title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2002, Pawlenty wanted to run for governor, but party leaders made it clear they favored businessman Brian Sullivan. Pawlenty then decided on the U.S. Senate, but abandoned those plans when Vice President Dick Cheney asked him to step aside and allow former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman to challenge Senator Paul Wellstone without Republican primary opposition. Pawlenty returned to his original ambition and won a hard-fought and narrow race against Sullivan in the Republican primary.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In the general election, Pawlenty faced two strong opponents. His main rival was veteran Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) state senator Roger Moe. Former Democratic Congressman Tim Penny ran on the Independence Party ticket (Governor Jesse Ventura, a member of the Independence Party, chose not to seek reelection). Until mid-October 2002, all three were essentially tied in the polls. Pawlenty's major campaign stances included a pledge not to raise taxes to balance the state's budget deficit (while allowing increases in license and user fees); that visa expiration dates be required to be printed on driver's licenses; that women seeking an abortion be required to wait 24 hours; enactment of a concealed carry gun law; and reform of the state's education requirements. He won the election with 43.8% of the vote. His largest gains after the tied polling were reportedly among voters in the suburbs of Minneapolis–St. Paul.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty ran for reelection in 2006. Conservatives criticized him on funding issues, in particular two pieces of legislation for stadiums for the Gophers and Minnesota Twins, and bond issues for public transit, including the Northstar commuter rail line.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: The race included Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch, of the DFL; Peter Hutchinson of the Independence Party; and Ken Pentel of the Green Party. Pawlenty won, defeating Hatch by less than one percent, though both the state House and Senate gained DFL majorities.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty was elected in 2002 on a platform of balancing the state's budget without raising taxes. He emphasized his campaign and first term with the Taxpayers League of Minnesota slogan "no new taxes". His governorship was characterized by a historically low rate of spending growth. According to the Minnesota Management and Budget Department, general-fund expenditures from 2004 to 2011 increased an average of 3.5% per two-year term, compared to an average of 21.1% from 1960 to 2003 (these numbers are not inflation-adjusted). University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs said that slowing state spending and opposing tax increases were Pawlenty's signature issues.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In his first year as governor, Pawlenty inherited a projected two-year budget deficit of $4.3 billion, the largest in Minnesota's history. After a contentious budget session with a Democrat-controlled Senate, he signed a package of fee increases, spending reductions, and government reorganization that eliminated the deficit. It reduced the rate of funding increases for state services, including transportation, social services, and welfare, and enacted a perennial proposal to restructure city aid based on immediate need rather than historical factors. Pawlenty agreed to several compromises, abandoning a public employee wage freeze and property tax restrictions.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: During his second term, Pawlenty erased a $2.7-billion deficit by cutting spending, shifting payments, and using one-time federal stimulus money. His final budget (2010–11) was the state's first two-year period since 1960 in which net government expenditures decreased. Pawlenty has claimed this as "the first time in 150 years" that spending was cut, but fact-checkers disputed this claim as no public budget records before 1960 are known to exist.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Some criticized Pawlenty for providing a short-term budget solution but coming up short in his long-term strategy as governor. The state department of Management and Budget reported that the two-year budget starting in July 2011 was projected to come up $4.4 billion short. Former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson, a Republican, criticized Pawlenty's budget strategy: he borrowed more than $1 billion from the tobacco settlement (money set aside for health care), more than $1.4 billion from K-12 education funding, and more than $400 million from the Health Care Access Fund for low-income families, among other short-term shifts in accounting. The result was a $5-billion deficit, the seventh largest in the United States. Minnesota property taxes rose $2.5 billion, more than the previous 16 years combined, and Moody's lowered the state's bond rating. Carlson told "Time", "I don't think any governor has left behind a worse financial mess than [Pawlenty] has." Pawlenty responded, "My friend governor Arne Carlson is, of course, now an Obama and John Kerry supporter."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: While Pawlenty said he was "confident" in his right to use unallotment, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled against him, 4 to 3, in a May 2010 decision. His budget had been the subject of a lawsuit in Ramsey County District Court, which was decided against him. Judge Kathleen Gearin ruled that Pawlenty had exceeded his constitutional authority in making unilateral spending cuts to a $5.3-million special dietary program that he had unalloted. Attorney David Lillehaug said initially, "This is, I don't think it's understating this to say, this is one of the most important court cases in Minnesota legal history." Pawlenty announced the following day that he would appeal; he filed his brief in February, and arguments were heard on March 15. In May, the Supreme Court affirmed Gearin's ruling, writing, "Because the legislative and executive branches never enacted a balanced budget for the 2010–2011 biennium, use of the unallotment power to address the unresolved deficit exceeded the authority granted to the executive branch by the statute." Pawlenty responded:


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: I will fight to reduce spending and taxes in Minnesota and that battle continues. My commitment to the people of Minnesota remains the same: we will balance the budget without raising taxes.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: After the ruling, as the 2010 legislative session drew to a close, Pawlenty vetoed a budget that would have fixed a $2.9-billion deficit by adding a new tax bracket for six-figure incomes. In response to the proposal, he criticized Democrats for attempting to raise taxes during an extremely difficult economic situation. Eventually, due in part to the efforts of House Speaker Margaret Kelliher, who was running for the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor of Minnesota, the legislature passed legislation approving nearly all the original unallotments.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Since the Minnesota Constitution prohibits state-run gambling outside of Native territory, Pawlenty proposed negotiating with Minnesota's 11 tribes over profit-sharing of their casinos. Legislators also pushed a proposal to turn Canterbury Park horse track into a racino. The plan was poorly received by Northern Tribes who would operate part of the racino, citing reluctance to compete with other tribes. Tribes with casinos opposed the expanded gambling and some legislators objected on moral grounds that the state shouldn't exploit problem gamblers. Politicians in heavy tribal areas feared losing campaign-finance sources if they supported the plan. Delays by the Legislature ended with the bill being pulled from committee. Tribes spent millions lobbying legislatures in 2004.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty worked throughout 2006 to fund a Minnesota Twins baseball stadium in Minneapolis. The resulting Minnesota Twins-Hennepin County ballpark bill called for an increased county sales tax, which passed the state legislature and was symbolically signed in at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. The majority of Hennepin County commissioners did not feel a referendum was necessary to approve the sales tax because of the delay it would cause. Pawlenty and the legislature agreed, citing 10 years of debate, and exempted the county from state law requiring one in the bill.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In June 2006, Pawlenty signed a $999.9-million public works bill that included funding for additional work on the Northstar Commuter rail line (a change in position from reservations about the idea he initially expressed), an expanded Faribault prison, a bioscience building at the University of Minnesota, and science facilities at Minnesota State University in Mankato. The bill also funded a $26-million expansion of the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2011, Pawlenty shut down an Islamic finance program that was part of a larger program to increase home ownership in Minnesota. His spokesperson said the program accommodated the Muslim ban on interest. Adam Sorensen from "Time" questioned whether this was a case of double standards, pointing out New York's kosher food regulations, Blue Laws that prohibit alcohol sales on Sundays, and Pawlenty's own creation of "The Governor's Council On Faith-Based And Community Initiatives".


