title: Taxi dancer

text: The growth of tango tourism in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has led to an increase in formal and informal dance hostess services in the "milongas", or dance halls. While some operators attempt to sell holiday romance, reputable tango agencies offer genuine host services to tourists who find it hard to cope with the "cabeceo"—the eye contact and nodding-method of finding a dance partner.


title: Taxi dancer

text: Since the 1920s when taxi dancing boomed in popularity, various films, songs and novels have been released reflecting the pastime, often using the taxi-dance hall as a setting or chronicling the lives of taxi dancers.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures, Barbie: Dreamhouse Adventures or just Dreamhouse Adventures, is a CGI-animated adventure comedy children's streaming television series released between May 3, 2018 and April 12, 2020 on Netflix in the United States, while in Canada, it premiered on YTV on June 22, 2018.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: Originally created to complement the "" web-based franchise, the series is rather centered on the activities and adventures of Barbie, her sisters, other family members and friends, and it follows up from the 2017 film, "Barbie: Dolphin Magic". The series' 4th and 5th seasons were referred to on-screen as Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures: Go Team Roberts! With the series release wrapped up on Netflix, it got adapted into 4 streaming television films which featured a portion of the core family and friends going along with Barbie on certain adventures.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: According to Mattel's then-chief content officer, (CCO), Catherine Balsam Schwaber, and Senior Vice President of content development & production, Christopher Keenan, the series was in response to kids wanting to know more about the iconic character, her sisters and her entire family and friends.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: The TV show premiered on May 3, 2018 as a Netflix original in episode bundles referred to as "seasons". Each "season" consists of 8 episodes which was released at certain dates and varied in countries and territories worldwide. The series premiered on YTV in Canada on June 22, Pop in the UK and Ireland on October 22, all in 2018, Gulli in France and Super RTL in Germany, the latter two with local-dubbing replacements. The second season of 8 episodes premiered on the streaming service on September 13, 2018, and the third season on February 14, 2019. As Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures: Go Team Roberts!, the fourth season premiered on November 1, 2019 and the fifth and final season premiered on January 19, 2020 and concluded on April 12, 2020.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: From this season until its end, the series was titled "Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures: Go Team Roberts" on-screen.


title: Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures

text: With the series wrapped up on 12 April 2020, Mattel Television expanded the TV series into television films, which like the series premiered on Netflix as "television specials" and were then picked up for television broadcast in certain countries. The first film from 2017, "Barbie: Dolphin Magic", not only served as the pilot for the series, but returned Barbie to the streaming service since the 2012–15 web series, "". The second film revived the well-known Barbie film franchise which was put on a hiatus after the release of the first film and permanently made the streaming service the destination for upcoming and newer Barbie content in the United States.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Mark Oliver Everett (born April 10, 1963) is the American lead singer, songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist and sometimes drummer of the rock band Eels. Also known as E, he is known for writing songs tackling subjects such as death, loneliness, divorce, childhood innocence, depression, and unrequited love.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett is the son of physicist Hugh Everett III, originator of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Mark's maternal grandfather was Harold "Kid" Gore, a men's basketball, football and baseball coach at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: When Everett was in his early teens, an incident occurred while he was attending a concert by English rock band the Who. A special effects laser struck Everett directly in the eye and, as a result, he has needed to wear glasses ever since.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett's father died of a heart attack when Everett was 19. Mark was the one to find him. Everett later made a documentary about his father's theory and his relationship with his father entitled "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" for the BBC that was aired on the PBS series "NOVA" in 2008.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: In 1987, Everett moved from his family home in Virginia and resettled in California. There, Everett began his professional musical career with two major-label albums: "A Man Called E" (1992) and "Broken Toy Shop" (1993). The pseudonym "E" was used for both of these early recordings. He became known as "E" because there were several people in his life at the time who had the same first name.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: In 1995, Everett formed the band Eels in Los Angeles. Their studio albums include "Beautiful Freak" (1996), "Electro Shock Blues" (1998), "Daisies of the Galaxy" (2000), "Souljacker" (2001), "Shootenanny!" (2003), "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" (2005), "Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire" (2009), "End Times" (2010), "Tomorrow Morning" (2010), "Wonderful, Glorious" (2013), "The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett" (2014), "The Deconstruction" (2018), "Earth to Dora" (2020) and "Extreme Witchcraft" (2022). "Hombre Lobo", "End Times" and "Tomorrow Morning" form a trilogy, focusing on "lust, loss and redemption".


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett's music has been featured in a number of films, including "American Beauty" ("Cancer for the Cure"), "Road Trip" ("Mr. E's Beautiful Blues"), "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" ("Christmas is Going to the Dogs"), "Holes" ("Eyes Down," "Mighty Fine Blues"), "Shrek" ("My Beloved Monster"), "Shrek 2" ("I Need Some Sleep"), "Shrek the Third" ("Royal Pain" and "Losing Streak"), "Shrek the Halls" ("The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight"), "" ("Beautiful Freak"), "Henry Poole is Here" ("Love of the Loveless"), "The Big White" ("Last Stop: This Town"), "Hot Fuzz" ("Souljacker, pt.1"), "The Big Year" ("I Like Birds"), as well as most of the music in "Yes Man". Additionally, his song "Fresh Blood" (off "Hombre Lobo") forms the music played over the credits of HBO's "The Jinx".


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett plays an acoustic version of the Eels song "What I Have to Offer" in a deleted scene from "This Is 40" (2012) and follows his performance by telling Rudd's record executive character that the band has decided to sign a contract with a competing label.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Although he has denied it, Everett is suspected of working under the alias MC Honky, who released the album "I Am the Messiah" in 2003.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: The 2007 BBC Scotland / BBC Four television documentary "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" followed Everett as he talked to physicists and his father's former colleagues about his father's theory. The documentary won a Royal Television Society award on March 19, 2008. The documentary was shown in lieu of a support act during their UK, US, Irish and Australian tours in the spring of 2008. In the U.S., the PBS program "Nova" broadcast the documentary in October 2008.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: In November 2007, Everett published his autobiography, entitled "Things the Grandchildren Should Know".


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: On February 19, 2016, Everett appeared as Brian in Season 1, Episode 4 ("A Party in the Hills") of Judd Apatow's "Love", playing a cover of Paul McCartney's song "Jet". He also briefly appeared in Season 1, Episode 9, Season 2, Episode 2 and Season 3, Episode 6. He had a small cameo in "Bill & Ted Face the Music" (2020).


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett's sister, Elizabeth, took her own life in 1996, and in 1998, his mother, Nancy Everett (née Gore), was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The lyrics of Eels' second album, "Electro-Shock Blues", focused extensively on these events.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: In 2000, Everett married Natalia Kovaleva, a Russian dentist he met near Hamburg, Germany. The marriage ended after five years. Following Eels' tour accompanying their album "The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett", Everett took a break from music. During this period, he met and married a Scottish woman employed in the film industry. At the age of 54, Everett became a father for the first time when his wife gave birth to their son, Archie McGregor Everett. The couple, however, divorced some time later.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: Everett's cousin, Jennifer Lewis (née Gore), was a flight attendant who perished on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that struck the Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 attacks. The plane struck the side of the Pentagon where his father had worked, and Everett remarks in his autobiography that he wonders whether the plane hit his father's old office.


title: Mark Oliver Everett

text: In July 2014, Everett was given the Freedom of the City of London, at a ceremony held prior to his concert at the Barbican Centre.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Robert Stanley Crewe (November 12, 1930 – September 11, 2014) was an American songwriter, dancer, singer, manager, and record producer. He was known for producing, and co-writing with Bob Gaudio, a string of Top 10 singles for the Four Seasons.


title: Bob Crewe

text: As a songwriter, his most successful songs include "Silhouettes" (co-written with Frank Slay); "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Walk Like a Man", "Rag Doll", "Silence Is Golden", "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)", "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" and "Bye, Bye, Baby" (all co-written with Gaudio); "Let's Hang On!" (written with Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell); and "My Eyes Adored You" and "Lady Marmalade" (both co-written with Kenny Nolan). He also had hit recordings with the Rays, Diane Renay, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Freddy Cannon, Lesley Gore, Oliver, Michael Jackson, Bobby Darin, Roberta Flack, Peabo Bryson, Patti LaBelle, Barry Manilow, and his own Bob Crewe Generation.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Born in Newark in 1930 and raised in Belleville, New Jersey, Crewe demonstrated an early and apparent gift for both art and music. Although lacking in formal musical training, he gravitated to learning from many of the great 19th- and 20th-century classical romantic composers as well as giants of jazz and swing, including Stan Kenton, Harry James, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. He studied for almost a year at Parsons School of Design in New York City with the intention of eventually pursuing a career in architecture.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1953, Crewe met and partnered professionally with Frank Slay Jr., a young pianist from Texas. Their collaboration created several hit songs (as well as a small record label, XYZ), for which Crewe performed as the demo singer. Crewe and Slay's 1957 recording session with the Rays for XYZ (picked up nationally by Cameo Records) produced two major hit songs. "Silhouettes", produced by Crewe, became a doo-wop anthem of the era. Climbing to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1957, "Silhouettes" displayed the flair for story-driven lyrics, innovative musical hooks, and final lyrical twists that were to become known as Crewe trademarks. In 1965, with a slightly faster tempo, "Silhouettes" again became a hit, this time for the British group Herman's Hermits, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Bob Dylan recorded "Silhouettes" during his legendary "Basement Tapes" sessions of the late 1960s, although his version was not released until 2014.


