willoughby and his fans had completely misunderstood that Sorge's espionage was directed against Germany and Japan, not the U.S.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Such was the popularity of Augstein's articles that the German author Hans Hellmut Kirst published a spy novel featuring Sorge as the hero, and Hans-Otto Meissner wrote the book "Der Fall Sorge" ("The Sorge Case") that was a cross between a novel and a history by blending fact and fiction together with a greater emphasis on the latter. Meissner had served as third secretary at the German Embassy in Tokyo and had known Sorge. Meissner's book, which was written as a thriller that engaged in "orientalism", portrayed Japan as a strange, mysterious country in which the enigmatic and charismatic master spy Sorge operated to infiltrate both its government and the German embassy. Meissner presented Sorge as the consummate spy, a cool professional who was dressed in a rumpled trench coat and fedora and was a great womanizer, and much of the book is concerned with Sorge's various relationships.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Later on, Meissner presented Sorge as a rather megalomaniac figure and, in the process, changed Sorge's motivation from loyalty to communism to colossal egoism. He had Sorge rant about his equal dislike for both Stalin and Hitler and had him say that he supplied only enough information to both regimes to manipulate them into destroying each other since it suited him to play one against the other. At the book's climax, Sorge agreed to work for the American Office of Strategic Services, in exchange for being settled to settle in Hawaii, and he was in the process of learning that Japan is planning on bombing Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, but his love of women proved to be his undoing as the Japanese dancer Kiyomi rejected his sexual advances. Sorge finally seduced Kiyomi but lost valuable time, which allowed the "Kempeitai" to arrest him.


title: Richard Sorge

text: The American historian Cornelius Partsch noted some striking aspects of Meissner's book such as his complete exoneration of the "Auswärtiges Amt" from any involvement in the criminal aspects of the Nazi regime. Meissner had Sorge constantly breaking into offices to steal information, which he did not do, as security at the German embassy was sloppy, and Sorge was trusted as an apparently-dedicated Nazi journalist and so breaking into offices would have been unnecessary. Meissner avoided any mention of SS "Standartenführer" Josef Albert Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw" who was stationed at the German embassy as the police attaché to Japan. Partsch wrote that Meissner gave Sorge almost-superhuman abilities at lockbreaking, as he broke into various offices, safes and filing cabinets with the greatest ease, but in reality, secret documents were all too often left out in the open in unlocked rooms, and Sorge was allowed to wander about the embassy without an escort. Meissner portrayed the "Auswärtiges Amt" in the traditional manner, as a glamorous, elitist group that operated in exotic places like Japan serving Germany, not the Nazi regime.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Kirst's book "Die letzte Karte spielt der Tod" was a novel that offered a considerably more realistic picture than Meissner's romanticised portrayal of Sorge. Kirst portrayed Sorge as an existential hero, a deeply-traumatized veteran of World War I, whose sleep was constantly disturbed by horrific nightmares of his war service, and when he was awake, he suffered from frequent panic attacks. Kirst's book depicted Sorge as a "lonely, desperate" man, a tragic, wounded individual with a reckless streak who engaged in maniacal binge drinking, nearly-suicidal motorcycle riding across the Japanese countryside, and though he wanted love, he was incapable of maintaining lasting relationships. Unlike Meissner, Kirst had Meisinger appear as one of the book's villains by portraying him as an especially-loathsome and stupid SS officer, who fully deserved to be deceived by Sorge. As part of Kirst's portrayal of Sorge as a tragic man on the brink and as victim led him to portray Sorge's spying for the Soviet Union by forces beyond his control. Kirst was more forceful in his condemnation of National Socialism than Meissner as his book maintained that the regime was so monstrously evil that an existential man forever on the brink of a mental breakdown like Sorge ended up spying for the Soviet Union as the lesser evil.


title: Richard Sorge

text: Partsch noted that both books were very much concerned with Sorge's womanising, which neither author exaggerated, but presented the aspect of his personality in different ways. Kirst portrayed Sorge's womanizing as part of the same self-destructive urges that led him to spy for the Soviet Union, but Meissner depicted Sorge's womanizing as part of his callous narcissism and as his principal weakness, as his desire for Kiyomi finally destroyed him. In turn, that led to different depictions of the male body. Meissner portrayed it as the seductive instrument that entices female desire and led women into ill-advised relationships with Sorge, whose body is perfectly fit and attractive to women. Kirst, by contrast, correctly noted that Sorge walked with a pronounced limp because of a war wound, which had Sorge sarcastically say was because of his "gallantry" in his book, and Sorge's wounded body served as a metaphor for his wounded soul. Partsch further commented that Meissner's book was a depoliticised and personalised account of the Sorge spy ring, as he omitted any mention of Hotsumi Ozaki, an idealistic man who sincerely believed his country was on the wrong course, and he portrayed Sorge as a "Faustian man" motivated only by his vanity to exercise "a god-like power over the world" and gave Sorge "an overblown, pop-Nietzsche an sense of destiny".


title: Richard Sorge

text: The ultimate "message" of Meissner's book was that Sorge was an amoral, egoistical individual whose actions had nothing to do with ideology and that the only reason for Germany's defeat by the Soviet Union was Sorge's spying, which suggested that Germany lost the war only because of "fate". Meissner followed the "great man" interpretation of history that a few "great men" decide the events of the world, with everyone else reduced to passive bystanders. By contrast, Kirst pictured Sorge as a victim, as a mere pawn in a "murderous chess game" and emphasised Sorge's opposition to the Nazi regime as the motivation for his actions. Kirst further noted that Sorge was betrayed by his own masters as after his arrest, and the Soviet regime denounced him as a "Trotskyite" and made no effort to save him. Partsch concluded that the two rival interpretations of Sorge put forward in the novels by Meissner and Kirst in 1955 have shaped Sorge's image in the West, especially Germany, ever since their publication.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1954, the West German film director Veit Harlan wrote and directed the film "Verrat an Deutschland" about Sorge's espionage in Japan. Harlan had been the favourite filmmaker of Nazi Information Minister Joseph Goebbels and directed many propaganda films, including "Jud Süss". Harlan's film is a romantic drama, starring Harlan's wife, Kristina Söderbaum, as Sorge's love interest. The film was publicly premiered by the distributor before it passed the rating system and so was withdrawn from more-public performances and finally released after some editing had been done.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1961, a movie, "Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?", was produced in France in collaboration with West Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was very popular in the Soviet Union as well. Sorge was played by Thomas Holtzmann.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In November 1964, twenty years after his death, the Soviet government awarded Sorge with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Sorge's widow, Hanako Ishii, received a Soviet and Russian pension until her death in July 2000 in Tokyo. In the 1960s, the KGB, seeking to improve its image in the Soviet Union, began the cult of the "hero spy" with former Chekists working abroad being celebrated as the great "hero spies" in books, films and newspapers. Sorge was one of those selected for "hero spy" status. In fact, the Soviets had broken Japanese codes in 1941 and had already known independently of the intelligence provided by Sorge that Japan had decided to "strike south" (attacking the United States and the British Empire), instead of "striking north" (attacking the Soviet Union).