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In the budget process, Pawlenty made an effort to preserve education funding while cutting other government spending. In 2009, he bolstered education funding with federal stimulus grants. Despite this, education funding fell from $9,700 to $8,400 per student (adjusted for inflation) during his tenure. Pawlenty was an advocate of charter schools and was praised by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools for his education policies. In 2010, the organization rated Minnesota #1 in the country for charter school promotion.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty oversaw the repeal of the "Profile of Learning" kindergarten through 12th grade graduation requirements and sought to reinstate them. Renamed the "Minnesota Academic Standards," they were guided by Department of Education commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke. The bill's first draft raised concern among the education review boards about the amount of content, its age-appropriateness, and a Eurocentric social sciences portion. Yecke revised and expanded material based on the response. Both legislative houses passed the Academic Standards bill, but her confirmation as commissioner was rejected by the DFL-majority Minnesota Senate. She was seen as an outsider coming from Virginia and became unpopular for having pushed the academic reforms during a tight budget session as well as her critical view of Minnesota public schools. In her confirmation hearing, DFLers also expressed concern over her conservative viewpoints.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In June 2006, Pawlenty proposed the "ACHIEVE" program for the top 25% of high school graduates. The program would pay for tuition for the first 2 years (4 years for selected fields such as science, technology, engineering and math) and would cost the state an estimated $112 million per 2-year cycle. The program was not included in the 2007 higher education bill.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty used an accounting change called a tax shift to balance the state deficit without raising taxes. School districts statewide unexpectedly lost $58 million in interest and reserve revenue.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2010, Pawlenty vetoed a bill that the legislature had passed 110 to 20 (HF 3164), calling for Minnesota State Colleges & Universities (MnSCU) to revamp its credit-transferring system within five years to fix "minimal loss of credits for transferring students" who had been losing between 10 and 30 percent of their credits. Pawlenty found it "unnecessary" because MnSCU was fixing its system already "through internal actions and policy changes".