title: Bob Crewe

text: "Daddy Cool" was the B-side of the Rays' "Silhouettes" single. Written and produced by Crewe and Slay at the same 1957 session, it achieved considerable note. Both "Daddy Cool" and "Silhouettes" were covered the same year by the Canadian group the Diamonds, whose version of "Daddy Cool" reached No. 10 on the "Billboard" charts. In 1961, Guy "Daddy Cool" Darrell released another single version on the Warwick label, and in 1977, the UK band Darts made the song their first-ever studio recording, scoring a No. 6 hit.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe and Slay built on their success by signing a deal with new, Philadelphia-based Swan Records. Sessions with Billy and Lillie (singers Billy Ford and Lillie Bryant) produced the 1958 hit "Lah Dee Dah", which reached the No. 9 position on the Billboard Hot 100; the following year, Billy and Lillie's recording of "Lucky Ladybug" hit No. 14. Crewe and Slay also wrote two Top 10 hits - "Tallahassee Lassie" and "Okefenokee" - for Swan's rising star Freddy Cannon. Crewe also began to score his own hits, "Sweetie Pie" (US No. 111, 1959) and "The Whiffenpoof Song" (No. 96, 1960).


title: Bob Crewe

text: As a solo singer, Crewe recorded a pair of albums in 1961, one of which included a Ralph Burns-produced swing version of Yale University's signature "The Whiffenpoof Song". The record became a major hit in New York and led to Crewe's receiving "teen heartthrob" coverage in such popular teen magazines as "16 Magazine", and to guest appearances with Mickey Rooney and Connie Francis on such TV variety shows as "The Revlon Revue".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In the early 1960s, Crewe began writing with Bob Gaudio, who had risen to fame at age 15 as a member of The Royal Teens, for whom he'd co-written the hit "Short Shorts". The first Crewe-Gaudio collaboration, "Sherry", was written by Gaudio and produced by Crewe. In 1962 it became a No. 1 single for Gaudio's new band, the Four Seasons, (fronted by Frankie Valli). The pair wrote many other songs for the group, including the No. 1 hits "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Rag Doll", and "Walk Like a Man", as well as "Ronnie", "Bye, Bye, Baby (Baby, Goodbye)", and "Connie-O".


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe collaborated with Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell on the Four Seasons hit "Let's Hang On!". The Four Seasons were also the first to record the Crewe-Gaudio composition "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)", later covered virtually note-for-note by the American singing group the Walker Brothers, who recorded their No. 1 selling version in England; their version made the American Top 10 as well. The Crewe-Gaudio collaborations capitalized on the extraordinary and distinctive voice of Frankie Valli, who could effortlessly soar to a piercing, emotionally expressive falsetto that became one of the emblematic and widely imitated sounds of the era. Record sales racked up by the Four Seasons are estimated as being between anywhere from 100 million to 199 million.


title: Bob Crewe

text: As the "Four Seasons sound" became more and more defined, other signature touches emerged, including dense but pristine-sounding percussion, such as the military-sounding march cadences and drum-stomps of "Sherry", "Big Girls Don't Cry", and "Walk Like a Man". The sophisticated harmonic patterns of the Four Seasons punctuated by the distinctive falsetto of Frankie Valli were at once classic and innovative, as was Crewe's use of melancholy harmonica on "Big Man in Town", the space-age organ of "Save It for Me", and the otherworldly glissandos of "Candy Girl".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In addition to his work with the Four Seasons, Crewe produced recording sessions by such artists as Dee Dee Sharp, The Orlons, Ben E. King, and The Highwaymen ("On a New Road"). With Bud Rehak and Eddie Rambeau he co-wrote "Navy Blue" for singer Diane Renay, and also produced it. Renay's recording made the Top 10 on the US pop chart in early 1964, and number one on the adult contemporary chart.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1965, Crewe formed his own record label, DynoVoice Records. With the release of the 1965 hit "Concrete and Clay" by Eddie Rambeau, DynoVoice launched a run of twenty-one Top 100 hits. The label found early success with the R&B trio the Toys, best known for their single "A Lover's Concerto", a No. 2 hit single, and "Attack". The Toys were produced by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer for executive producer Crewe. Writing about "A Lover's Concerto", based on a melody inspired by Bach's "Minuet in G major", critic Dave Thompson observed, "Few records are this perfect. Riding across one of the most deceptively hook-laden melodies ever conceived ... 'A Lover’s Concerto' marks the apogee of the Girl Group sound." The song was subsequently recorded by the Lennon Sisters, the Delfonics, Sarah Vaughan, the Supremes, Mrs. Miller, Audrey Hall, and Kelly Chen.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Another DynoVoice powerhouse of the mid-1960s emerged when Crewe discovered a band called Billy Lee & The Rivieras. The group had limited success until he renamed them Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. Under his direction, they scored eleven Top 100 hits, most notably Crewe's powerful and muscular arrangements of "Devil with a Blue Dress On", the group's highest-charting single at No. 4, as well as "Sock It to Me, Baby!", a No. 6 hit in 1967, and "Jenny Take a Ride", which reached No. 10 in 1965.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Another often-recorded song from the 1965 Linzer-Randell album by the Toys is "Can't Get Enough of You Baby". The number, co-written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, was also recorded by the Bay City, Michigan, rock group ? and the Mysterians, best known for their 1966 hit "96 Tears". "Can't Get Enough of You Baby" has enjoyed subsequent reinterpretations by the Colourfield and Smash Mouth, among many others.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe's record label scored another hit with Norma Tanega's off-beat, folksy "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog". Crewe also helped bring success to the Epic Records group the Tremeloes with their hit cover of "Silence Is Golden", a song originally written for and recorded by the Four Seasons.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Bob Crewe himself (recording as The Bob Crewe Generation) released a version of Sid Ramin's 1967 instrumental "Music to Watch Girls By" (originally composed as a Diet Pepsi commercial jingle) on DynoVoice. The song became a Top 20 hit. and spawned another successful instrumental version by Al Hirt and a vocal hit by Andy Williams. In 1967, Bob Crewe produced and wrote seven of the songs sung by Lesley Gore on her last commercially successful album, "California Nights", including producing the title track. The Bob Crewe Generation also recorded the original soundtrack (composed by Crewe and Charles Fox) for the 1968 Paramount Pictures motion picture "Barbarella", starring Jane Fonda and directed by Roger Vadim. The soundtrack for the cult favorite features vocals by Crewe and the group the Glitterhouse.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1967, Crewe and Gaudio scored one of their greatest successes with "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", recorded by Frankie Valli with the Four Seasons. The song reached No. 2 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and earned a gold record. "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" has since been recorded by a wide variety of vocalists and bands, in several different languages. A 1968 version by singer Andy Williams climbed to No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart. Also achieving chart status over the decades were English-language versions by the Lettermen, Maureen McGovern, Boys Town Gang and Lauryn Hill. The song has been heard in numerous motion pictures, including "The Deer Hunter", "The Fabulous Baker Boys", "Conspiracy Theory", "10 Things I Hate About You", "Drop Dead Gorgeous", "Bridget Jones's Diary", and "Jersey Boys".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1969, Crewe collaborated with the singer Oliver, producing his pop hit "Jean", a song written by poet Rod McKuen which served as theme to the Oscar-winning film "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", starring Maggie Smith. Crewe also produced a hit single of Oliver performing the optimistic "Good Morning Starshine" from the rock musical "Hair". The song reached No. 3 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Easy Listening singles surveys.


title: Bob Crewe

text: The Crewe record label released a series of well-received recordings such as Ben Bagley's "Cole Porter Revisited" and "Rodgers and Hart Revisited" featuring vocal performances by such artists as Harold Arlen, Elaine Stritch, Dorothy Loudon, Anthony Perkins, Ann Hampton Callaway, Bobby Short, Jerry Orbach, Tammy Grimes, and Blossom Dearie.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe appeared on ABC-TV's "American Bandstand" and also "Where the Action Is", both with Dick Clark. He was interviewed and some of his current 1960's songs were played for the dancers and crowds.


title: Bob Crewe

text: The Generation's late 1969 LP "Let Me Touch You", including covers of Henry Mancini's "Moon River" and "Two For The Road", arranged by Charles Fox, remains a favorite of lounge music collectors. It was also their only quadraphonic release. The Bob Crewe Generation briefly reappeared as a chart act in the mid-1970s, recording material for the disco era. The 1976 LP "Street Talk" on Elektra was in this vein.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1975, Crewe wrote and produced disco material for the Eleventh Hour, who had dance club success with at least three releases on 20th Century Records: "Hollywood Hot" (45 rpm single, number: TC-2215), "Bumper to Bumper", and "Sock It To Me/It’s Your Thing".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In the mid-1970s, Crewe and Sir Monti Rock III formed the disco club favorites Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, best known for their 1975 successes "Get Dancin'" and "I Wanna Dance Wit' Choo (Doo Dat Dance)". The group is referenced by Elvis Costello in his song "Invasion Hit Parade" and by The Pet Shop Boys in their song "Electricity".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1977, at the insistence of producer Jerry Wexler, who had been an early mentor of his, Crewe recorded a solo album in Memphis, with Barry Beckett co-producing. The album, entitled "Motivation", was a showcase for his singing voice. Although the album did not achieve chart success, it included the ballad "Marriage Made In Heaven", a collaboration between Crewe and Kenny Nolan which later became popular with Carolina beach music bands. The album also produced the song "It Took a Long Time (For The First Time In My Life)", also recorded by Patti LaBelle.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe and Nolan had previously written two other songs - "My Eyes Adored You" and "Lady Marmalade" - which became back-to-back No. 1 records in 1975. "My Eyes Adored You" was produced by Crewe and performed by Frankie Valli with the Four Seasons. When the record label, Mowest, balked at releasing it, Crewe, certain of its quality and hit potential, bought back the rights for $4,000 and it was issued on Private Stock Records. Despite widespread rejections from music industry pundits, the song became a smash solo hit for Valli, and was the fifth biggest song of the year. "Lady Marmalade", recorded by Labelle, became notorious for its sexually provocative, New Orleans-inflected chorus, "" The song became a radio and dance club sensation. When it reached No. 1 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100, it displaced "My Eyes Adored You". Both songs spent one week at No. 1. "Lady Marmalade" has since been used in numerous motion pictures, including "Cheech and Chong's The Corsican Brothers", "Beethoven", "Carlito's Way", "The Birdcage", "The Long Kiss Goodnight", and "Semi-Pro".