title: Richard Sorge

text: The Kremlin gave much greater attention to signals intelligence in evaluating threats from Japan from 1931 to 1941 than it did to the intelligence that was gathered by the Sorge spy ring, but since Soviet intelligence did not like to mention the achievements of its codebreakers, Soviet propaganda from 1964 onward gloried Sorge as a "hero spy" and avoided all mention that the Soviets had broken the Japanese codes. The Soviets, during the Cold War, liked to give the impression that all of their intelligence came from human intelligence, rather than signals intelligence, to prevent Western nations from knowing how much the Soviets collected from the latter source. A testament to Sorge's fame in the Soviet Union was that even though Sorge worked for the GRU, not the NKVD, it was the KGB, which had far more power than the Red Army, that claimed him as one of its "hero spies" in the 1960s.


title: Richard Sorge

text: In 1965, three East German journalists published "Dr Sorge funkt aus Tokyo" in celebration of Sorge and his actions. Before the award, Sorge's claim that Friedrich Adolf Sorge was his grandfather was repeated in the Soviet press. In a strange Cold War oddity, the authors stirred up a free speech scandal with patriotic letters to former Nazis in West Germany, which caused the "Verfassungsschutz" to issue a stern warning in early 1967: "If you receive mail from a certain Julius Mader, do not reply to him and pass on the letter to the respective security authorities".


title: Richard Sorge

text: There is a monument to Sorge in Baku, Azerbaijan. Sorge also appears in Osamu Tezuka's "Adolf" manga. In his 1981 book, "Their Trade is Treachery", the author Chapman Pincher asserted that Sorge, a GRU agent himself, recruited the Englishman Roger Hollis in China in the early 1930s to provide information. Hollis later returned to England, joined MI5 just before World War II began and eventually became the director-general of MI5 from 1956 to 1965. As detailed by former MI5 staffer Peter Wright in his 1988 book "Spycatcher", Hollis was accused of being a Soviet agent, but despite several lengthy and seemingly-thorough investigations, no conclusive proof was ever obtained.


title: Richard Sorge

text: One of Aleksandar Hemon's first stories in English is "The Sorge Spy Ring" ("TriQuarterly", 1997). The 2003 Japanese film "Spy Sorge", directed by Masahiro Shinoda, details his exploits in Shanghai and in Japan. In the film, he is portrayed by the Scottish actor Iain Glen. In 2016, one of Moscow's Moscow Central Circle rail stations was named after Sorge (Zorge). A Russian television series, "Richard Sorge. Master Spy", was a twelve-episode series filmed in 2019.


title: Belgians

text: Belgians (; ; ) are people identified with the Kingdom of Belgium, a federal state in Western Europe. As Belgium is a multinational state, this connection may be residential, legal, historical, or cultural rather than ethnic. The majority of Belgians, however, belong to two distinct ethnic groups or "communities" (; ) native to the country, i.e. its historical regions: Flemings in Flanders, who speak Dutch; and Walloons in Wallonia, who speak French or Walloon. There is also a substantial Belgian diaspora, which has settled primarily in the United States, Canada, France, and the Netherlands.


title: Belgians

text: The 1830 revolution led to the establishment of an independent country under a provisional government and a national congress. The name "Belgium" was adopted for the country, the word being derived from "Gallia Belgica", a Roman province in the northernmost part of Gaul that, before Roman invasion in 100 BC, was inhabited by the "Belgae", a mix of Celtic and Germanic peoples.


title: Belgians

text: The Latin name was revived in 1790 by the short-lived United Belgian States which was created after a revolution against Austrian rule took place in 1789. Since no adjective equivalent to "Belgian" existed at the time, the French noun "Belgique" (or "Belgium") was adopted as both noun and adjective; a phenomenon borrowed from Latin which was still commonly used during the period. From the sixteenth century, the Low Countries" or "Netherlands", were referred to as 'Belgica' in Latin, as was the Dutch Republic.


title: Belgians

text: Belgians are primarily a nationality or citizen group, by "jus soli" (Latin: right of the soil), also known as birthright citizenship, and are not a homogeneous ethnic group. Belgians are made up of two main linguistic and ethnic groups; the Dutch-speakers (called the Flemish) and the French-speakers (mostly Walloons), as well as a third tiny but constitutionally recognized group from two small German-speaking areas. These sometimes competing ethnic and linguistic priorities are governed by constitutionally designated "regions or communities", depending on the constitutional realm of the topic, a complex and uniquely Belgian political construct. Since many Belgians are at least bilingual, or even trilingual, it is common for business, social and family networks to include members of the various ethnic groups composing Belgium.


title: Belgians

text: The Brussels-Capital Region occupies a unique political and cultural position since geographically and linguistically it is a bilingual enclave within the unilingual Flemish Region. Since the founding of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830, the city of Brussels has transformed from being almost entirely Dutch-speaking into a multilingual city with French as the majority language and "lingua franca", a process that has been labelled the Frenchification of Brussels".


title: Belgians

text: Since the independence of Belgium in 1830, the constitutional title of the Belgian head of state is the "King of the Belgians" rather than the "King of Belgium".