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: During Pawlenty's first term, urban traffic congestion was a significant concern of voters. He appointed his lieutenant governor, Carol Molnau, as transportation commissioner, and the legislature approved the appointment in May 2004. Molnau attempted to reform the transportation department, Mn/DOT, using concepts such as "design-build". Legislators criticized her performance as transportation commissioner, citing ineffective leadership and management, and removed her from that role in February 2008, a decision Pawlenty said was motivated by partisanship.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty favored raising fees and imposing toll lanes on roads as the primary means of discouraging excessive traffic. During his term, the carpool lanes of Interstate 394 leading into downtown Minneapolis were converted into high-occupancy toll lanes. Pawlenty used or threatened vetoes in 2005, 2007 and 2008 on legislation funding proposed highway expansion, infrastructure repairs, road maintenance, and mass transit. The 2008 veto was in spite of Pawlenty's announcement that he would consider reversing his opposition to a state gas-tax increase for funding road and bridge repairs in the wake of the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty had opposed the Northstar Commuter Rail as a legislator, but changed his position in 2004, announcing a funding plan to jump-start the project, when the Bush administration determined the rail line was deemed cost-effective and time-saving for commuters.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In April 2008, during the budget bonding bill signing, Pawlenty used his line-item veto on $70 million for building the Central Corridor light-rail project intended to connect Minneapolis and Saint Paul. In vetoing the expenditure, he did not consult Metro Council head Peter Bell, the project leader. Pawlenty said he vetoed the bill in order to send a message to the legislature, which had exceeded his initial budget request, that they needed to "stay focused, be fiscally disciplined, set priorities and solve this budget crisis in a fiscally disciplined way." But he supported the project and had requested the money in the bonding bill he submitted to the legislature. The veto disappointed some of Minnesota's U.S. representatives, including Republican Senator Norm Coleman, who pledged to "raise my voice as strong as I can, as loud as I can. The federal commitment is there." Pawlenty's veto might have delayed the state's ability to receive federal matching funds for the project, but Bell said the project was not derailed. The Central Corridor funding issue was resolved on May 19, 2008, with the state pledging the original amount for the project after legislators compromised with Pawlenty's budget requests.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: There were Republican state legislators who supported other cuts of the bonding bill, including Doug Magnus, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation Finance Division, who praised Pawlenty's "fiscal responsibility". Critics, including Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, called Pawlenty's veto "political gamesmanship", seeing it as retribution for the legislature's override of Pawlenty's veto of a transportation bonding bill. They noted that cuts overwhelmingly targeted Democratic districts, and Democratic stronghold Saint Paul most heavily.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Crime in Minnesota was a high-profile political issue during Pawlenty's governorship. When crime rates in Minneapolis spiked 16% from 2004 to 2005, city officials blamed Pawlenty for large cuts to state aid, which they said restricted public safety resources. He in turn criticized the city for poorly allocating its funding.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty made two large efforts to expand penalties for sexual offenders. In response to his first proposal in 2005, the state legislature passed a large package of sentencing reforms. One new instrument was the possibility of a life sentence without parole for serious offenders. Pawlenty expressed disapproval of the courts' reluctance to use this option: only seven people received such a sentence in its first two years of implementation. He pushed for even harsher sentences in 2010, increasing the presumptive sentence for first-degree sex offenses from 12 years to 25 and increasing it further for repeat offenders. At the same time he advocated a $90-million expansion of the state's civil commitment program for sexual offenders, maintaining that the increased criminal sentences would keep the commitment program's cost under control. According to the "Star Tribune", "A report on Minnesota's sex-offender program delivered to legislators in the final days of the Pawlenty administration was heavily edited by a top political appointee to reflect the former governor's skepticism about the effectiveness of treatment and to delete arguments for expanded community resources for offenders."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Early in 2006, after issuing a study that estimated the cost of illegal immigration to the state as approximately $188 million, Pawlenty announced a program for changing the way the state dealt with persons who were in the United States illegally. Pawlenty said that the economic benefits of illegal immigration did not justify the illegal behavior. Pawlenty's extensive proposal included the designation of 10 state law enforcement officials as the Minnesota Illegal Immigration Enforcement Team, "trained to question, detain and arrest suspected illegal immigrants" with a focus on "such crimes as human trafficking, identity theft, methamphetamine distribution and terrorism". He rounded out his proposal with tougher penalties for false identification and instituting a fine of up to $5,000 for employers of illegal immigrants. His proposal was challenged by DFL senators who preferred increased legal immigration to punitive action.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Minnesota has mandated a 10% mixture of gasoline and ethanol (gasohol) since 1997. Pawlenty has also lobbied the Governors' Ethanol Coalition to mandate higher ethanol use nationwide.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Conservative Republican governors were not supportive of Pawlenty's presentation on clean energy to the governor's association, which he gave in cooperation with Ed Rendell, who was the governor of Pennsylvania and the National Governors Association's Democratic vice-chairman. With Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Pawlenty was co-chair of the association's energy committee. The effort received "adamant opposition" from governors of oil producing states.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2007, Governor Pawlenty signed the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007 into law and, along with six other Midwestern governors, the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord. These directed state agencies to develop a plan to reduce greenhouse gases, and "develop a market-based and multi-sector cap-and-trade mechanism". However, by 2009 Pawlenty had reversed his position and called cap-and-trade "overly bureaucratic" and a potential "disaster". By 2011, Pawlenty's position had changed sufficiently to state "the weight of the evidence is that most of it, maybe all of it, is because of natural causes."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2004, Minnesota's "Star Tribune" newspaper opined that the credibility of Pawlenty's commissioner of health, Dianne Mandernach, suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. She also angered many when it was learned she had delayed releasing government research on cancer in miners. In 2007, Mandernach resigned.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2005, Pawlenty asked a U.S. Senate subcommittee to allow his MinnesotaCare health plan to expand and continue allowing state residents and employees to import cheaper Canadian prescription drugs.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2007, Pawlenty signed into law the 2007 Omnibus Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill, which provided funding for the Health Care Transformation Task Force, a panel of health care experts charged with exploring ways to reduce health care spending, improve quality, and ensure that Minnesota develops a universal health care plan by 2011.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Later in his tenure he used health care funding cuts as a mechanism to balance the state budget. After years of assuring doctors that the state "sick tax" would be used only to fund health welfare programs, in 2009 Pawlenty recommended a 3% cut in physician reimbursements from the state and asked that the sick tax be put instead into the state's general budget. Pawlenty used a line-item veto to remove $381 million from health and human services funding, a removal which could lead to 35,000 Minnesotans' losing their General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) health insurance in 2011. Hennepin County Medical Center—the largest provider of health care to Minnesota's poor and uninsured—closed two clinics, reduced its staff and reduced access to non-emergency services. State Senator Linda Berglin wrote a bill that would extend GAMC funding.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2010, he refused federal health care funds including more than $1 billion to expand the number of Minnesotans covered by Medicaid, $68 million for a high-risk insurance pool, $1 million to help set up an insurance exchange where consumers could shop for health coverage, and $850,000 for teenage pregnancy prevention. Pawlenty accepted a $500,000 abstinence-only sex-education grant that would require $350,000 in matching state money. Pawlenty said, "It doesn't say we have to apply for all of them."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty's first term coincided with the deployment of National Guardsmen from numerous states, connected with the War on Terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his two terms Pawlenty made trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kuwait visiting Minnesota troops.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty was visited in 2004 by Mexican President Vicente Fox in talks to strengthen trade. Fox announced that his country would open a consulate in Minnesota the next year, removing the need for Mexican residents in the state to travel out of state for identification papers and other materials. In mid-2006, in response to illegal immigration, Pawlenty sent Minnesota National Guardsmen to the U.S.–Mexico border at the request of the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty took a delegation of nearly 200 Minnesotan business, government, academic and civic leaders on a weeklong trip to China in mid-November 2005. The stated objectives were to provide a forum for companies to acquire market information, assess market potential, evaluate market entry strategies and identify potential business partners, as well as to promote Chinese investment in Minnesota. Pawlenty also led Minnesota trade delegations to Canada in 2003, Poland and the Czech Republic in 2004, India in 2007, and Israel in 2008.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Throughout his eight-year tenure, Pawlenty hosted a weekly one-hour radio show on WCCO-AM, a tradition he inherited from his predecessor as governor, Jesse Ventura. Pawlenty was the chairman of the National Governors Association for the 2007–2008 term. He also served as Chair of the Midwestern Governors Association in 2006.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Beginning in 2005, Pawlenty was rumored in the press as a potential candidate for president of the United States. When formally announcing his candidacy for a second term as Governor of Minnesota on May 31, 2006, Pawlenty said, "As to my future, if I run for governor and win, I will serve out my term for four years as governor." On January 15, 2007, after being reelected, Pawlenty said, "I am committed to serving out my term as governor. That's what I am going to do."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2007, it was announced that Pawlenty would be serving in a lead role for McCain as a national co-chair of his presidential exploratory committee which led to Pawlenty's becoming co-chairman of McCain's campaign (along with Phil Gramm and Tom Loeffler). In January 2008, a reporter for the Minneapolis "Star Tribune" suggested Pawlenty's renewed focus on his proposed immigration reform plans might be politically motivated as counterbalance to McCain's less favorable guest worker program.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: For many weeks, Pawlenty was widely considered to be a leading candidate for the vice-presidential nomination on the Republican ticket with John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. In a surprise, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. In the aftermath of the running mate selection, Pawlenty was regarded as a potential contender for the position of Secretary of Transportation in a possible McCain presidency.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In 2008, Pawlenty expressed support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). But in 2010, he claimed that he had made those statements solely as a surrogate for presidential nominee McCain and never actually supported the idea himself. On May 23, 2011, Pawlenty formally announced he'd run for the Republican presidential nomination, saying, "politicians are often afraid that if they're too honest, they might lose an election. I'm afraid that in 2012, if we're not honest enough, we may lose our country."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In February 2018, Pawlenty began considering running for election for a third term as Governor of Minnesota in 2018, and started meeting with Republican donors and advisors. Pawlenty announced his candidacy on April 5, 2018. He eventually lost the primary to Jeff Johnson, the Hennepin County Commissioner. Pawlenty's campaign was affected by disparaging statements he made about then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Although Pawlenty eventually declared his support for Trump before running for governor, he said after his defeat that the "Republican party has shifted" and that he was not a "Trump-like politician" in the "era of Trump". He said he was ending his career in politics.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In February 2005, ABC News identified him as a potential candidate for president. Pawlenty decided not to seek a third consecutive term as governor, and so was not a candidate in the November 2010 gubernatorial election. In July 2009, Public Policy Polling conducted a poll that showed that President Obama was favored to win against Pawlenty in his home state of Minnesota by more than 10 points. In October 2009, a CNN article suggested that Pawlenty was contemplating a 2012 White House bid. Among those advising him in preparation for a potential presidential run was lobbyist and former Congressman Vin Weber.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In late 2009, Pawlenty began taking steps that many saw as leading to a 2012 presidential bid. He visited Iowa in November 2009 and April 2010, making political speeches. In January 2011, the "New York Times" reported that "Few Americans, in fact, even know his name." In January 2011, Pawlenty told the College Republicans group at The George Washington University "If I decide to run it would be for president, not vice president."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty went on tour for his book "Courage to Stand", and as of January 18, his book had reached #1,979 on Amazon.com's list of bestsellers. Pawlenty calls himself a social conservative. In his extended interview with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show", he said he thinks United States Social Security and Medicare need to be cut to balance the federal budget. Pawlenty believes that state governments should outlaw abortion, except for cases of rape, incest, and to save a woman's life. He thinks the United States Supreme Court decided "Roe v. Wade" wrongly, abortion being a state, not a federal, matter. He opposes same-sex marriage and civil unions, and said on talk radio "... I have been a public supporter of maintaining Don't ask, don't tell and I would support reinstating it as well".