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1984, a collaboration by Crewe and writers Jerry Corbetta and Bob Gaudio produced another Billboard Top 100 success with the romantic duet "You're Looking Like Love To Me", sung by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson. Another Crewe-Corbetta project united them with singer-songwriter-producer Ellie Greenwich, for whom they produced the original cast album of Greenwich's Broadway musical "Leader of the Pack". The album was a Grammy Award nominee and the show itself was nominated for a Tony Award.


title: Bob Crewe

text: "Lady Marmalade" was re-recorded by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa, and Pink for the soundtrack of the 2001 film "Moulin Rouge!", and their version stayed at No. 1 in the U.S. for five weeks. It achieved the same chart position in the United Kingdom and Australia. "Rolling Stone" ranked "Lady Marmalade" as the 479th greatest song of all time.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In 1999, when the US performing rights and royalties organization BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) announced its Top 100 Songs of the Century, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" landed in the Top 10 with six million airplays. BMI calculates one million continuous performances of a song of the average length (3 minutes) as representing 5.7 years of continuous airplay.


title: Bob Crewe

text: In addition to his numerous benchmarks and accolades in music, Crewe has also achieved recognition as an artist, having designed a number of album covers as well as having had highly successful one-man gallery showings of his paintings at the Earl McGrath Gallery, Thomas Soloman's Garage, and the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Since 2005 Crewe has been featured as a supporting character (played originally by Peter Gregus) in "Jersey Boys", the long-running, multiple Tony Award-winning Broadway musical based on the story of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. Although the 2014 film version (with Mike Doyle as Crewe) was only a modest success, the play has gone on to become an international hit, with Crewe credited as the show's lyricist. He used his proceeds from the show to start a foundation supporting gay rights, people with AIDS, and bringing music and art to children in deprived communities.


title: Bob Crewe

text: While Crewe was portrayed as openly gay in the "Jersey Boys" stage musical and film, his brother Dan Crewe told an interviewer that his brother was discreet about his sexuality, particularly during the time he was working with the Four Seasons. "Whenever he met someone, he would go into what I always called his John Wayne mode, this extreme machoism," Dan Crewe told "The New York Times".


title: Bob Crewe

text: From April 2014 until his death, Crewe resided in a Scarborough, Maine, nursing home. His charity, the Bob Crewe Foundation, donated $3 million to the Maine College of Art in April 2014.


title: Bob Crewe

text: Crewe died in the nursing home on September 11, 2014, at the age of 83. He had been in declining health for several years following a fall.


title: Bob Crewe

text: US peak chart position on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart follows the song title. Only singles that reached a position of No. 30 or higher on the Hot 100 are listed here.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Investiture of the Gods, also known by its Chinese names () and is a 16th-century Chinese novel and one of the major vernacular Chinese works in the gods and demons ("shenmo") genre written during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Consisting of 100 chapters, it was first published in book form between 1567 and 1619. Another source claims it was published in 1605. The work combines elements of history, folklore, mythology, legends and fantasy.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The story is set in the era of the decline of the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC) and the rise of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC). It intertwines numerous elements of Chinese mythology, including deities, immortals and spirits. The authorship is attributed to Xu Zhonglin.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The novel is a romanticised retelling of the overthrow of King Zhou, the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, by Ji Fa, who would establish the Zhou dynasty in its place. The story integrates oral and written tales of many Chinese mythological figures who are involved in the struggle as well. These figures include human heroes, immortals, and various spirits (usually represented in avatar form, such as vixens and pheasants, and occasionally as inanimate objects such as a pipa).


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: Bewitched by his concubine Daji, who is actually a vixen spirit disguised as a beautiful woman, King Zhou of Shang oppresses his people and persecutes those who oppose him, including those who dare to speak up to him. Ji Fa (King Wu of Zhou), assisted by his strategist Jiang Ziya, rallies an army to overthrow the tyrant and restore peace and order. Throughout the story, battles are waged between the kingdoms of Shang and Zhou, with both sides calling upon various supernatural beings – deities, immortals, demons, spirits, and humans with magical abilities – to aid them in the war. Yuanshi Tianzun ("Primeval Lord of Heaven") bestows upon Jiang Ziya the "Fengshen Bang", a list that empowers him to invest the gods of Heaven. The heroes of Zhou and some of their fallen enemies from Shang are eventually endowed with heavenly ranking and essentially elevated as gods, hence the title of the novel.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The novel features many stories in which various supernatural beings enter the human realm and change the fates of mortals and the course of history with their magical powers. The following are some of the better-known of its component anecdotes.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: King Zhou visits the temple of the ancient Chinese goddess Nüwa to offer incense and pray. As he was doing so, there came a gust of wind which blew up the cover on Nüwa’s statue. He notices that the statue of the goddess is very attractive. The lewd king spouts blasphemy before the statue, "It'd be good if I could marry Her". He writes poems on the walls to express his lust for the goddess. He has offended Nüwa unknowingly and Nüwa foresees that King Zhou is destined to be the last ruler of the Shang dynasty. She sends the thousand year old vixen spirit, nine-headed pheasant spirit and jade pipa spirit to torture King Zhou, because the goddess was very angry when she saw that King Zhou could enjoy himself for 28 years. The king becomes obsessed with the spirits, who disguise themselves as beautiful women, and starts to neglect state affairs and rule with cruelty. The people suffer under his tyranny and eventually join Ji Fa to rise up and overthrow him.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: King Zhou places Ji Chang, the Western Duke, under house arrest in Youli () for almost seven years. Ji Chang's eldest son Bo Yikao comes to Zhaoge (present-day Hebi, Henan) to plead with King Zhou to release his father. Daji falls in love with Bo Yikao and requests the king to permit Bo Yikao to teach her how to play the guqin. Daji attempts to seduce Bo Yikao but he rejects and ridicules her. The irate Daji complains to King Zhou that Bo Yikao molested her and insulted the king through his music. The king is furious and he has Bo Yikao executed, minced into pieces and made into meat pies, and served to his father. Ji Chang knows divination and has already foreseen his son's fate. He suppresses his sorrow and consumes the meat cakes. After that incident, King Zhou lowers his guard against Ji Chang and allows the latter to return home. Ji Chang builds up his forces and plans to avenge his son.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: Jiang Ziya is an apprentice of master of the Kunlun Mountains Yuanshi Tianzun. He leaves his master at the age of 72. He only uses a straight fishhook without bait, three feet above the water, for angling. His neighbours are puzzled by his odd method of fishing. They ask him out of curiosity. Jiang replies, "What I'm angling is not a single fish, but the king and the great many vassals. Only those who really wish to go on the hook will be fished by me." Jiang Ziya means that he is waiting for a wise ruler who recognises his talent and needs him.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: Some people tell Ji Chang about Jiang and Ji Chang becomes interested in him. One day, Ji Chang pays a visit to Jiang Ziya. Jiang demands that the duke helps him pull his cart. Ji Chang does so and stops pulling after he has moved 800 steps forwards. Jiang Ziya tells the duke that his future kingdom (the Zhou dynasty) will exist for 800 years. Ji Chang wishes to pull the cart for a few more steps but he is too exhausted to move forward. Jiang Ziya becomes the chancellor of Zhou afterwards and assists Ji Chang in building his kingdom.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: From the prophecy revealed by the oracle bones, Jiang Ziya predicts that King Zhou's loyal and benevolent courtier, Bi Gan, will die soon. He gives a charm to Bi Gan. One night, during a banquet hosted by King Zhou, several "immortals" appear and the king is delighted to see them. The "immortals" are actually Daji's fellow fox spirits in disguise, and Bi Gan, who is also present at the banquet, senses something amiss. Bi Gan's suspicions are confirmed when the fox spirits reveal their tails unknowingly after getting drunk. Bi Gan gathers a group of soldiers and they track the fox spirits back to their den and kill all of them. Bi Gan uses the foxes' hides to make a cloak and presents it to King Zhou. Daji is horrified and saddened when she sees the cloak, and she secretly plots vengeance on Bi Gan.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: Not long later, Daji tells King Zhou that she has a heart attack and only a "delicate seven-aperture heart" () can relieve her agony. No one in the palace has that type of heart except Bi Gan, who is revered as a saint. Bi Gan swallows the charm given by Jiang Ziya, grabs his heart, pulls it out of his body, and presents it to King Zhou. Bi Gan does not die immediately nor sheds a single drop of blood. Instead, he walks out of the palace and follows Jiang Ziya's instructions to go straight home without looking back.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: When he is only a few steps away from home, a female huckster yells from behind, "Hey! Cheap cabbages without stems (hearts)!" (The "heart" rhetorically refers to the stem of the plant). Bi Gan turns around, then asks the huckster in curiosity, "How can there be cabbages without stems?" The woman puts on an evil grin and replies, "You're right, sir. Cabbages cannot live without stems just as men cannot live without hearts." Bi Gan shouts, collapses, and dies. The huckster is actually the jade pipa spirit in disguise.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Foursome of Nine Dragon Island () are a set of four fictional characters . These four individuals are Wang Mo, Yang Sen, Gao Youqian, and Li Xingba; each of them are renowned as superior men. These four superior men would later be personally recruited by Grand Old Master Wen Zhong in an attempt to put an end to the threat of King Wu.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: This is a list of the variety of projects created by Daji throughout the novel "Fengshen Yanyi" by Lu Xixing and Xu Zhonglin.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Bronze Toaster, intended as a torture and execution device, was first suggested by Daji. It is a bronze cylindrical device that is over twenty-feet tall and eight-feet wide. It has two wheels on each side so it can be moved around. There are three layers of charcoal over three layers of burning fire inside the device. The victims were stripped naked and tied before being placed into the pit. The pit was used to execute Grand Counselor Mei Bo. Big fans were used to intensify the fire during the execution of Mei Bo.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Snake Pit, another torture device, was first introduced in Chapter 17. The 25-feet wide snake pit was dug beneath the Star-Picking Belvedere. Venomous spiders and exceedingly venomous snakes were put into the pit. Once this pit was finally constructed, seventy-two unfortunate maidens, with their hair shaved and clothes stripped, were tied and thrown into the pit to feed the snakes.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Wine Pool and Meat Forest were introduced in Chapter 17. The Wine Pool was located on the left side of the Snake Pit, while the Meat Forest was on the right, thus forming a small park before the Star-Picking Belvedere. Fifty maidens and fifty eunuchs were chosen and tied together to form 50 pairs. Each individual pair would then get thrown into the pool and would be asked to drink the pool's wine while performing swimming tricks. Once each pair is readily drunk, they would be put into the Meat Forest to enjoy an abundance of cooked duck, roasted pig, etc. By sunset a few pairs would then be beaten to a bloody pulp and secretly fed to Daji to ease her need for human flesh.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: This method of torture, created by Daji, was first mentioned in Chapter 17, as well as multiple times afterward.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The Deer Gallery is also mentioned in Chapter 17. Daji had chosen this Deer Gallery as an ensured way to put an end to Jiang Ziya, who had been entrusted to complete the impossible mission of creating the Deer Gallery itself. This large tower-like structure was forty-nine feet in height (double the size of the Star-Picking Belvedere), fully equipped with columns of jade, floors of marble, roofs and ceilings of legendary jewels, and railings of great pearls and sea corals.