title: Belgians

text: Within Belgium the Flemish, about 60% of the population, form a clearly distinguishable group, set apart by their language and customs. However, when compared to the Netherlands most of these cultural and linguistic boundaries quickly fade, as the Flemish share the same language, similar or identical customs and (though only with the southern part of today's Netherlands) traditional religion with the Dutch.


title: Belgians

text: However, the popular perception of being a single polity varies greatly, depending on subject matter, locality and personal background. Generally, Flemings will seldom identify themselves as being Dutch and vice versa, especially on a national level.


title: Belgians

text: Walloons are a French-speaking people who live in Belgium, principally in Wallonia. Walloons are a distinctive community within Belgium, important historical and anthropological criteria (religion, language, traditions, folklore) bind Walloons to the French people. More generally, the term also refers to the inhabitants of the Walloon Region. They may speak regional languages such as "Walloon" (with "Picard" in the West and "Gaumais" in the South).


title: Belgians

text: Though roughly three-quarters of Belgium's French speakers live in Wallonia, it is important to note that French-speaking residents of Brussels tend not to identify as Walloons.


title: Belgians

text: The German-speaking Community of Belgium is one of the three constitutionally recognized federal communities of Belgium. Covering an area of less than 1,000 km within the province of Liège in Wallonia, it includes nine of the eleven municipalities of the so-called East Cantons and the local population numbers over 73,000 – less than 1% of the national total. Bordering the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg, the area has its own parliament and government at Eupen.


title: Belgians

text: The German-speaking community is composed of the German-speaking parts of the lands that were annexed in 1920 from Germany. In addition, in contemporary Belgium there are also some other German-speaking areas that belonged to Belgium even before 1920, but they are not currently considered officially part of the German-speaking community in Belgium: Bleiberg-Welkenraat-Baelen in Northeastern province of Liège and Arelerland (city of Arlon and some of its nearby villages in Southeastern province of Belgian Luxembourg). However, in these localities, the German language is highly endangered due to the adoption of French.


title: Belgians

text: Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion, with approximately 65% of the Belgians declaring themselves to be Catholics. However, by 2004, nationwide Sunday church attendance was only about 4 to 8% (9% for Flanders only). A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, long considered more religious than the Brussels or Wallonia regions in Belgium, showed 55% of its inhabitants calling themselves religious, while 36% said that they believed that God created the world.


title: Belgians

text: Belgium had a population of 10,839,905 people on 1 January 2010, an increase of 601,000 in comparison to 2000 (10,239,085 inhabitants). Between 1990 (9,947,782 inhabitants) and 2000 the increase was only 291,000. The population of Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels on 1 January 2010 was 6,251,983 (57.7%), 3,498,384 (32.3%) and 1,089,538 (10.1%), respectively.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Robert Matthew Hurley (born June 28, 1971) is an American basketball coach and former player who is the head coach of the Arizona State Sun Devils. He was previously the head coach at the University at Buffalo.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: As a player, he was an All-American at Duke University, where he won consecutive national championships. He is the all-time leader in assists in NCAA basketball. He played in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Sacramento Kings and Vancouver Grizzlies from 1993 to 1998.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Hurley was a basketball star at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, where his father, Bob Hurley Sr., was the longtime coach. While at St. Anthony from 1985 to 1989, Hurley led the team to four consecutive Parochial B state titles. In his senior year he averaged 20 points, 8 assists and 3 steals, as St. Anthony racked up a 32–0 record, the school's first Tournament of champions crown, and the No. 1 ranking in the United States. In his high school career the team's overall record with Hurley as point guard was 115–5.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Hurley was a point guard for coach Mike Krzyzewski's Duke University team from 1989 to 1993. He was a first-team All-American in 1993, went to the Final Four three times, and helped lead the Blue Devils to back-to-back national championships in 1991 and 1992 with All American teammates Christian Laettner and Grant Hill, earning Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors in 1992. Hurley remains the NCAA all-time assists leader with 1076 assists, and Duke's single game assist leader with 16 (against Florida State on February 24, 1993). His Duke jersey number 11 was retired in 1993. In 2002, Hurley was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary men's basketball team as one of the fifty greatest players in Atlantic Coast Conference history. In 2006, Hurley, who is of Polish descent through his mother, was inducted into the National Polish American Sports Hall of Fame. At Duke, Hurley was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. Coincidentally, Bobby Hurley played against his younger brother Dan in an NCAA Tournament game, when Duke squared off against Seton Hall.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Hurley was selected by the Sacramento Kings as the seventh pick in the 1993 NBA draft. He signed a shoe contract with a new shoe company ITZ (In The Zone), which was sold at Foot Locker exclusively.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: On December 12, 1993 while Hurley was returning home following a game in his rookie season, he was involved in a car accident. His SUV was broadsided by a station wagon. Hurley was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from his vehicle, and suffered severe life-threatening injuries. Kings teammate Mike Peplowski was driving five minutes behind Hurley and was among the first on the scene to render immediate aid.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Hurley returned to the NBA for the 1994–95 season and played four more years beyond that. He was traded to the Vancouver Grizzlies on February 18, 1998, and played in 27 games for the Grizzlies. Hurley was waived by the Grizzlies on January 25, 1999.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: After retiring, Hurley went on to become a thoroughbred racehorse owner and breeder. He was also hired as a scout by the Philadelphia 76ers in 2003.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: Hurley appeared in the 1994 feature film "Blue Chips", where he played for the Indiana team under coach Bobby Knight.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: A fan of thoroughbred horse racing, Hurley owned Songandaprayer who won the 2001 Fountain of Youth Stakes. He currently owns Devil Eleven Stables. In December 2009 he was sued by PNC Bank for defaulting on a $1 million loan that was used to purchase Songandaprayer, who was trained by Eddie Plesa Jr.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: On April 13, 2010, Wagner College announced that Hurley was hired as an assistant coach for the men's basketball team. Hurley joined his younger brother Dan Hurley's coaching staff. Dan Hurley had been hired as Wagner's head coach on April 6, 2010. In 2012, the Hurleys took coaching positions at Rhode Island.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: On March 26, 2013, Hurley was named the head coach of the Buffalo Bulls, replacing Reggie Witherspoon. Hurley coached the 2014–15 Bulls team to their first NCAA tournament appearance.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: On April 9, 2015, Hurley was hired as head coach at Arizona State. In his first conference game with the Sun Devils, he gained notoriety when he got ejected for 2 technical fouls in 15 seconds for arguing with the officials against the rival Arizona Wildcats. After he got ejected, he encouraged the crowd to continue to taunt the officials. Following a 15–17 first season at Arizona State, Hurley's contract was extended through 2021. A second season showed improvements and ASU improved its roster with transfers and a few recruits. During his third year as head coach, Hurley would lead Arizona State to their first 12–0 start and sweep their non-conference schedule. Along the way, ASU beat Top-10 teams Kansas and Xavier and were ranked #3 by the Associated Press. With three senior guards leading the way during that time, they began to market themselves as 'Guard U' to start the 2017–18 Pac-12 Conference schedule against their rivals Arizona Wildcats. Following the 77–70 loss Feb 15, he fell 0–6 against his biggest rival Arizona Wildcats. Despite their early season success, the Sun Devils struggled mightily in conference play, going only 8–10 and earning the 9th seed in the Pac-12 tournament, where they were defeated in the first round by the 8th seeded Colorado Buffaloes. Nevertheless, ASU still earned a bid to the NCAA Tournament and faced Syracuse in a First Four matchup in Dayton. The Orange then beat the Sun Devils 60–56, thus ending their season. Hurley's squad finished 20–12, 8–10 in the Pac-12, his best season so far as the Sun Devils' coach.