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In December 2010, Pawlenty was one of three U.S. governors who publicly declared solidarity with the Christian-right group Family Research Council.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty's tour was in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Dallas, and it ended January in Iowa where the Iowa Caucuses were scheduled for February 6, 2012. "That will come up fast," he said, "if I do run." In Minneapolis, speaking to Pat Kessler of WCCO-TV who asked about his feelings regarding a potential run for president by Representative Michele Bachmann, "I have a lot of respect for Michele Bachmann … Whether she runs or not, it's gonna be a big field. There's gonna be five, six, seven, eight people running … Whoever wants to run can run. The more, the merrier."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In a December 2010 column in "The Wall Street Journal", Pawlenty argued in favor of the historical benefits of "private sector" labor unions and strongly against "public sector" labor unions, whose collective bargaining rights he would like to see curbed: "The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America's working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation." He also criticized modern unions: "The moral case for unions—protecting working families from exploitation—does not apply to public employment... Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: On March 21, 2011, Pawlenty announced via Facebook that he had formed an exploratory committee in preparation for a potential run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: On April 12, 2011, Pawlenty said on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight" that he was "running for president" and not for vice president, adding that a formal announcement would be given in several weeks. On Twitter, his spokesman said CNN took his comments out of context.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: On May 23, 2011, Pawlenty launched his candidacy for president in a speech in Iowa stating: "I'm going to try something a little unusual in politics. I'm just going to tell the truth." A YouTube video appeared a day before. "The Wall Street Journal" wrote of his candidacy, and the luck he experienced in the GOP's field, that Pawlenty has a "golden chance to become the chief rival to... Mitt Romney".


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty finished third in the Ames Straw Poll on August 13, 2011, behind the winner Michele Bachmann and the runner-up Ron Paul. Before the Ames debate, he took a more aggressive stance against Romney, including the coining the term "Obamneycare". When pressed by John King during CNN's June 13, 2011, debate to address why he used the word, he backed off. However, he denied that he backed off. The following day he announced his decision to withdraw from the presidential race. On September 12, 2011, Pawlenty announced his endorsement of former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as well as his position as national co-chair for Romney's campaign. Romney retired over $400,000 of Pawlenty's campaign debt.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: On September 20, 2012, Pawlenty's advisor Brian McClung announced to Associated Press that Pawlenty would resign as the co-chairman of Mitt Romney's electoral campaign. He was to head the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), a financial service industry lobby group in Washington, D.C. He would not be running in the 2014 gubernatorial election in Minnesota nor in the state's 2014 senatorial election. He assumed the positions of President & CEO. He replaced Steve Bartlett, a former U.S. Representative from Texas who had held the positions since 1999.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In November 2012, Pawlenty said that "Republicans and Democrats will have to reconcile their differences on spending and taxes because the 'walls of reality are closing in on them'" relative to the federal government's looming "fiscal cliff". Presenting himself as not from Wall Street or from Washington and, having previously criticized "entrenched financial interests", he said he could "bring a fresh and new voice to those debates". He also "refuted assertions that implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, legislation enacted roughly 27 months [earlier] in response to the financial crisis, ha[d] been delayed because of lobbying".