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: Although the novel is now seen as one of the towering works of Chinese literature, it was not always appreciated as such. In comparing the work to other Chinese novels of the past, Lu Xun remarked in his 1924 book "A Brief History of Chinese Fiction" that "Fengshen Yanyi" "lacks the realism of "Water Margin" and the imaginative brilliance of "Journey to the West"."


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The book was also translated to Dutch as "Feng Shen: De Verheffing tot Goden" by Nio Joe Lan (Jakarta, 1940).


title: Investiture of the Gods

text: The novel has a significant impact on Chinese and Japanese popular culture. It has been adapted in various forms, including television series, manhua, manga, and video games. Some of the more notable adaptations are listed below:


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Psychedelic folk (sometimes acid folk or freak folk) is a loosely defined form of psychedelia that originated in the 1960s. It retains the largely acoustic instrumentation of folk, but adds musical elements common to psychedelic music.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Psychedelic folk generally favors acoustic instrumentation although it often incorporates other instrumentation. Chanting, early music and various non-Western folk music influences are often found in psych folk. Much like its rock counterpart, psychedelic folk is often known for a peculiar, trance-like, and atmospheric sound, often drawing on musical improvisation and Asian influences.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: The first musical use of the term psychedelic is thought to have been by the New York-based folk group The Holy Modal Rounders on their version of Lead Belly's 'Hesitation Blues' in 1964.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Folk/avant-garde guitarist John Fahey recorded several songs in the early 1960s that experimented with unusual recording techniques, including backward tapes, and novel instrumental accompaniment. His nineteen-minute "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" "anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings". Other songs from Fahey's "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions" (recorded between 1962 and 1966) also used "unsettling moods and dissonances" that took them beyond the typical folk fare. In 1967, he performed with the psychedelic/avant-garde/noise rock band Red Krayola (then Red Crayola) at the Berkeley Folk Festival which was recorded and later released as "Live 1967". Among other descriptions, their performance has been likened to early Velvet Underground bootlegs and "the very weirdest parts of late-'60s Pink Floyd pieces (like the shrieking guitar scrapes of 'Interstellar Overdrive')".


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Similarly, folk guitarist Sandy Bull's early work "incorporated elements of folk, jazz, and Indian and Arabic-influenced dronish modes". His 1963 album "Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo" explores various styles and instrumentation and "could also be accurately described as one of the very first psychedelic records". Later albums, such as 1968's "E Pluribus Unum" and his live album "Still Valentine's Day 1969", which use experimental recording techniques and extended improvisation, also have psychedelic elements.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Musicians with several groups that became identified with psychedelic rock began as folk musicians, such as those with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Beau Brummels from San Francisco; The Byrds, Love, Kaleidoscope, and The Peanut Butter Conspiracy from Los Angeles; Pearls Before Swine from Florida; and Jake and the Family Jewels, and Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys from New York. The Serpent Power was a psychedelic rock group with a strong folk influence. The Byrds was the most important american folk rock band to incorporate psychedelia in their sound and themes.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: In the UK, folk artists who were particularly significant included Marc Bolan, with his hippy duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, who used unusual instrumentation and tape effects, typified by the album "Unicorn" (1969), and Scottish performers such as Donovan, who combined influences of American artists like Bob Dylan with references to flower power, and the Incredible String Band, who from 1967 incorporated a range of influences into their acoustic based music, including medieval and eastern instruments. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, solo acts such as Syd Barrett and Nick Drake began to incorporate psychedelic influences into folk music with albums such as Barrett's The Madcap Laughs and Drake's Five Leaves Left.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: In the mid 1970s psychedelia began to fall out of fashion and those folk groups that had not already moved into different areas had largely disbanded. In Britain folk groups also tended to electrify as did acoustic duo Tyrannosaurus Rex which became the electric combo T. Rex. This was a continuation of a process by which progressive folk had considerable impact on mainstream rock.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Independent and underground folk artists in the late 1990s led to a revival of psychedelic folk with the New Weird America movement. Also, Animal Collective's early albums identify closely with freak folk as does their collaboration with veteran British folk artist Vashti Bunyan, and The Microphones/Mount Eerie, who combine naturalistic elements with lo-fi and psychedelia. Both artists received significant exposure in the indie music scene following critical acclaim from review site "Pitchfork Media" and soon more artists began experimenting with the genre, including Quilt, Grizzly Bear, Devendra Banhart, Rodrigo Amarante, Ben Howard and Grouper.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: In 2022, Uncut Magazine published a CD called "Blackwaterside: Sounds of the New Weird Albion""," featuring artists including Jim Ghedi, Henry Parker, Jon Wilks, Sam Lee, and Cath Tyler"." This subsequently led to the publication of an extensive exploration of Britain's new "weird folk" in Japanese music magazine, Ele-King. The lead article looked at artists including Nick Hart, Burd Ellen, Elspeth Anne, Frankie Archer, Shovel Dance Collective and Angeline Morrison.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Freak folk is a loosely defined synonym or subgenre of psychedelic folk that involves acoustic sounds, pastoral lyrics, and a neo-hippie aesthetic. The label originated from the "lost treasure" reissue culture of the late 1990s.


title: Psychedelic folk

text: Vashti Bunyan has been labeled "the Godmother of Freak Folk" for her role in inspiring the new crop of folk experimentalists. Other major influences on later freak folk artists include Linda Perhacs, Anne Briggs, Karen Dalton, Shirley & Dolly Collins, Animal Collective, the Incredible String Band, Xiu Xiu, and Pearls Before Swine. Devendra Banhart would become one of the leaders of the 2000s freak folk movement, along with Joanna Newsom.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: Yitang Zhang (; born February 5, 1955) is a Chinese American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: Previously working at the University of New Hampshire as a lecturer, Zhang submitted a paper to the "Annals of Mathematics" in 2013 which established the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often. This work led to a 2013 Ostrowski Prize, a 2014 Cole Prize, a 2014 Rolf Schock Prize, and a 2014 MacArthur award. Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: Zhang was born in Shanghai, China, with his ancestral home in Pinghu, Zhejiang. He lived in Shanghai with his grandmother until he went to Peking University. At around the age of nine, he found a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. He first learned about Fermat's Last Theorem and the Goldbach conjecture when he was 10. During the Cultural Revolution, he and his mother were sent to the countryside to work in the fields. He worked as a laborer for 10 years and was unable to attend high school. After the Cultural Revolution ended, Zhang entered Peking University in 1978 as an undergraduate student and received a bachelor of science in mathematics in 1982. He became a graduate student of Professor Pan Chengbiao, a number theorist at Peking University, and obtained a master of science in mathematics in 1984.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: After receiving his master's degree in mathematics, with recommendations from Professor Ding Shisun, the President of Peking University, and Professor Deng Donggao, Chair of the university's Math Department, Zhang was granted a full scholarship at Purdue University. Zhang arrived at Purdue in January 1985, studied there for six and a half years, and obtained his PhD in mathematics in December 1991.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: Zhang's PhD work was on the Jacobian conjecture. After graduation, Zhang had trouble finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with "Nautilus" magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor [Tzuong-Tsieng Moh] did not write me letters of recommendation." Zhang made this claim again in George Csicsery's documentary film "Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture" while discussing his difficulties at Purdue and in the years that followed. Moh claimed that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters. In a detailed profile published in "The New Yorker" magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job". In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website. Moh wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted seven years of his own life and my time".