title: Bobby Hurley

text: On December 22, 2018, Hurley led the Sun Devils to its first home win (and second win ever) against a #1 NCAA ranked team (Kansas).


title: Electric Six

text: Electric Six is a six-piece American rock band formed in 1996 in Detroit, Michigan. Their music was described by AllMusic as a combination of garage, disco, punk rock, new wave, and metal. The band achieved recognition in 2003 with the singles "Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar", and have since released 14 studio albums, two rarities albums, and one live album. A live DVD, "Absolute Treasure", was released in 2014. The current lineup of the band consists of vocalist Dick Valentine, lead guitarist , keyboardist Tait Nucleus?, rhythm guitarist Da Vé, bassist Rob Lower and drummer Todd Glass. Live drummer Hyperkube Bonanza has filled in for Glass on most tours since 2016.


title: Electric Six

text: The band formed in 1996 and was initially known as The Wildbunch, eventually dropping that name due to pressure from the British group of the same name. Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, they played regularly at the Old Miami and the Gold Dollar in Detroit, the center of a scene that produced breakout acts like the White Stripes. The band was originally composed of Dick Valentine (Tyler Spencer, lead vocals), M (Cory Martin, drums), The Rock and Roll Indian (Anthony Selph, lead guitar), Surge Joebot (Joe Frezza, rhythm guitar), and Disco (Steve Nawara, bass and former member of The Detroit Cobras). Valentine has always been the primary songwriter, both music and lyrics, of Electric Six. During the band's temporary split at the end of the 1990s, he formed his own band called The Dirty Shame and released one CD titled "Smog Cutter Love Story" which featured, among other tracks, a first version of "Fire" track "Vengeance and Fashion." The band reformed by 2001 to record and release "Danger! High Voltage" and record the track "Dealin' in Death and Stealin' in the Name of the Lord" with Troy Gregory for his "Sybil" album.


title: Electric Six

text: The 2003 release of "Danger! High Voltage" (produced and mixed by Damien Mendis and Stuart Bradbury) proved a massive hit, particularly in the United Kingdom. The single also garnered the band public attention after a rumor got out that a pre-fame Jack White from The White Stripes sang backup vocals on the single track "Danger! (High Voltage)" when it was recorded. Although this was presented as fact in multiple sources, then-guitarist Surge said in an interview:


title: Electric Six

text: In another interview, former drummer M. said: "My attorney has advised us to neither confirm nor deny the presence of Jack White." Still, the rumor persisted that White was featured on the song. Both he and Electric Six denied this, and the vocal work was credited officially to the unknown John S O'Leary.


title: Electric Six

text: The band's 2003 debut "Fire" (also produced and mixed by Damien Mendis and Stuart Bradbury) earned the group significant critical success, landing the "Danger! High Voltage" single at number 2 on the UK singles chart. Their second single, "Gay Bar", released in 2003, reached No. 5 in the UK charts. The song was reportedly inspired by a raucous night out in Detroit's gay club scene with former Crazy Town member Brandon Calabro. The album made it into several best-of-2003 lists, as well as reaching the top 10 in the UK album chart, and another single "Dance Commander", which gave Electric Six its third Top 40 single in the UK.


title: Electric Six

text: After finishing the recording of "Fire", three members left in June, leaving Dick Valentine, M, and Tait Nucleus?. (John Nash, lead guitar, member of The Volebeats, The Witches and solo effort The Alphabet), The Colonel (Zach Shipps, rhythm guitar, ex member of Brendan Benson, The Atomic Numbers and Mood Elevator), John R. Dequindre (Chris Peters, bass/guitar) and Frank Lloyd Bonaventure (Mark Dundon, bass) (both-ex members of Ann Arbor's whirlingRoad, Getaway Cruiser and Six Clips) subsequently joined the group, although The Colonel had to opt out of early performances due to prior touring commitments. In time, Dequindre switched from guitar to bass and Bonaventure left to attain a law degree.


title: Electric Six

text: The band's second album, "Señor Smoke", was released in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2005. Since the band had been dropped from their previous American record label, a North American release of the album was delayed until February 7, 2006, when it came out on Metropolis Records.


title: Electric Six

text: The first single from the album put the band at the center of controversy, especially with Queen fans, following a cover of the Queen hit song "Radio Ga Ga." The controversial music video shows lead singer Dick Valentine as the ghost of Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury and a backing band of poodles. Queen drummer Roger Taylor, who wrote the song, said that he was "unimpressed" with the video; Queen guitarist Brian May reportedly liked it.


title: Electric Six

text: In November 2004, drummer M. called it quits, leaving Dick Valentine as the sole original member of the former Wildbunch. Their new drummer, Percussion World (Mike Alonso), had been affiliated with the band and its members for some time, and was named as a permanent member of the band.