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty and his wife Mary have two daughters, Anna and Mara. Mary was appointed as a judge of the Dakota County District Court in Hastings, Minnesota, in 1994. After he was elected governor in 2002, the family remained at their Eagan home instead of moving into the Governor's residence because his wife was required to live in her judicial district. In 2007, she left her judicial position to become General Counsel of the National Arbitration Forum, a dispute-resolution company based in Minneapolis. She stayed only briefly before departing for another dispute-resolution company, the Gilbert Mediation Center.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty was raised a Roman Catholic. His conversion to Evangelical Protestantism has been attributed to Mary, who is a member of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a member congregation of the Minnesota Baptist Conference. In a January 2011 interview, Pawlenty said, "I love and respect and admire the Catholic Church. I still attend Mass once in a while there. The church I now attend is an interdenominational church which has got many former Catholics in it, and so we share the Christian faith and the Bible. I had to reconcile my faith life with my wife so we could have a consistent, integrated family faith life."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty is generally considered a conservative on the American political spectrum. With regard to his economic record, he has drawn mixed reviews from fiscally conservative interest groups. The lobbying group Taxpayers League of Minnesota gave Pawlenty an average approval score of 80% during his years as a state legislator, while the Cato Institute think-tank gave him scores ranging from C to A across his eight years as governor. In February 2008, "Washington Post" columnist Robert Novak wrote that Pawlenty was the most conservative Minnesota governor since Governor Theodore Christianson in the 1920s. A 2011 white paper by the Club for Growth, analyzing Pawlenty as a presidential candidate, found his political stance difficult to identify. The group praised him for reduced growth in spending and taxation, but found that he "has some simply inexcusable tax hikes in his record" and questioned his support of proposals such as "mandatory vegetable oil in gasoline, cap and trade, and a statewide smoking ban". Chris Edwards, a director at Cato, speculated that Pawlenty's rightward tack in his second term was related to his impending presidential run. In Pawlenty's 2018 Minnesota gubernatorial campaign, he received an A rating from the National Rifle Association, supported permit-to-carry laws, and was open to an optional background check for private firearm sales.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: Pawlenty voted for President Donald Trump and "support[s] most of what's he's doing, nearly all of what he's doing on a policy level." In 2016, Pawlenty had expressed disapproval of Trump's "comments and language and behavior", calling the president "unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit" during his campaign. Pawlenty stated that since the election, "he's made a lot of great progress as leader of our country and president of the United States in terms of policy priorities and the outcomes."


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In April 2009, 46% of Minnesotans approved of Pawlenty, while 40% disapproved. Among registered Republicans nationwide in July 2009, 38% had a favorable view of him while 33% didn't, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey. In March 2010, 42% of Minnesotans approved of Pawlenty, while 52% disapproved.


title: Tim Pawlenty

text: In October 2010, a Rasmussen report showed that Pawlenty had a 49% approval rating among Minnesotans, with 49% disapproving. A March 2011 survey by Gallup stated that Pawlenty began his presidential run with only 41% name recognition in the GOP. Also in March 2011, the Public Policy Polling (PPP) agency found that nationwide voters had a net negative view of Pawlenty, with 15% viewing him favorably versus 33% unfavorably. In a 2011 PPP poll of registered Minnesota voters conducted from May 27–30, 42% of Minnesotans had a favorable opinion of Pawlenty, while 52% had an unfavorable opinion of him. In the presidential race, President Obama lead Pawlenty by 51% to 43%, suggesting Pawlenty could lose his home state to President Obama were he the 2012 GOP nominee.


title: Genesys (company)

text: Genesys, or Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., is an American software company that sells customer experience (CX) and call center technology to mid-sized and large businesses. It sells both cloud-based and hybrid cloud software. The company was founded in 1990 and was acquired by investment firms Permira Funds and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) in February 2012.


title: Genesys (company)

text: Genesys was founded by Gregory Shenkkman and Alec Miloslavsky in October 1990. The company's original seed funding was $150,000 in loans from the founders' families. The company completed its initial public offering (IPO) in June 1997 and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GCTI.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In July 2016, private equity investor Hellman & Friedman purchased a $900 million stake in Genesys from majority owners Permira and Technology Crossover Ventures, valuing the company at $3.8 billion.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In May 2019, former Skype CEO Tony Bates joined Genesys as the new CEO, with former CEO Segre moving to the position of chairman.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In 2002, Genesys parent Alcatel acquired Telera, a Campbell, California-based developer of voice portal and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and merged the company into Genesys.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In April 2006, Genesys acquired VoiceGenie Technologies, a developer of voice self-service software based on VoiceXML.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In December 2007, Genesys announced it acquired Informiam, a developer of performance management software for customer service operations.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In January 2009, Genesys announced the acquisition of Conseros, a developer of high-volume work item management software and SDE Software Development Engineering, a creator of hosting management software for contact centers.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In May 2013, the company acquired Angel.com, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions, from parent company MicroStrategy, for $110 million.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In March 2014, the company acquired Solariat, a developer of software to measure and manage social media engagements for customers.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In May 2014, the company acquired OVM Solutions, a developer of cloud-based customer communications software.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In 2016, the company acquired the Genesys division of EIT, its regional partner in Korea. In December, Genesys acquired Interactive Intelligence, a developer of customer experience software for the cloud, for $1.4B


title: Genesys (company)

text: In February 2017, Genesys acquired Silver Lining, an employee performance management company that developed applications to support and analyze employee performance and learning automation.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In March 2020, the company acquired nGUVU, a partner purchased to add gamification to its workforce engagement management suite.


title: Genesys (company)

text: In March, 2021, the company announced the acquisition the Bold360 suite of digital engagement software from LogMeIn.


title: Genesys (company)

text: The company develops call center software for businesses. The software is available over the cloud, or as on-premises software. The company's products include the following:


title: Genesys (company)

text: Genesys is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and has offices in Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia.


title: Genesys (company)

text: Genesys is the primary sponsor of IndyCar Series driver James Hinchcliffe in the #29 Andretti Autosport Honda. The company also has sponsorships with the Texas Motor Speedway for the Genesys 300 and Genesys 600 races.


title: Slash (album)

text: Slash is the debut album by American rock and roll musician Saul "Slash" Hudson, best known as the lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses. Released in 2010, the album was produced by Eric Valentine and features multiple musicians, including four of the five members of the "Appetite for Destruction"-era Guns N' Roses lineup: Slash himself, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler.


title: Slash (album)

text: In his 2007 autobiography, Slash mentioned he was planning a solo album, and listed some of the vocalists with whom he would like to work. He stated that the album would be called "Slash & Friends" (although "& Friends" was later dropped from the title). Slash's wife Perla mentioned in a 2008 interview that the album would include "everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Fergie".


title: Slash (album)

text: The song "Crazy" featuring Chester Bennington was recorded for the album but was blocked to avoid conflict with a pending release by Bennington's group Linkin Park; "A Thousand Suns" was released a few months later after Slash's album was issued. Slash re-rerecorded the song with Lemmy on vocals as "Doctor Alibi". Slash reported rights to "Crazy" were owned by Bennington's family after his 2017 suicide, with any possible release of the song needing their approval.