title: Yitang Zhang

text: After some years, Zhang managed to find a position as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, where he was hired by Kenneth Appel in 1999. Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop. A profile published in the Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job-hunting days. He served as lecturer at UNH from 1999 until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers. Zhang stayed for a semester at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: On April 17, 2013, Zhang announced a proof that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by less than 70 million. This result implies the existence of an infinitely repeatable prime 2-tuple, thus establishing a theorem akin to the twin prime conjecture. Zhang's paper was accepted by "Annals of Mathematics" in early May 2013, his first publication since his last paper in 2001. The proof was refereed by leading experts in analytic number theory. Zhang's result set off a flurry of activity in the field, such as the Polymath8 project.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: If "P"("N") stands for the proposition that there is an infinitude of pairs of prime numbers (not necessarily consecutive primes) that differ by exactly "N", then Zhang's result is equivalent to the statement that there exists at least one even integer "k" < 70,000,000 such that "P"("k") is true. The classical form of the twin prime conjecture is equivalent to "P"(2); and in fact it has been conjectured that "P"("k") holds for "all" even integers "k". While these stronger conjectures remain unproven, a result due to James Maynard in November 2013, employing a different technique, showed that "P"("k") holds for some "k" ≤ 600. Subsequently, in April 2014, the Polymath project 8 lowered the bound to "k" ≤ 246. With current methods "k" ≤ 6 is the best attainable, and in fact "k" ≤ 12 and "k" ≤ 6 follow using current methods if the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture and its generalization, respectively, hold.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: Zhang was awarded the 2013 Morningside Special Achievement Award in Mathematics, the 2013 Ostrowski Prize, the 2014 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, and the 2014 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: He is a recipient of the 2014 MacArthur award, and was elected as an Academia Sinica Fellow during the same year. He was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians.


title: Yitang Zhang

text: In 1989 Zhang joined a group interested in Chinese democracy (). In a 2013 interview, he affirmed that his political views on the subject had not changed since.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Religion in Switzerland is predominantly Christianity, which, according to the national survey of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, in 2020 was adhered to by 61.2% of the resident population (aged fifteen years and older), of whom 33.8% were Catholics, 21.8% were Swiss Protestants, and 5.6% were followers of other Christian denominations. The proportion of Christians has declined significantly since 1980, when they constituted about 94% of the population; during the same timespan, unaffiliated Swiss residents have grown from about 4% to 31% of the population, and people professing non-Christian religions have grown from about 1% to 7% of the population. In 2020, according to church registers, 35.2% of the resident population were registered members of the country's Catholic Church, while 23.3% were registered members of the Protestant Church of Switzerland.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Christianity was adopted by the Gaulish (mostly Helvetians) and Germanic (mostly Alemans) ancestors of the modern Swiss respectively between the 4th- and 5th-century late Roman domination the former, and between the 6th- and 7th-century Frankish domination the latter, abandoning their indigenous Gallo-Roman and Germanic paganisms. The Old Swiss Confederacy which began to emerge in the 13th century remained entirely Catholic until the 16th century, when it became one of the centres of the Protestant Reformation and a majority of the Swiss joined the Protestant movement of Calvinism. Conflicts, and even civil wars, between Protestants and Catholics persisted until the Sonderbund War in 1847, after which freedom of conscience was established by law — only for Christians. Legal discrimination against Jews and some restrictions against the Catholic Church persisted, respectively, until the late 19th century the former and the end of the 20th century the latter. In the early 20th century, Switzerland had an absolute majority of Protestants (about 60%) and a large population of Catholics (about 40%); since the late 20th century and throughout the 21st century, the religious composition of the country has changed significantly, with a rise of the irreligious population, a sharp decline of Protestantism to about two tenths of the population, and a less sharp decline of Catholicism to about three tenths of the population.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Switzerland has no state religion, though most of its cantons (except for Geneva and Neuchâtel) recognise official churches ("Landeskirchen"), in all cases Catholic and Swiss Protestant, and in some cantons also the Old Catholic Church and Jewish congregations. These churches are financed by taxation of their adherents.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: According to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, based on cumulative data collected between 2013 and 2017, there were significant differences in the religious affiliations of the five most common ethno-national groups in Switzerland: Swiss nationals were mostly Christians (73%), evenly divided between Catholics (37%), Swiss Protestants (31%) and other Christians (5%); the vast majority of Italian and Portuguese nationals living in Switzerland were Catholics (77% and 74%, respectively); half of German nationals in Switzerland were unaffiliated, while Christians were minority accounting for 47%; and Frenchmen in Switzerland were mostly unaffiliated (55%), while only 38% of them were Christians.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: According to the national structural survey of 2020, Christianity was the religion of 61.2% of the population, of whom 33.8% were Catholics, 21.8% were Swiss Protestants — almost all adherents of Calvinism —, and 5.6% were adherents of other Christian denominations — including Orthodox Christians, Lutherans, nondenominational Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other Christian movements. Christianity has declined significantly since the 1970s, at first in the urban centres and later increasingly also in the rural countrysides.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Islam is the second largest religion in Switzerland after Christianity, adhered to by 5.4% of the population in 2020. Swiss Muslims are mostly of foreign origin (mostly of Arab ancestry those in the Gallo-Romance regions, and mostly of Balkan, Turkish and Iranian ancestry those in the Germanic regions), although there is an increasing number of native Swiss converts. Religious Jews represented 0.2% of the Swiss population in 2020. Other religions present in the country include Hinduism and Buddhism, practised by both local Swiss who have nutrured interest in Eastern doctrines and by immigrants from Asia. There is a Taoist temple, "Ming Shan" (明山, "Mountain of Light"), located in Bullet, Vaud, and built according to the rules of "feng shui"; it is the headquarters of the Swiss Taoist Association and the main centre in Europe of the Taoist tradition of "Wujimen" (无极门, "Gate of Infinity"), which originated on the Min Mountains of Sichuan, China. In the country there are also various new religious movements, among which one of the most influential has been the Theosophy-derived Anthroposophy; the Anthroposophical Society was established by the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s and 1930s in Dornach, Solothurn, and it is known for its promotion of the well-reputed Waldorf schools.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The ancestors of the modern Swiss were the Gaulish Helvetians and Gallicised Rhaetians, whom between the 1st century BCE and the 4th century CE were Romanised and had become part of the Roman Empire, and the Germanic peoples who settled the area of modern Switzerland in the Migration Period, between the 6th and the 7th century, after the collapse of the Roman power; namely the Alemans who settled the eastern regions and maintained their Alemannic German language, and the Burgundians who settled the western fringes of modern Switzerland and Burgundy and were assimilated by the Gallo-Romans. Between the 8th and 9th century the linguistic boundary between the Gallo-Romance-speaking western regions and the central and western Alemannic-speaking regions had already formed clearly, and between the 13th and the 14th century the Swiss Plateau became completely Alemannic-speaking. Pockets of Rhaeto-Romance speakers persisted in isolated valleys of the south-eastern region of modern Switzerland.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: A Roman inscription with the "Chi Rho" symbol in Sion, dated 377, is the earliest datable record of Christianity in the territory of modern Switzerland. The Gallo-Romans abandoned Gallo-Roman syncretism and adopted Christianity already between the 4th and the 5th century, while the Alemans, originally practitioners of Germanic paganism, became Christians between the 6th and the 7th century, when the area was under the Frankish Empire; the Christianisation of the Gauls was promoted at first by Roman officials and local landowners, while the later Christianisation of the Alemans was carried out mostly by convents. Theologically monotheistic, early Christianity integrated popular polytheism by turning it into the cult of Christian saints.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: At the beginning of the 13th century, the Old Swiss Confederacy began to emerge within the Holy Roman Empire from a pact between the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden to resist the power of the House of Habsburg; the pact was soon joined by other territories and by the cities of Zürich, Bern and Basel, who wanted to remain independent from the Habsburgs and from the Dukes of Burgundy. During the following centuries, the confederacy expanded to the entire territory of modern Switzerland as a network of alliances and tributary relations. The Swiss confederacy remained entirely Catholic until the 16th century, although with tiny communities of Jews attested in Swiss cities since the 12th century.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: In the 16th century, Switzerland was swept by the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, and it became the world centre of the Protestant movement of Calvinism, to which a majority of the Swiss converted. Anabaptism and the Radical Reformation, and in the following century Pietism, also made inroads in Switzerland. The development of Protestantism was strictly linked to the growth in power of the cities and their guilds of artisans and merchants; elements of Christianity linked to agrarian life, the cult of saints and images, and monasticism, were abolished, and religious life became centred no longer on ritual but on moral teaching drawn from the interpretation of the Bible. The Alemannic cantons of Zürich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen were the first to officially adopt the new religion under the influence of Huldrych Zwingli, while Geneva became the centre of the movement under the sway of John Calvin, whom was French in origin. Geneva came to be known as the "Calvinist Rome" or the "Protestant Rome". Other areas of Switzerland remained Catholic. During the Counter-Reformation enacted by the Catholic Church in the Council of Trent (1545–1563) to thwart the spread of Protestant movements, Geneva and other Protestant cantons became havens of refuge for Calvinists from elsewhere, and in the 17th century Switzerland welcomed French Huguenots who fled France after the Edict of Nantes (1598), through which Henry IV had granted them freedom in France, was revoked by Louis XIV with the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685).