title: Electric Six

text: Electric Six finished recording their third album, titled "Switzerland", in November 2005 and released it in North America on September 12, 2006. The band intended to record a video for every song on the album, "a lot of them...low budget." At present, eight videos have been released.


title: Electric Six

text: In May 2007, Swedish bassist Smörgåsbord! (Keith Thompson, member of Johnny Headband) joined the band, replacing John R. Dequindre on the bass, who reportedly wished to spend more time on his other musical projects.


title: Electric Six

text: "I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master", Electric Six's fourth studio album, was released October 9, 2007. It has sixteen tracks. In the UK the album was released on October 22.


title: Electric Six

text: 16 of the 18 tracks recorded were used on the album. There were no singles in support of this album; however, the band have had several music videos produced and spread over the internet for a number of tracks on the album.


title: Electric Six

text: A fifth album, "Flashy", was released on October 21, 2008. This same year the band won the 2008 "My Heart" Competition for this album.


title: Electric Six

text: The band promoted the album in the US, the UK and Spain on their 'Hitting the Walls and Working the Middle' tour. A 30 track album of demos and previously unreleased material titled "Sexy Trash" was released and made available at those shows.


title: Electric Six

text: In May 2009, Metropolis records released "Covered in Gas" by Evil Cowards, a project by Valentine and Fall On Your Sword's William Bates.


title: Electric Six

text: Dick Valentine told the audience at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia on April 30, 2009 that the new fall release would be titled "Jared Styles"; however the final name for the album simply became "KILL".


title: Electric Six

text: A music video for first track on the album, "Body Shot", has been released on the internet, and is featured on the upcoming soundtrack of Michael Benveniste's "Tedd Can Chronicles".


title: Electric Six

text: On February 14, 2010, Dick Valentine announced via the Electric Six website that the band is in the process of recording their 7th studio album.


title: Electric Six

text: Valentine also mentioned that this album would contain a cover song that they have been contemplating for a long time. This cover has since been confirmed as "The Rubberband Man" by The Spinners.


title: Electric Six

text: On April 30, 2010, Dick Valentine confirmed at a concert at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana that the seventh album would be a twelve-track compilation titled "Zodiac". It was released on September 28, 2010.


title: Electric Six

text: The band's eighth studio album is titled "Heartbeats and Brainwaves", as announced through their official website on June 22, 2011. It was released on October 11. It was the first release of which served as producer. Previews of five tracks from the album were posted on the band's official Facebook page.


title: Electric Six

text: On January 30, 2012, the band announced via their website and Facebook that they were going to release a live album, entitled Absolute Pleasure, set for release in the fall of 2012. The album was recorded at shows in Minneapolis and Chicago in May. Absolute Pleasure was initially reported to be a double-disc album, with the first disc containing the entirety of their first album, "Fire", and the second containing their "favorite tracks from all the other albums", however, these plans changed in development and the finished product was a single-disc amalgamation of both discs' content."


title: Electric Six

text: A live DVD of "Fire" was also going to be filmed at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on December 15; however, these plans were cancelled and later revisited as the band's 2013 Absolute Treasure Kickstarter project.


title: Electric Six

text: Lead singer Dick Valentine released his first solo album "Destroy the Children" under the Dick Valentine moniker on May 14, 2012.


title: Electric Six

text: On February 16, 2013, the band launched a Kickstarter campaign for a live DVD called "Absolute Treasure". The project was intended to give Electric Six the funds to film and release a live DVD of a performance to be filmed on September 7, 2013. The funding was successful.


title: Electric Six

text: On April 11, 2013, the band confirmed through their Facebook page that their next album, "Mustang", would be released in October 2013, and was released on the 8th of the month.


title: Electric Six

text: Lead singer Dick Valentine released his second solo album "Halloween Fingers" under the Dick Valentine moniker on April 30, 2013.


title: Electric Six

text: Towards the end of their 2013 tour, Dick Valentine confirmed on stage that they were working on a new unnamed album to be released in 2014. On January 22, 2014 the Electric Six Facebook page posted "Hey Crazies...work has commenced on studio album # 2,143...or 10, depending upon how you're keeping score. It'll be out in the fall. No confirmed title yet, so don't ask."


title: Electric Six

text: The title was later confirmed as 'Human Zoo' on May 16, 2014, and was released for streaming on Spotify on October 13, 2014.


title: Electric Six

text: On the 6th of June 2014, Electric Six launched their second Kickstarter project; this time for a two-disc album entitled "Mimicry and Memories". Disc 1, "Mimicry", being a cover album. Each member of the band personally selected a song to cover and the funding packages offered four fans the chance to choose a song to be included on the album. Songs to be included on "Mimicry" include covers of "One" by Harry Nilsson, "The Warrior" by Patty Smyth and Scandal, "The Look" by Roxette, "Do You Love Me?" by Kiss, "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac, "Easy Lover" by Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey, "Turn Me Loose" by Loverboy and "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" by David Bowie.


title: Electric Six

text: Disc 2, "Memories", served as a sequel to "Sexy Trash", offering another selection of rarities, demos and B-sides from the band's back-catalogue. The project was successfully completed and was released to the public in March 2015.


title: Electric Six

text: Lead singer Dick Valentine announced the release of his third solo album, "Here Come The Bags!" under the Dick Valentine moniker. It was released on April 21, 2015.


title: Electric Six

text: On March 24, 2015, it was announced that bassist Smorgasbord was to leave the band. He was subsequently replaced by Matt Tompkins, AKA Rob Lower, from the band Mighty Tiny.


title: Electric Six

text: On October 2, 2015, the band released its eleventh studio album, entitled "Bitch, Don't Let Me Die!" It was originally released for streaming via Spotify on Metropolis Records.


title: Electric Six

text: On January 7, 2016, the band suggested via their Instagram page that longtime drummer Percussion World would be leaving the group. A few weeks later, he surfaced as the new drummer for Celtic punk band Flogging Molly under his real name, Mike Alonso. He was replaced by Noah Appel, AKA Two-Handed Bob, who also was in Mighty Tiny with Matt Tompkins earlier.


title: Electric Six

text: 2016 saw the fruition of the band's Roulette Stars of Metro Detroit project - a mockumentary feature film starring the band as themselves, funded by Kickstarter and complete with soundtrack album.