title: Slash (album)

text: On November 11, 2009, preceding the release of the album, Slash released the Japan-only single "Sahara", featuring Japanese vocalist Koshi Inaba (from B'z) who contributed Japanese and English lyrics. It charted at number four on the Oricon Singles Chart, as well number six on the Billboard Japan Hot 100 and number four on the Top Singles Sales chart. It has been awarded Western "Single of the Year" award at the 24th Japan Gold Disc Award by RIAJ.


title: Slash (album)

text: On January 16, Slash made an appearance at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show. On January 19, 2010, Slash teamed up with Linkin Park's Music for Relief, along with Alanis Morissette, The All-American Rejects and others, and donated a previously unreleased track, "Mother Maria" featuring Beth Hart, to aid the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. The song was later featured as an iTunes bonus track for the record, and appeared on a Platinum Deluxe Edition.


title: Slash (album)

text: Just prior to release, the song "Back from Cali" featuring singer Myles Kennedy was added to the album's track listing, making Kennedy the only person to be featured on more than one song on the album's standard track listing. Slash also announced that Izzy Stradlin is the only other person who played guitar on the record, performing rhythm guitar on the song "Ghost", featuring singer Ian Astbury. "I Hold On" was featured on the season one episode of "Hawaii Five-0", "Malama Ka Aina", which aired on October 4, 2010; it was featured as characters Steve and Danny drive to a pizza shop.


title: Slash (album)

text: The album was made available in the United States via EMI, and in the U.K. via Roadrunner. The cover art was produced from a painting by Ron English, a prominent Pop Surrealist artist and friend of Slash.


title: Slash (album)

text: Best Buy released an exclusive version including the album and a Slash T-shirt. Best Buy also sells an exclusive digital version of the album that includes two bonus tracks: "Baby Can't Drive" (featuring Alice Cooper/Nicole Scherzinger/Steven Adler/Flea) and a cover of Guns N' Roses' "Paradise City" (featuring Fergie/Cypress Hill).


title: Slash (album)

text: In an interview following the release of the record, Slash revealed that he would have wanted Thom Yorke to sing "Saint Is a Sinner Too" but that he was too nervous to call the Radiohead singer. In a later interview with the Finnish "Soundi" magazine, Slash stated that he would have wanted the record to feature his friend, former-Hanoi Rocks lead singer Michael Monroe, but there was not a song that Slash thought fit him.


title: Slash (album)

text: A music video for the remix version of "Gotten" featuring Adam Levine, released in March 2012. The video was part of the donation for the Los Angeles Youth Network.


title: Slash (album)

text: On February 4, 2010, Slash announced via a MySpace blog that "Myles Kennedy is going to be fronting the band for the upcoming tour. Something I'm really stoked about. Myles sang a killer track on the record and I think he is by far one of the best rock and roll singers out there today. I'm really honored and proud to be working with him." Prior to the tour, Slash confirmed that his own solo material and songs from Guns N' Roses ("Civil War", "Sweet Child O' Mine", and "Nightrain" among others), Velvet Revolver, and Slash's Snakepit, as well as Alter Bridge material ("Rise Today") would be played.


title: Slash (album)

text: The touring line-up for the initial tour, besides Slash and Myles Kennedy included Bobby Schneck (Slash's Blues Ball) on rhythm guitar, Brent Fitz (Alice Cooper) on drums and, initially, Dave Henning (Big Wreck) on bass, though prior to the start of the tour Todd Kerns (Age of Electric, Static in Stereo, Sin City Sinners) took over bass duties instead of Dave Henning.


title: Slash (album)

text: Slash performed "By the Sword" on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" on April 6, and on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" on April 9. While performing the song on Jay Leno's show, Slash was wearing an "I'm With Coco" pin, to show support for former "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien. There are very few close-ups of Slash during the song, but TMZ caught one second where the pin was displayed on camera. Slash also played "By the Sword" on "Lopez Tonight" on April 9, 2010, and performed "Back from Cali" on the show on April 12. Slash and Adam Levine performed "Gotten" on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" on May 11.


title: Slash (album)

text: Upon release, "Slash" entered the "Billboard" 200 charts at number 3 (also at number one on the Rock, Hard Rock, Digital and the Independent Albums Chart) with 61,000 copies sold during the first week. The album also debuted at number one in Canada, Austria, New Zealand and Sweden while it also broke into the top 20 in Germany, Finland, Australia, France, Norway, Poland and Switzerland.


title: Slash (album)

text: The album's first single, "By the Sword" featuring Andrew Stockdale, peaked at number 41 on the Rock Songs Chart and number 78 on the Canadian Hot 100. "Beautiful Dangerous", featuring Fergie, charted at number 11 and number 58 on the Heatseekers Songs and Canadian Hot 100. The cover of "Paradise City" featuring Fergie and Cypress Hill also charted on the Canadian Hot 100 at number 75.


title: Slash (album)

text: The album has received generally mixed-to-positive reviews, scoring a 56 out of 100 ("mixed or average reviews") on Metacritic. MTV News writer Kyle Anderson called the album "a tremendous collection of hard rock songs that center around the axe man's signature chunky, swirling riffs... On balance, it's an excellent album, and it feels good to have that classic Slash sound back."


title: Slash (album)

text: Writer Shelby Powell took note of Slash's precision on guitar, rating the album 3.5/5 thumbs, but took off points for "a little too much reverence paid to the 90s and some of the feature selections may have old head purists poking their bottom lips out and putting their lighters down," but concludes that "the assortment of genres blends well."


title: FARC dissidents

text: FARC dissidents (Spanish: "Disidencias de las Farc"), also known as Carlos Patino Front, refers to a group, formerly part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who have refused to lay down their arms after the Colombian peace process came into effect in 2016, or resumed their insurgency afterwards. In 2018, the dissidents numbered some 2,000, to 2,500, armed combatants with an unknown number of civilian militia supporting them. The FARC dissidents have become "an increasing headache" for the Colombian armed forces, as they have to fight them, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Clan del Golfo at the same time.


title: FARC dissidents

text: FARC dissidents have been responsible for several attacks on the Colombian armed forces. These fighters are believed to be heavily involved in the production and sale of cocaine. In June 2020, it was revealed that the presence of FARC dissidents in northern Antioquia instigated a direct armed conflict with the Clan del Golfo known as "Operation Mil".