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Conflicts, and even civil wars, between Protestant and Catholic cantons and cantons' districts arose. To avoid the laceration of the system of alliances between territories, the confederacy adopted the principle of territorial exclusivity of religion ("cuius regio, eius religio"), thereby recognising the plurality of Christian denominations on a constitutional level, although in areas of mixed religious affiliation, including Aargau, Thurgau, the surroundings of St. Gallen, the Grisons and Geneva, armed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants continued. The complete constitutional parity of the two denominations was reached through four "Landfriede" (land peaces), the first in 1529 and the fourth one in 1712. Meanwhile, the Swiss confederacy was recognised as fully independent from the Holy Roman Empire as part of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It was within Protestantism that embryonal ideas of separation of spiritual life from secular life were first developed; in Switzerland, Protestant cantons became the drivers of the economic, political and social innovation of the country, while Catholic cantons would have remained agrarian and backward until the 19th century.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The principle of exclusivity of religion in autonomous regions remained in force until 1798; whoever did not want to be part of a territory's official religion could emigrate, but had to leave all his possessions, although a few Protestant cantons granted a merciful "ius emigrandi" (right of emigration). The short-lived Helvetic Republic, established as a sister republic of France between 1798 and 1803, was as a secular state according to the principles of the French Revolution. After the end of the Helvetic Republic and the restoration of Switzerland as a confederation of states, conflicts between Catholics and Protestants arose again, although popular uprisings after 1830 led many cantons to adopt liberal constitutions which granted religious freedom. In 1845, two Catholic cantons of central Switzerland, namely Fribourg and Valais, formed a separate league, the "Sonderbund", which opposed Protestants and liberals. As more cantons joined the Protestant and liberal faction than the "Sonderbund", the general diet of the cantons asked the dissolution of the latter. A civil war, the Sonderbund War, ensued in 1847, and it resulted in the defeat of the Catholic forces and in the establishment of Switzerland as a federal republic in 1848, under the Swiss Federal Constitution.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The constitution of 1848 declared Switzerland a multilingual and multireligious country; freedom of conscience was recognised as a fundamental right, though only for Christians. However, the cantons continued to have responsibility over the detailed regulation of the relations between church and state, and this led to differing systems, ranging from total separation to official churches ("Landeskirchen") with a subordinated official recognition of other churches. Legal discrimination against non-Christians, Jews, continued, as they had neither freedom of establishment nor freedom of worship, they could live only in the two "Jewish villages" of Endingen and Lengnau, and they could bury their dead only on a designated island in the Rhine; the bans on Jewish establishment and worship were abolished with revisions of the constitution respectively in 1866 and 1874.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The revision of the constitution in 1874 had introduced some restrictions against Catholic institutions: the prohibition of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the prohibition of convents, and the prohibition of electing clerks in the highest federal authorities; these norms were abolished respectively in 1979, 1999 and 2001. The ban on Jesuits was abrogated from the constitution by popular vote, from which resulted that 54.9% of the Swiss were in favour of lifting the ban. At the same time, the 1874 revision of the constitution finally secured some fundamental secular principles: the separation of civil marriage from religious marriage and the separation of the teaching of religion from the rest of education. Over the following decades, freedom of worship and secular principles, combined with free movement of the population, gradually loosened the system of territorial exclusivity of religions which was characteristic of old Switzerland. However, in 1980, a popular vote to gauge the complete separation of church and state resulted in opposition to such change, with only 21.1% voting in support, so that the system of the "Landeskirchen" was retained.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: In the early 20th century, Switzerland had an absolute majority of Protestants, about 60%, and a large population of Catholics, about 40%. After the World War II, the religious composition of the country began to change significantly; the immigration of workers from Italy and Spain sustained a growth of the Catholic population until 1970. Geneva, once the "Protestant Rome", in 1948 became the centre of world Christian ecumenism, hosting the World Council of Churches. Interest among locals brought to Switzerland Eastern religions, mostly Hinduism and Buddhism, first as intellectual systems, later established as practised religions by waves of immigration towards the end of the century. The same strain of comparative synthesis of world religions which in the 19th century had given rise to Theosophy and even earlier to Freemasonry (present among the elites in Switzerland since the 18th century), in the early 20th century led to the establishment of Anthroposophy in Switzerland by the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner. Since the mid-1970s, new migration waves brought to Switzerland Orthodox Christian and Islamic populations from the Balkans, which increased in the 1990s with the welcoming of refugees fleeing the Yugoslav Wars. As a consequence, Islam grew to become today the second largest religion in the country after Christianity. At the same time, identification with, practice of Christianity, and membership in the traditional Christian churches, began to decline, first in the urban centres of Zürich, Basel and Geneva, and then also in the rural countrysides. Since then, Protestantism has declined to about two tenths of the population, and Catholicism to about three tenths of the population, while the proportion of Swiss people not believing in any religion has grown about thirty times.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The Swiss federal state does not have any official religion and does not favour any religion, and on the federal level there is not any administrative office which deals specifically with religious affairs, thus on such level the church and the state are fully separated. Although the preamble of the Swiss Federal Constitution begins "In the name of God Almighty!", the invoked higher power is not to be intended in the Christian sense, but as the higher power of any religion. According to the Constitution, the relationship between the churches and the state has to be governed by the cantons themselves, so that the twenty-six cantons have twenty-six different systems of legislation on religious affairs. If a member of the Federal Council receives religious communities, this only happens in the form of a delegation of the representatives of all the country's major religious communities, so that no single religion has privileged access to the supreme federal authority. The majority of politicians keep a certain distance from religious communities, and political parties of religious character established by the religious communities themselves are marginal, so that religious ideas have little importance in the contemporary Swiss political process.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Law defines that Swiss public schools must be religiously neutral, and that the teaching of religious studies in public schools must not identify unilaterally with any religion or proseytise for it. Moreover, religious symbols are prohibited from being displayed by public schools and public school officials, be it crucifixes in classrooms or headscarves of Muslim female teachers. The state allows religious or philosophical communities to establish confessional private school, though they are still supervised by the state, which imposes certain requirements and conducts inspections; there are private Protestant, Catholic, Montessori, Waldorf (Anthroposophical), Jewish schools, and plans for Islamic schools.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: The Article 15 of the Constitution protects as fundamental rights of individual citizens the belief in any religion or unbelief in any religion, and the performance of religious cult activities, alone or in community with others, and it makes clear that "no one shall be forced" to believe in a religion or participate in religious activities; the Article 36 also introduces a limitation to these rights if they threaten public order or if they encroach upon the basic rights of others, for example prohibiting ritual slaughter as it conflicts with Swiss animal laws and limiting certain public missionary practices. The Article 261 of the Swiss Criminal Code punishes the malicious disturbance or public mocking of religious beliefs and religious practices, and the dishonouring of locations and objects of worship.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: While the federal state is completely neutral in matters of religion, each canton may recognise individual religious communities as juristic persons under public law due to their church sovereignty, thereby subjecting them to better conditions than unrecognised religious communities — it is the case of the "Landeskirchen". The use of cantonal taxes to support cantonal churches has been ruled legal by the Federal Supreme Court, even though they are collected from juristic persons (e.g. corporations) of which irreligious citizens or citizens of unrecognised religions are shareholders.


title: Religion in Switzerland

text: Some observers have identified persisting discrimination against Jews and Muslims in Switzerland; while cases of harassment have mostly been verbal, after 2016 there were a few reports of physical assault against Jews, and Muslim cemeteries were targets of vandalism. In a referendum of November 2009, 57.5% of Swiss voters approved a popular initiative which prohibited the construction of minarets as part of Swiss Islamic mosques (though the four existing minarets of mosques in Zürich, Geneva, Winterthur and Wangen bei Olten were not affected retroactively and remained in place).


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Ferdinand Karl Piëch (; 17 April 1937 – 25 August 2019) was an Austrian business magnate, engineer and executive who was the chairman of the executive board ("Vorstandsvorsitzender") of Volkswagen Group in 1993–2002 and the chairman of the supervisory board ("Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender") of Volkswagen Group in 2002–2015.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: A grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, Piëch started his career at Porsche, before leaving for Audi after an agreement that no member of the Porsche or Piëch families should be involved in the day-to-day operations of the Porsche company. Piëch eventually became the head of Audi, where he is credited with evolving and growing Audi into a competitor to equal Mercedes-Benz and BMW, thanks in part to innovative designs such as the Quattro and 100. In 1993, Piëch became the chairman and CEO of Volkswagen Group, which he is credited with turning into the large conglomerate it is today; He oversaw the purchase of Lamborghini and Bentley, as well as


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: the founding of Bugatti Automobiles, all of which he integrated with the Volkswagen, Škoda, SEAT and Audi brands into a ladder-type structure similar to that used by Alfred Sloan at General Motors. Piëch was required to retire at age 65 per Volkswagen company policy, but he remained on its supervisory board and was involved in the company's strategic decisions until his resignation on 25 April 2015.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Educated as an engineer, Piëch influenced the development of numerous significant cars including the Porsche 911, Audi Quattro and notably, the Bugatti Veyron, which as of 2012 was the fastest, most powerful and most expensive road legal automobile ever built. Due to his influence on the automobile industry, Piëch was named the Car Executive of the Century in 1999 and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2014.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch was born in Vienna, Austria, to Louise ("née" Porsche; Ferdinand's daughter) and Anton Piëch, a lawyer. He studied at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz and graduated from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1962, with a degree in mechanical engineering, having written a master thesis about the development of a Formula One (F1) engine. At the same time, Porsche was involved in F1 and developed an 8-cylinder engine for the Porsche 804.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: From 1963 to 1971, he worked at Porsche in Stuttgart, on the development of the Porsche 906 and following models that led to the successful Porsche 917. In 1972, he moved to Audi in Ingolstadt. Starting from 1975, he was manager of technological engineering, being responsible for the concepts of many Audi models from the 1970s and 1980s, including the Audi 80, Audi 100 and the Audi V8. He celebrated his 40th birthday on 17 April 1977 with a ball at which guests included Giorgetto Giugiaro and at which the staff of the Porsche Hotel presented him with an Audi 80 that was just long and constructed of marzipan. In 1977 he also initiated the development of a car for the World Rally Championship, resulting in the four-wheel drive Audi Quattro. The engine used in the Quattro model was a turbocharged inline-5 cylinder unit.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch held a small engineering company in the time between leaving Porsche AG and joining Audi, and while there, he developed a 5-cylinder in-line diesel engine for Mercedes-Benz. He picked up the concept again after moving to Audi, because there was a market demand for engines with more than 4 cylinders. At the time, Audi (and the Audi-derived VW Passat/Santana model range) used longitudinally mounted inline engines and front wheel drive. More conservative layouts with 6 cylinders were rejected because of engineering and production costs (V6 engine) or packaging requirements (straight 6 did not fit because front wheel drive required that it be mounted in front of the axle).