title: Electric Six

text: On July 29, 2016, the band announced its twelfth studio album, "Fresh Blood for Tired Vampyres", which was released on October 7, 2016. Two Handed Bob left and was replaced by Hyperkube Bonanza (Ray Kubian). In September, the band launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund "You're Welcome!", a double-album with one disc being a covers album - a sequel to "Mimicry" - and the second disc being a live album - a sequel to "Absolute Pleasure". The live album contained the show recorded at the O2 Academy in Oxford on the 22nd of April 2017. "You're Welcome!" was released in September 2017.


title: Electric Six

text: In October 2017, Electric Six released its thirteenth studio album, "How Dare You?". In November, the band launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a double album entitled "A Very Electric SiXmas and Chill Out!" with the first disc being a Christmas studio album and the second disc a live album containing a set of stripped-down versions of the band's songs.


title: Electric Six

text: In July 2018, the band announced that its fourteenth studio album would be entitled "Bride of the Devil". It was released on October 5, 2018.


title: Electric Six

text: Since the end of the COVID-19 Pandemic the band have been spending 2022 touring North America and Europe.


title: Electric Six

text: Electric Six incorporates a variety of styles, resulting in being termed a "genre-blurring" band. The group's sound has been described as a synthesis of "disco, synth pop, glam, and arena rock," including the falsetto vocals of disco, laden with "rampant solos, be they guitar riffs, synth wails, or strutting drums" that enforce the band's "energetic sound." However, the band members themselves have rejected such genre classifications as "disco-metal" and "disco-punk."


title: Electric Six

text: Critics have termed their lyrics as "disaffected, angry, ironic and lustful", expressing "macho flippancy" and "tongue-in-cheek pomposity". Dick Valentine has estimated that "90 percent of our songs, maybe even higher than 90 percent" are "about absolutely nothing." Songs by Electric Six are often concerned with subjects such as human sexual behavior, masculinity, dancing, hypersexuality, fast food and fire (The band's official biography states that their debut album "Fire" was so named because they "noticed an abundance of the word fire on this record and...decided to go with it."). Lead singer Dick Valentine had commented on the aforementioned lyrical tendencies in song content with regards to the band's third album:


title: Electric Six

text: Valentine cited Freddie Mercury, Talking Heads, Falco, Devo, and Captain Beefheart as his musical influences, as well as Black Sabbath, Queen and KISS for the rest of the group.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "No" (stylized in all caps) is a song by American singer-songwriter Meghan Trainor from her second major-label studio album "Thank You" (2016). Ricky Reed produced the song and wrote it with Trainor and Jacob Kasher Hindlin; Epic Records released it as the album's lead single on March 4, 2016. A dance-pop song inspired by 1990s pop music and R&B, "No" has lyrics about sexual consent and empowerment, encouraging women to reject unwanted advances from men.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Music critics praised "No" as a showcase of Trainor's confident and mature side and deemed it an improvement from the lyrics on earlier Trainor songs. In the United States, the song reached number three on the "Billboard" Hot100 and was certified 2× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It also reached the top 10 in Australia, Canada, Austria, Israel, Latvia, South Africa, and Scotland, attaining multi-platinum certifications in the former two and Poland.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Fatima Robinson directed the music video for "No", which features Trainor performing choreographed dances in a warehouse and entwining her arms with accompanying female dancers. Critics compared it to the visuals of various 1990s female recording artists and praised her creative evolution, particularly the choreography. In further promotion, Trainor performed "No" on television shows such as the iHeartRadio Music Awards, "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", and the "Billboard" Music Awards, and included it on the set list of her 2016 concert tour, The Untouchable Tour.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Meghan Trainor signed with Epic Records in 2014 and released her doo-wop debut single, "All About That Bass", to commercial success. She initially recorded music in a similar vein for her second major-label studio album, "Thank You" (2016). L.A. Reid, the chairman of the label, encouraged Trainor to go back to the drawing board because she lacked a proper lead single for the project: "You don't have your bullet. You don't have that big song," a behavior that Trainor described as typical of him. Determined not to write "All About That Bass 2.0", she booked studio time with producer Ricky Reed that afternoon. Reed recounted that they "never set out to specifically go after any particular sound", beginning the session with the idea of a dancehall-inspired rhythm. They texted Jacob Kasher Hindlin to cancel his other session and join them.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Reed considered it impossible to complete the lead single that day and said, "Let's just blow off some steam, fuck around, have a good time." Trainor was determined to write "a big eff-you song, an anthem about girl power that sounded like nothing on the album", and asked Hindlin and Reed to "do a beat that no one expects Meghan Trainor to do". "No" was written within seven hours. Reed described the swift evolution of the song as "a thing of mystery", likening it to opening Pandora's box. When Reid heard it, he jumped up and said "That's what I'm talkin' about!", playing it 29 times in succession. Ultimately, "No" changed the direction of "Thank You", as the three started experimenting with new musical styles and produced six more tracks.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: In December 2015, Trainor stated that she had almost completed her upcoming album, describing the material as "something that's not on the radio" and disparate. In a Fuse interview published in February 2016, Trainor confirmed the lead single's title as "No" along with a March 2016 release date, calling it an anthem for women about telling a man they are fine by themselves: "No no no. I don't need your hands all over me. I'm good. I'm gonna dance on my own with my girls." On March 1 she unveiled the artwork for the song on her social media accounts. Epic Records digitally released it three days later, along with the preorder for the album. In the United States, the label promoted "No" to adult contemporary radio stations on March 7, and to contemporary hit radio stations the next day. BBC Radio 1 selected the song as the "Track of the Day" on March, while Epic Records solicited it to radio airplay in Italy four days later.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "No" is three minutes and 33 seconds long. Reed played keyboards, piano, and produced and programmed the song. Ethan Shumaker engineered it at Reed's studio in Elysian Park, Los Angeles, Chris Gehringer mastered it at Sterling Sound in New York, and Manny Marroquin mixed it at the Carriage House studio in Nolensville, Tennessee.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "No" is inspired by 1990s music and R&B. "Billboard"s Joe Lynch described the song as a "dance-y pop anthem". Trainor opens it by singing doo-wop vocals over retro style music reminiscent of her debut major-label studio album, "Title" (2015), which transitions into crisp guitar instrumentation and a beat that recalls The Neptunes. Trainor intended for the transition to surprise listeners who may be expecting "No" to sound like her usual music: "Yeah, you think this is Meghan Trainor? Here we go, drop the beat." Fuse's Emilee Lindner compared Trainor's flow on the song to Mýa's 2003 single "My Love Is Like ... Wo", noting that the chord progression in the chorus is akin to the work of Max Martin. "Spin"s Brennan Carley and "Time"'s Nolan Feeney compared its melody and guitar squeals to early Britney Spears and NSYNC songs. The instrumentation of "No" also makes use of whistles, described by Isabella Biedenharn of "Entertainment Weekly" as "a catchy sundae of whistles and sassy quips". "Knoxville News Sentinel"s Chuck Campbell called the song a "clubby/girl-group rumbler".