title: FARC dissidents

text: FARC dissidents have been led by former mid-level commanders such as alias Gentil Duarte, alias Euclides Mora, alias Jhon 40, alias Giovanny Chuspas and alias Julián Chollo. The group has attempted to recruit locals in the Putumayo Province in Colombia to take up their cause. On October 15, 2020, Colombian President Iván Duque announced that a FARC dissent member known by the alias of "Cabuyo" was now the head of the FARC dissents.


title: FARC dissidents

text: Dissidents of FARC's 1st Front are located in the eastern plains of Colombia. Jhon 40 and their dissident 43rd Front moved into the Amazonas state of western Venezuela where they can operate with Colombian allies. Venezuela has served as the primary location for many FARC dissidents. Other dissidents hide in the mountains north of Medellín. In 2018, Cabuyo was reported to be based in the north of Antioquia.


title: FARC dissidents

text: Despite claiming to still follow the Leftist ideology of FARC, many dissidents are more motivated in their continuing struggle against the government by their inability to reintegrate into civilian society, a desire to protect themselves from other paramilitary or crime groups, and criminal connections. Dissident groups would become part of the rivalries between the different drug cartels, allying with some and fighting against others.


title: FARC dissidents

text: On 15 July 2018, the Colombian and Peruvian governments launched a joint military effort known as Operation Armageddon to combat FARC dissidents. Peru issued a 60-day state of emergency in the Putumayo Province, an area bordering both Colombia and Ecuador. On the first day alone, more than 50 individuals were arrested in the operation, with the majority being Colombian nationals, while four cocaine labs were dismantled.


title: FARC dissidents

text: On 28 July 2019, during the XXV São Paulo Forum hosted in Caracas, Nicolás Maduro declared that the FARC-EP dissidents leaders Iván Márquez and Jesús Santrich were "welcome" in Venezuela and to the São Paulo Forum on condition that they lay down their arms.


title: FARC dissidents

text: On 26 June 2020, Clan del Golfo and FARC dissidents were confirmed to be in a direct armed conflict in northern Antioquia known as "Operation Mil." The Clan del Golfo, which dispatched 1,000 of its paramilitaries from Urabá, southern Córdoba and Chocó, hopes to remove FARC dissent from northern Antioquia and take control of the entire municipality of Ituango.


title: FARC dissidents

text: On 21 March 2021, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela launched a large-scale military operation against FARC dissidents in Apure, Venezuela. The 2021 Apure clashes has resulted in the mass displacement of over 5,000 civilians to Colombia.


title: FARC dissidents

text: On 25 May 2022, Colombian and Venezuelan intelligence officials confirmed the death of Miguel Botache Santillana, alias Gentil Duarte, the top leader of the FARC dissidents.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The Division Bell Tour was the final concert tour by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was performed in 1994 to support their album "The Division Bell", which was released two days before the tour's start date. Following the tour's conclusion, the group quietly disbanded.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The Division Bell Tour in 1994 was promoted by Canadian concert impresario Michael Cohl and became the highest-grossing tour in rock music history to that date, with the band playing the entirety of "The Dark Side of the Moon" in some shows. The first show they played the whole "The Dark Side of the Moon" was on 15 July 1994 at the Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, which was the first time since 1975 it was played. While preparing for the tour, Pink Floyd spent most of March rehearsing in a hangar at Norton Air Force Base in California.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The concerts featured even more impressive special effects than the previous tour, including two custom designed airships. Three stages leapfrogged around North America and Europe, each long and featuring a arch resembling the Hollywood Bowl venue. All in all, the tour required 700 tons of steel carried by 53 articulated trucks, a crew of 161 people and an initial investment of US$4 million plus US$25 million of running costs just to stage. This tour played to 5.5 million people in 68 cities; each concert gathered an average 45,000 audience. At the end of the year, the Division Bell Tour was announced as the biggest tour ever, with worldwide gross of over £150 million (about US$250 million). In the U.S. alone, it grossed US$103.5 million from 59 concerts. However, this record was short-lived; less than a year later, The Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge Tour (like the Division Bell Tour, also sponsored in part by Volkswagen) finished with a worldwide gross of over US$300 million. The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Metallica, U2, The Police, Bon Jovi, Roger Waters and Madonna remain the only acts ever to achieve a higher worldwide gross from a tour, even when adjusting for inflation.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The massive and innovative stage set for the tour was designed by Mark Fisher, who, with his Entertainment Architecture studio STUFISH went on to design many more of the record breaking stadium and arena tours for The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, U2, Maddona and many others.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The tour was sponsored in Europe by Volkswagen, which also issued a commemorative version of its top-selling car, the "Golf Pink Floyd", one of which was given as a prize at each concert. It was a standard Golf with Pink Floyd decals and a premium stereo, and had Volkswagen's most environmentally friendly engine, at Gilmour's insistence.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: The final concert of the tour on 29 October 1994 turned out to be the final full-length Pink Floyd performance, and the last time Pink Floyd played live before their one-off 18-minute reunion with Roger Waters at Live 8 on 2 July 2005.


title: The Division Bell Tour

text: There were two typical set lists used throughout the tour. The first was used all tour, and the second was introduced on 15 July at the Pontiac Silverdome, and rotated with the first typical set list for the remainder of the tour.


title: Riddim

text: Riddim is the Jamaican Patois pronunciation of the English word "rhythm". In the context of reggae and dancehall, it refers to the instrumental accompaniment to a song and is synonymous with the rhythm section. Jamaican music genres that use the term consist of the "riddim" plus the "voicing" (vocal part) sung by the deejay. The resulting song structure is distinctive in many ways. A given riddim, if popular, may be used in dozens—or even hundreds—of songs, not only in recordings but also in live performances.


title: Riddim

text: Since the 1970s, riddims have accompanied reggae music and through the 1980s, more widely known as dancehall. As seen in dancehall music, there is a voicing part – sung by the DJ – over some riddim that has probably been widely used in many other songs. There is a unique establishment in the combination of riddims and voicing.


title: Riddim

text: By 1993, Jamaica finally established a copyright act, but producers still face difficulty in establishing profit. Through proper registration, many artists now work on negotiating their royalties and taking it more seriously. The unique nature of dancehall and riddims have been highly influential on the numerous remixes that now circulate throughout R&B and hip-hop music.