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: In 1993, Piëch moved to Volkswagen AG, parent company of the Volkswagen Group, where he became Chairman of the Board of Management, succeeding Carl Hahn. At that time Volkswagen was only three months from bankruptcy, and he was central to orchestrating its dramatic turnaround. He retired from the Board of Management in 2002, but still served in an advisory capacity as Chairman of the Supervisory Board.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: In 2000, he was named chairman of Scania AB. He retired from the management board in 2002 and was succeeded as chairman by Bernd Pischetsrieder.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: While head of Volkswagen Group, Piëch was known for his aggressive moves into other markets. He drove the Volkswagen and Audi brands upmarket with great success. Piëch also pursued other marques, successfully acquiring Lamborghini for Audi, and establishing Bugatti Automobiles SAS. His purchase of British Rolls-Royce and Bentley was more controversial. After successfully buying the Crewe, England, car building operation, including the vehicle designs, nameplates, administrative headquarters, production facilities, Spirit of Ecstasy and Rolls-Royce grille shape trademarks, VW was denied the use of the Rolls-Royce brand name, which had been licensed to BMW by Rolls-Royce Holdings, and was thought to be the most valuable part of the division. After tensions had formed between the two companies, VW later sold the Spirit of Ecstasy and Rolls-Royce grille shape trademarks to BMW, which allowed them to found Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, and produce a new line of cars that were unrelated to their predecessors, with all of the traditional Rolls-Royce styling cues. Although Piëch later claimed that he only really wanted the Bentley brand, as it was the higher volume brand, out-selling the equivalent Rolls Royce by around two to one, the loss of the intellectual property rights for Rolls-Royce to rival BMW was widely seen as a major failure.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: What was not a failure, however, was his effort to revitalize Volkswagen in North America. Hahn's previous efforts to regain market share in North America – which he had built up as the head of Volkswagen of America from 1958 to 1965 – were unsuccessful, but Piëch helped reverse VW's fortunes by the decision to manufacture the Volkswagen New Beetle, the introduction of which in 1998 gave Volkswagen of America a much needed impulse, after years of selling competent, but bland offerings in the US.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Due to his continued influence in the auto industry, "Automobile Magazine" announced that Piëch has won their Man of the Year award for 2011.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: At Porsche, Piëch triggered significant changes in the company's policy. For example, the position of drivers in race cars was moved from the left to the right, as this gives advantages on the predominantly clockwise race tracks. After making mainly small race cars that were supposed to be closely related to road cars, Porsche made a risky investment by unexpectedly building twenty-five Porsche 917, surprising the rule makers at the FIA. Even Ferrari had needed to sell his company to Fiat before making such a move. Always thinking big, Piëch started development of a 16-cylinder engine for the Can-Am series. It is probably no coincidence that his grandfather had developed a famous supercharged 16-cylinder engine for the Auto Union racing cars in the 1930s. Piëch was denied the chance to complete it, as a turbocharged version of the existing 12-cylinder was simpler, more powerful and very successful. Three decades later as CEO of Volkswagen Group, Piëch insisted on the very ambitious Bugatti Veyron, with a turbocharged W16-cylinder, and top speed. Some of these figures are still not higher than those of the Porsche 917/30, but higher than most current racing cars. Piëch was also behind the Volkswagen Phaeton luxury saloon, which was intended as a rival to other German luxury cars, but the sales of the model have been disappointing.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch owned a significant share of Porsche, exactly 10%. In order to prevent discussions among the many family members, a policy was established in early 1972 that no Porsche family member is allowed to be involved in the management of the company. Even company founder Ferry Porsche, Piëch's uncle, only held a seat on the supervisory board of Porsche after the company's legal form was changed from a limited partnership to a private legal company. This made Piëch move to Audi after the foundation of his engineering bureau.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch reportedly had 12 children from four different women, though an obituary published by "The Detroit News" mentioned him having 13 children. He was married to his second wife Ursula Piëch from 1984 to his death, he lived with her in retirement in Salzburg, Austria. One of his sons, Toni Piëch, is the founder of car company Piëch Automotive. He was dyslexic, and had a vast car collection that included two Bugatti Veyrons regularly driven by him and his wife.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch collapsed suddenly on 25 August 2019 while having dinner with his wife in Aschau near Rosenheim, Oberbayern. He was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. A specific cause of death wasn't released.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: An engineer by trade, Ferdinand Piëch was both known for his intricate involvement in product development from a technical standpoint, as well as his domineering personality. Piëch has been behind the development of multiple significant and influential automobiles, including the Porsche 911, Third generation (C3) Audi 100, Audi Quattro and Bugatti Veyron. Automotive blog "Jalopnik" said of Piëch, "He is the mad genius behind much of Porsche and Audi’s racing successes as well as VW’s all-out engineering and luxury push from the early 2000s. That’s what gave us cars like the Bugatti Veyron and the 12-cylinder VW Phaeton." Piëch is both noted for turning the Audi brand from an also-ran economy car builder to one of the most respected luxury brands in the world, as well as rescuing Volkswagen as a whole from near-bankruptcy and overseeing its transformation into the massive conglomerate it is today. Fellow automotive executive Bob Lutz described Piëch as "one of the most successful leaders in the automotive business" and "the greatest living product guy" in the automobile industry. "Automotive News" described Piëch as "a world-class eccentric but a figure of transcendent importance in the history of cars and car companies" who has had "The strangest and possibly most significant automotive industry career this side of Henry Ford". In their obituary, "The Guardian" said of Piëch, “His stewardship of VW has been indisputably successful. Piech will go down in history as an automotive legend, in the same class as Gottlieb Daimler, Henry Ford and Kiichiro Toyoda.”


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch has been described as being socially awkward and having an abrasive personality; some automotive journalists who have encountered Piëch described him as being uncomfortable to be around. "Automotive News" once noted, "Many of his CEO peers said they could not hold a normal conversation with him. Discussions could be punctuated with long stretches of unexplained silence." Piëch himself has acknowledged that he occasionally struggles to relate to other people and understand their feelings. As Piëch rose to the top of Volkswagen in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then-CEO Carl Hahn took notice of Piëch's poor social skills and tried to position him as a technocrat kept behind closed doors. Hahn was particularly bothered by how Piëch behaved during a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine; while a Shinto priest was showing the shrine's collection of vintage swords, Piëch examined one and told the priest that it was a fake. Subsequently, Hahn presented the Audi Avus quattro concept car himself at the 1991 Tokyo Motor Show and didn't allow Piëch to take part, which infuriated Piëch due to his extensive personal involvement in the Avus quattro's creation.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Piëch was widely interested in pushing technological boundaries in automotive development, especially as the head of Audi. "Automotive News" noted of this, "The company’s slogan “Vorsprung durch Technik” was the personification of Piech — the belief that technology was the answer to all problems in the auto business. Audi was the test bed to prove his theory and the springboard for his ambition." Piëch often spearheaded the development of audacious vehicles or oversaw business decision and strategies that baffled analysts, but still proved beneficial for the company as a whole. In recounting some of the extraordinary vehicles Volkswagen put in production under Piëch's watch, "Wired" noted that he alone pushed the Bugatti Veyron supercar into production, despite objection from other executives as well as the fact that Volkswagen lost what is believed to be millions on every Veyron sold: "Consider that for a moment. Long past the average retirement age, this gent greenlit one of the largest automotive losses in history and managed to keep his job. Moreover, he was hailed as a hero."


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: An aggressive and demanding manager, Piëch was known for setting both lofty and extremely specific goals and standards for projects. An example of this is with the development of the Volkswagen Phaeton luxury car, in which Piëch laid out ten parameters the car had to meet, amongst them being that the Phaeton should be capable of being driven all day at with an exterior temperature of whilst maintaining the interior temperature at . Piëch requested this even though the Phaeton's top speed was electronically limited to . Another requirement was that the car should possess torsional rigidity of 37,000 N·m/degree. Piëch would often become personally involved in vehicle development, such as how he oversaw the development of the Audi 100's aerodynamics himself, keeping it secret from even Audi's top engineers to prevent any crucial details of the car's aerodynamic capabilities from leaking to competitors. Piëch often liked to ride along with automotive journalists during press test drives and would consider their critiques to improve Volkswagen's vehicles. "Car and Driver" writer John Phillips recounted how when he test drove the Volkswagen New Beetle during its launch in 1997, Piëch rode along and asked for his opinion on how its chassis and driving dynamics could be improved. Similarly, Piëch once demanded that an "Automobile" reviewer take the Volkswagen Phaeton up to its top speed while he rode along in the back seat.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: With a leadership style described as "old fashioned", Piëch was known for his prolific firing of subordinates throughout his career, particularly how he engineered the ousting of former Volkswagen CEO Bernd Pischetsrieder and Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. According to Piëch, he fired any subordinate who "makes the same mistake twice". "The Guardian" noted, "Piech was known for his ability to outmanoeuvre competitors by stoking internal rivalries to his own advantage, even if it resulted in turning against his own managers, including the VW chief executive Bernd Pischetsrieder, to side with VW’s labour leaders." Piëch leveraged this reputation to use threats and intimidation to get subordinates to meet his lofty goals; during Piëch's induction into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2014, fellow automotive executive Bob Lutz recounted a conversation he had with Piëch at the Frankfurt Auto Show in the early 1990s, in which he remarked how he was impressed with the fit and finish and tight body tolerances on Volkswagen's new models. Piëch told Lutz that he achieved this by assembling Volkswagen's top body engineers in his office and telling them they would all be fired if all of Volkswagen's vehicles didn't have body tolerances of 3 millimeters within six weeks. "Wired" described Piëch as "Machiavellian" and "an autocrat's autocrat". Bob Lutz said of his management style, "It's what I call a reign of terror and a culture where performance was driven by fear and intimidation[...]That management style gets short-term results, but it's a culture that's extremely dangerous. Look at dictators. Dictators invariably wind up destroying the very countries they thought their omniscience and omnipotence would make great. It's fast and it's efficient, but at huge risk." He would also describe Piëch as a "mad genius" that while he respected, he would never want to work for or with at any capacity. Lutz, CNBC, the American documentary TV series "Dirty Money", among others, have claimed that the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal is the result of the ruthless and tyrannical corporate culture Piëch installed at the company.