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "No" has lyrics about sexual consent and women's empowerment. The song discusses men who approach women and are unable to accept it when their advances are rejected. During its chorus, Trainor repeats the word "no" several times to emphasize the eternal nature and decisiveness of the word: "My name is no, my sign is no, my number is no." She proceeds to decline an assertive male counterpart's offer to dance with her and asks him to back off. Trainor affirms that she could court a man if she intended to, but it is not her priority. When asked about her inspiration for "No", she stated that she wanted to be better at being single, and wanted the song to help young women and teenagers realize they do not need a suitor, and that they "can go out with [their] girls and have just as much fun".


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Music critics viewed "No" as a departure from Trainor's earlier work, showcasing her confident and mature side. Lindner called the song an improvement from the problematic lyrics on "All About That Bass" and Trainor's 2015 single "Dear Future Husband". Lynch stated that Trainor was more confident on it than her debut single, and proved that she has more to offer than what listeners expect. Carley thought Trainor gave up her "sock-hopping persona" in favor of straightforward free-spokenness on "No". MTV News's Lucy Bacon praised the empowering lyrics and catchy chorus, foreseeing greater success than "All About That Bass" for the song. Chris Conaton of "PopMatters" wrote that though it strays from the "doo wop and early girl group-inspired songs" that popularized her, it fits her area of expertise. Writing for "Spin", Dan Weiss stated that with its TLC-influenced chorus, "No" alleviates the soft-hued trauma from "All About That Bass", calling the end result faultless and magnificent. The "Los Angeles Times"s Gerrick D. Kennedy thought that the song was way more suitable for clubs than others by Trainor. Glenn Gamboa of "Newsday" described it as Trainor's version of "the usual club tale", on which she was inspired by Destiny's Child to create an empowering song so memorable it would be difficult to escape.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Writing for ABC News, Allan Raible stated that though "No" is well-intentioned, it comes across as neoteric and is a diluted version of the Destiny's Child and En Vogue songs that precede it by several years. In a negative review, "Slant Magazine"s Alexa Camp likened the song to a suffragette's anthem and said it pretends that dismissing an uninvited admirer is the unsurpassed assertion of a woman's agency. Carvell Wallace of MTV News accused Trainor of appropriating the African-American accent, which she clarified was inspired by her father.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "Billboard" named "No" the 100th best song of 2016, writing that Trainor decimates the entitled male ego on it. The magazine noted that the song encapsulates the drivel a woman has to put up with before finding a husband. On the other hand, "Time" named it the eighth-worst song of 2016, noting that it appeared to be a corrective measure for criticism she had received for "espousing anti-feminist messages" in the past, but was insubstantial, unimaginative and repetitive.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Trainor's highest debut, "No" entered at number11 on the US "Billboard" Hot100 issued for March 26, 2016. The song debuted at number 21 on the Radio Songs chart, the highest entry since Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" (2011). On April 9, 2016, it moved from number12 to number six on the "Billboard" Hot100 and became Trainor's fourth top 10 entry. "No" peaked at number three in its fourth week on the chart. The Recording Industry Association of America certified the song 2× Platinum, which denotes two million units based on sales and track-equivalent on-demand streams. On the Canadian Hot 100, it reached number 10 and was certified 3× Platinum by Music Canada.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: "No" debuted at number 59 on the UK Singles Chart issued for March 11. Following Trainor's performance of the song on "The Graham Norton Show", it rose from number23 to its peak of number11 on April 15. The British Phonographic Industry certified it Gold. In Australia, "No" reached number nine and was certified 3× Platinum. The song peaked at number 18 in New Zealand and was certified Gold. It charted within the top 20 of national record charts, at number one in Latvia, number two in South Africa, number three in Israel, number seven in Austria, number eight in Scotland, number 12 in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, number 13 in Argentina, number 15 in Spain, and number 20 in Ireland. "No" received a 2× Platinum certification in Poland, Platinum+Gold in Mexico, Platinum in Spain, Sweden, and Gold in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Fatima Robinson directed the music video for "No", which was filmed on March 4, 2016. It premiered on Trainor's YouTube and Vevo accounts on March 21. To represent the new musical direction she took with the song, she wanted its video to be darker and more sexually charged than her previous works. Trainor aimed for it to be converse of her bright and colorful music video for "All About That Bass". She told "Billboard" during rehearsals that she danced "more than [she had] ever danced in [her] life" in the video. Trainor's stylist, Maya Krispin, picked outfits that Trainor could comfortably dance in, including a light metallic gold coat designed by Isabel Marant, a black sequined blazer by Veronica Beard, and a customized crimson outfit by Michael Costello. Krispin designed the rest of Trainor's ensemble: a black jumpsuit with a bra top and a fishnet bodysuit.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: In the music video, Trainor walks in an abandoned warehouse filled with smoke and old machines. Dressed in a metallic silver jacket, she performs a choreographed dance routine with female backup dancers. Black and red shots of a female silhouette are interspersed with the routine, which MTV News's Sasha Geffen deemed reminiscent of 1990s iPod commercials. In another scene, Trainor, in a fishnet bodysuit, entwines her arms with the dancers, and brushes her cleavage; Evan Real of "Us Weekly" compared it to Spears' music video for "I'm a Slave 4 U" (2001). Trainor proceeds to sway her hair in front of a high-powered fan. It concludes with all previous scenes meshed with shots of women holding open flares.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Critics compared the music video to artists including Spears, Destiny's Child, and Janet Jackson. John Paul Stapleton of "The Boston Globe" opined that it shows Trainor's seductive side, reminiscent of Jackson in her heyday. Geffen thought the video features substantial 1990s pop overtones redolent of TLC. Lynch compared its atmosphere to 2000s Spears and 1990s Madonna videos, and Trainor's outfits to those the latter wore while promoting her album "Erotica" (1992). Lorena Blas of "USA Today" likened the choreography to the work of Missy Elliott, and Destiny's Child's music video for "Jumpin', Jumpin'" (2000).