title: Ferdinand Piëch

text: Although Piëch had tried a hostile takeover against Suzuki in 2010 and threatened its management, Suzuki won the case to terminate its partnership with Volkswagen at the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce after Piëch fell from power, and could dissolve the capital tie-up until September 2015.


title: Jack Sprat

text: "Jack Sprat" (or "Jack Spratt") is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19479.


title: Jack Sprat

text: The name "Jack Sprat" was used of people of small stature in the 16th century. This rhyme was an English proverb from at least the mid-17th century. It appeared in John Clarke's collection of sayings in 1639 in the form:


title: Jack Sprat

text: As with many nursery rhymes, "Jack Sprat" may have originated as a satire on a public figure: history writer Linda Alchin suggests that Jack was King Charles I, who was left "lean" when parliament denied him taxation, but with his queen Henrietta Maria he was free to "lick the platter clean" after he dissolved parliament—Charles was a notably short man. An alternative explanation comes from the popular Robin Hood legend, applying it to the disliked King John and his greedy queen Isabella.


title: Jack Sprat

text: The saying entered the canon of English nursery rhymes when it was printed in "Mother Goose's Melody" around 1765, but it may have been adopted for use with children much earlier.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Takata was founded in 1933 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, by Takezo Takada and started to produce lifelines for parachutes, and other textiles. In the early 1950s, the company started to research seat belts. Later they incorporated as "Takata". In the 1960s, Takata started to sell seat-belts and built Japan's first crash test plant for testing seat-belts under real world conditions.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In the 1970s, Takata developed child restraint systems. In the 1980s the company changed its name to "Takata Corporation" and expanded internationally to Korea, the United States, and later to England, to sell seat-belts.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In 2000, Takata Corporation acquired German competitor Petri AG, forming the European subsidiary Takata-Petri, renamed Takata AG in early 2012. Takata AG makes steering wheels and plastic parts, not only for the automotive industry.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On June 25, 2017, Takata filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States and filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan, owing more in compensation than was possible for its survival. The surviving assets were sold to its largest competitor, Chinese owned and U.S. (Michigan) based Key Safety Systems, for about $1.6 billion. On April 11, 2018, following the completion of Key Safety System's acquisition of Takata, the company announced that the company would be renamed to Joyson Safety Systems, and continue to operate in Michigan as Key Safety Systems.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In May 1995, a recall in the U.S. affecting 8,428,402 predominantly Japanese built vehicles made from 1986 to 1991 with seat belts manufactured by the Takata Corporation of Japan, was begun. It was called at the time the "second largest recall in the 30-year history of the Department of Transportation (DOT)". The recall was prompted by an investigation (PE94-052) carried out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Takata-equipped Honda vehicles, after many of their owners complained of seat belt buckles either failing to latch, latching and releasing automatically, or releasing in accidents. It revealed that potentially faulty Takata seat belts were not limited only to Honda vehicles, but to other Japanese imports as well.


title: Takata Corporation

text: NHTSA opened up a second investigation on Takata seatbelts broadly (EA94-036) as well as individual investigations on the vehicle manufacturers using Takata seat belts to determine the magnitude of the defect. This second investigation was only limited to the front seat belt buckles and in particular Takata's 52X and A7X models. This determined that a total of 11 manufacturers were affected by the investigation.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Japanese models sold in the United States by American Honda Motor Co., Isuzu Motors of America Inc., Mazda Motor of America Inc., Nissan North America, Daihatsu Motor Co. American, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America Inc. and Subaru of America Inc. also had affected seat belt buckles.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Moreover, Chrysler, General Motors and Ford all had various models manufactured by Japanese companies with the seat belt buckles concerned, but sold under American names such as the Dodge Stealth and the Geo series (except Prizm) under General Motors.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Ford had vehicles such as the Probe manufactured by Mazda on its MX-6 platform and the Festiva made by Kia in South Korea, but engineered by Mazda that also had the seat belts. However, unlike Chrysler and General Motors, Ford did not admit that their seat belts could be defective.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Initially, some Japanese manufacturers suspected that the seat belt failures were a result of user abuse, rather than a design failure; however, the nine-month investigation by NHTSA concluded that the cause of the defect was that the buckles were made of ABS plastic. Through exposure to ultraviolet light over a period of time, the plastic became brittle and pieces fell off, causing a jamming of the release button mechanism.


title: Takata Corporation

text: The manufacturers involved agreed to a voluntary recall, though this did not go smoothly. Only 18% of the 8.9 million cars and trucks with the Takata belt buckle were repaired two years after the recall had begun. In addition, NHTSA assessed a $50,000 civil penalty against both Honda and Takata for failing to notify the agency about the seat belt defect in a timely manner. Honda was fined because NHTSA believed the company knew about the hazard at least five years before the recall, but never reported the problem to NHTSA, nor offered to conduct a voluntary recall.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Takata began making airbags in 1988 and, as of 2014, held 20 percent of the market. During 2013, several automakers began large recalls of vehicles due to Takata-made airbags. Reports state that the problems may have begun a decade before, with the faulty airbags placed in some Honda models starting in 1998.


title: Takata Corporation

text: Honda stated they knew of more than 100 injuries and thirteen deaths (seven in the United States plus six in Malaysia) that were related to Takata airbags.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In April and May 2013, a total of 3.6 million cars were recalled due to defective Takata airbags. All of those airbags were made at, or otherwise used inflator units manufactured by, Takata's Monclova Plant in Coahuila, Mexico, operated by Takata's North American/Mexican subsidiary, "TK Holdings Inc." In November 2014, BMW announced they would move any orders from the Mexican plant to a Takata plant in Germany.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In June 2014, Takata admitted their Mexican subsidiary had mishandled the manufacture of explosive propellants and improperly stored chemicals used in airbags. Identifying vehicles with defective airbags was made more difficult by the failure of TK Holdings Inc. to keep proper quality control records. That prompted another round of recalls in June 2014.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In their statement the company said, "We take this situation seriously, will strengthen our quality control and make a concerted effort to prevent a recurrence".


title: Takata Corporation

text: On June 23, 2014, auto manufacturers BMW, Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, and Toyota announced they were recalling over three million vehicles worldwide due to Takata Corporation-made airbags. The reason was that they could rupture and send debris flying inside the vehicle. This was in response to a US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation that was initiated after the NHTSA received three injury complaints.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In a statement on June 23, 2014, Takata said they thought excessive moisture was the cause of the defect. Haruo Otani, an official at the vehicle recall section of the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, said that moisture and humidity could be seeping inside inflators, destabilizing the volatile propellant inside.


title: Takata Corporation

text: In July 2014, a pregnant Malaysian woman was killed in a collision involving her 2003 Honda City which contained the defective airbag. The woman, aged 42, died when a metal fragment from a ruptured driver's airbag sliced into her neck in the accident in which she was driving at around 30 km/h (18 mph) when another vehicle hit her at a junction, according to a lawsuit filed by her father at a Miami federal court. Her daughter, delivered after the mother's death, died three days later.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On November 18, 2014, the NHTSA ordered Takata to initiate a nationwide airbag recall. The action came as 10 automakers in the U.S. recalled hundreds of thousands of cars equipped with potentially faulty air bags manufactured by Takata.


title: Takata Corporation

text: As of May 19, 2015, Takata is now responsible for the largest auto recall in history. Takata has already recalled 40 million vehicles across 12 vehicle brands for "Airbags that could explode and potentially send shrapnel into the face and body of both the driver and front seat passenger". This recall will bring the number up to about 53 million automobiles eligible for this recall. In November 2015, Takata was fined $200 million ($70 million paid upfront) by U.S. federal regulators in response to Takata's admission of a fault. Toyota, Mazda and Honda have said that they will not use ammonium nitrate-based inflators.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On May 4, 2016, the NHTSA announced recall campaigns of an additional estimated 35-40 million inflators, adding to the already 28.8 million inflators previously recalled.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On January 13, 2017, the United States charged three Takata executives, Shinichi Tanaka, Hideo Nakajima and Tsuneo Chikaraishi for Takata's exploding airbags. The company agreed to plead guilty and to pay $1 billion to resolve the investigation, which includes a $25 million fine, $125 million for victim compensation and $850 million to compensate automobile manufacturers. At least 16 deaths are linked to the defective airbags.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On 28 February 2018 the Australian Federal Government announced the compulsory recall of all cars fitted with Takata airbags. "About 2.3 million vehicles will be subject to the compulsory recall and the airbags must be replaced within two years."


title: Takata Corporation

text: On 1 March 2018, it was announced that 106,806 Volkswagen vehicles, including models such as the Golf, Passat, Polo, CC Eos, and 'Up!', have been recalled for containing defective Takata airbags.


title: Takata Corporation

text: On 2 March 2018, Holden announced that the airbag recall now includes 330,000 of their Australian vehicles, despite not originally having any of their cars in the federal government's compulsory recall list.