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Some reviewers directed praise towards the video for representing a change from Trainor's earlier work. Lynch thought it marked a shocking transition from the light colors and old-world adorable tone featured in Trainor's early videos, describing it as a sultrier look for her. Real thought the video recalled "killer choreography and coordinat[ed] outfits" popular in the early 2000s, which was new territory for Trainor. Joey Nolfi of "Entertainment Weekly" noted that unlike her video for "Like I'm Gonna Lose You" (2015), Trainor attempted legitimate pop star dancing in it. "Billboard"s Katie Atkinson described Trainor's look as stern and seductive, and found the video "very Y2K-leaning". Nick Maslow of "People" called the dance moves keen and Trainor's hair in it worthy of becoming a popular GIF.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Writing for "The Kansas City Star", Jeneé Osterheldt preferred the song to its music video but said Trainor's choice to be sexual in the latter strengthened the song's message: "Too often men think a woman's clothes or demeanor mean that [...] they are entitled to her body." In a less enthusiastic review, "Spin"s Rachel Brodsky found the visuals endearing but thought Nicki Minaj played the underground seductress better in her music video for "Only" (2014). Dennis Hinzmann of "Out" was critical of Trainor's dancing, noting the background dancers upstaged Trainor and made her look evasive.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: Trainor performed "No" live at the 3rd iHeartRadio Music Awards on April 3, 2016; Lynch ranked it as the seventh best performance of the night, complimenting her vocal delivery but noting she looked uncomfortable executing the dance sequence. On April 8, she reprised the song on "The Graham Norton Show". Trainor sang it on "The Voice UK"s fifth season finale on April 10, and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" ten days later; she accompanied both performances with one-armed choreography. On May 22, 2016, she performed "No" at the 2016 "Billboard" Music Awards, in a multihued and spangly dress while strolling through the crowd; "Rolling Stone" was critical of the performance, deeming it one of the night's worst, it stated that Trainor failed to "sell her hit onstage" and was upstaged by the celebrities in the audience and their glowing wristbands. Trainor reprised the song for "Today"'s Citi Concert series on June 21, 2016. She included it as the last song on her setlist for The Untouchable Tour (2016), during the encore.


title: No (Meghan Trainor song)

text: A cappella group Pentatonix released a cover version of "No" via their YouTube channel in April, which Trainor praised on Twitter. On April 7, Allison Iraheta and other contestants covered the song during the season 15 finale of "American Idol". It is featured in an episode of the second season of American television series "Superstore".


title: Music Box (Mariah Carey album)

text: Music Box is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey. It was released by Columbia Records on August 31, 1993. The album comprises ballads primarily written by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, with whom she had previously worked on "Emotions" (1991), and a few urban dance tracks. During the course of the album's development, Carey wanted to broaden her audience, choosing a more pop/R&B oriented sound. During this time frame, she experimented with different musical instruments, leading the album's sound away from her more contemporary previous two efforts. Two additional tracks from the album sessions were released, with "Do You Think of Me" serving as the B-side to "Dreamlover" and "Everything Fades Away" and being featured on international editions of "Music Box".


title: Music Box (Mariah Carey album)

text: In order to successfully take the album in a new direction, Carey and Afanasieff sought out new and innovative producers, as well as some from Carey's previous releases. Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds first began working with Carey on "Music Box", where he helped produce "Never Forget You", as well as being part of the songwriting process. Additional writers and producers were Robert Clivillés and David Cole (a pair also known as C+C Music Factory) and Daryl Simmons. While the album featured a range of music producers, the bulk of the songwriting was done by Carey and her writing partner, Walter Afanasieff. In future projects, they would continue writing material for Carey's albums, until her 1999 release "Rainbow", where he is absent from the writing credits.


title: Music Box (Mariah Carey album)

text: Four singles were released from the album. The first three, "Dreamlover", "Hero" and "Without You", became worldwide chart-topping singles, the latter becoming Carey's highest charting international single of her career. "Without You" became Carey's first number-one single in most European markets and reached the top three in the United States. To promote "Music Box", Carey embarked on the short but successful Music Box Tour which traveled to select cities in North America. Carey was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Dreamlover" at the 1994 Grammy Awards and received the same nomination for "Hero" at the 1995 Grammy Awards.


title: Music Box (Mariah Carey album)

text: After its release, "Music Box" received generally mixed reviews from music critics. The album faced criticism regarding Carey's more mellow and laid-back tone in comparison to her previous work. Commercially, the album reached number one in 15 countries, including Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified it Diamond, for shipments of ten million copies across the United States. "Music Box" remains Carey's highest seller with more than 28 million copies sold worldwide and is one of the best-selling albums of all time.


title: Music Box (Mariah Carey album)

text: In 1988, Carey was discovered by Tommy Mottola, CEO of Columbia Records, and was promptly signed to the label. Carey's self-titled debut studio album, released in 1990, focused on re-recording and mastering several songs she had already written in high school alongside classmate, Ben Margulies. Aside from the seven songs taken from Carey's demo tape, four other tracks were written and produced by the former and an array of famed record producers. The album was complimented by critics, who called it a mature debut, full of various genre influences ranging from pop, R&B and soul. The album became a commercial success, selling fifteen million units globally. While making a strong impact on pop music, Carey became interested in altering her sound, and deviating from pop music for her second studio effort, "Emotions" (1991). Following the success of her debut, Columbia allowed her to take more control over her musical departure, enabling her to change her genre infusions, melodies and production.