title: Riddim

text: Some classic riddims, such as "Nanny Goat" and "Real Rock" both produced by Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, are essentially the accompaniment tracks of the original 1960s reggae songs with those names. Since the 1980s, however, riddims started to be originally composed by producers/beatmakers, who give the riddims original names and, typically, contract artists to voice over them. Thus, for example, "Diwali" is the name not of a song, but of a riddim created by Steven "Lenky" Marsden, subsequently used as the basis for several songs, such as Sean Paul's "Get Busy" and Bounty Killer's "Sufferer."


title: Riddim

text: "Riddims are the primary musical building blocks of Jamaican popular songs... At any given time, ten to fifteen riddims are widely used in dancehall recordings, but only two or three of these are the "now ting" (i.e., the latest riddims that everyone must record over if they want to get them played in the dance or on radio)... In dancehall performing, those whose timing is right on top of the rhythm are said to be "riding di riddim".


title: Riddim

text: The bass culture of Jamaican sonic sensibilities is characterized with less emphasis on melody and large emphasis on the drum beats and low frequency bass vibrations to draw attention to the social grounding to the culture. These aspects of Jamaican music are expressed visually through the Dancehall choreography and its African inspired folk traditions, which emphasize earthly connection through flat-footed stamping and “bumper-grinding sexually explicit choreography, where the bass note is struck by the body itself—displaying its fecundity and celebrating its fertility”. This bass culture is also embodied sonically by the music’s heartbeat, the bass lines often described as riddims, produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These riddims offer a sonic foundation on top of which different other sounds are incorporated to form innumerable versions.


title: Riddim

text: Riddims are the instrumental background (the rhythm section) of reggae, lovers rock, dub, ragga, dancehall, soca, bouyon, Sega and also reggaeton, which itself is largely based on the Dem Bow and Poco riddims by Steely & Clevie from the early 1990s, feature a riddim, such as Ivy Queen and Sasha's "Dat Sexy Body", which uses the Bookshelf riddim produced by Tony Kelly of the K-Licious reggae label.


title: Riddim

text: In other musical contexts, a riddim would be called a groove or beat. In most cases, the term "riddim" is used in reference to the entire background track or rhythm section, but in older roots riddims, "riddim" is used to reference a certain bass line and drum pattern. Often a melody is associated with the riddim, and occasionally an artist will produce two different songs with the same riddim (e.g. Elephant Man's "Ele Melody" and "Father Elephant" were both produced using the Kopa riddim, produced by Supa Dups). Riddims began forming popular in the early 1960s with the evolving role of the DJ. The work of DJs became less of shouting throughout points during a song, but more focused on an aesthetic with the voicings over these instrumental riddims. A specific DJ, DJ U-Roy, revolutionized the practice with studio recordings of these DJ voicings as his recordings skyrocketed on the charts in Jamaica in the 70s, thus leading to the beginning stages of dancehall. Riddims, therefore, became the standard practice for dancehall as it has progressed. Today, the same practices combining riddim and voicing still takes precedence in dancehall. Other live performances like at clubs or along the streets feature the use of sound systems in which there are usually medleys of different songs that all use the instrumental accompaniment.


title: Riddim

text: Whilst mainly reggae-based music, an emerging electronic music genre as a sub-genre of dubstep also called riddim has recently emerged.


title: Riddim

text: African in origin (see clave (rhythm) and bell pattern), riddims can generally be categorized into three types. One of the oldest types of riddim is the classical riddim providing roots reggae, dub, and lovers rock with instrumentals, such as Bam Bam, produced by Sly & Robbie. The second type is the ragga riddim backing raggamuffin and dancehall songs, such as the Juice riddim, produced by Richard "Shams" Browne. The third type is the digital riddim, such as Sleng Teng, Punaany Riddim & Duck Riddim produced by King Jammy.


title: Riddim

text: A number of riddims take their name and influence from African-Jamaican religious drumming such as the Kumina riddim, created in 2002 by Sly and Robbie, and Burru.


title: Riddim

text: Different producers often develop their own versions of the same riddim, such as the Punanny riddim, which has distinct versions crafted by Steely & Clevie and by Ward 21, the Buzz Riddim, which was produced by Troyton Rami & Roger Mackenzie and officially launched dancehall deejay Sean Paul into superstardom ("Gimme the Light" from the Buzz Riddim won him his first Grammy for Best Reggae Album). Different artists often perform on top of the same riddims with different lyrics and different vocal styles, ranging from singing to toasting. As an example, Beenie Man's song "My Wish", Mr. Vegas' song "Go Up", and T.O.K.'s "Mana Bad Man" are all based on the Juice riddim. Many riddims are named after the song that was recorded on that instrumental track for the first time (or, in some cases, the song that becomes the most popular on a given riddim). For example, the Satta Massagana riddim is named after the Abyssinians' original song "Satta Massagana".


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: In Dianetics and Scientology, Clear is a status afforded to followers by the Scientology organization, or by other Scientologists, after they complete certain activities. It is one of the major ostensible "states" practitioners strive to reach on their way up what the Scientologists call the Bridge to Total Freedom. Scientology followers are given the status of Clear when a person is deemed to be free of the influence of engrams – supposed unwanted emotions or painful traumas which Scientology claims are not readily available to the conscious mind. Scientologists believe that human beings accumulate anxieties, psychosomatic illnesses, and aberration due to receiving engrams throughout their current or past lives, and that by applying Dianetics, every single person can obtain the status of Clear.


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: A Clear is defined by the Church of Scientology as a person who no longer has a "reactive mind" (a pseudoscientific subdivision of the mind), and is therefore free from negative effects purported to be produced by the "reactive mind". A Clear is said to be "at cause over" (that is, in control of) their "mental energy" (their thoughts), and able to think clearly even when faced with the very situations that in earlier times caused them difficulty. The next level of spiritual development is that of an Operating Thetan. A person who has not reached a state of Clear is called a "pre-clear."


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: Dianetics claims that a person's awareness is influenced by the stimulus-response nature of the "reactive mind". Achieving the state of Clear means a person has supposedly overcome the "reactive mind" and is in complete control of their analytical mind. According to Hubbard: "A Clear is a being who no longer has his own reactive mind, and therefore suffers none of the ill effects the reactive mind can cause. The Clear has no engrams which, when restimulated, throw out the correctness of his computations by entering hidden and false data." Sociologist Roy Wallis noted, “Being Clear meant being able to do all those things which one could currently not do, and to which one aspired so desperately.” It is estimated that the cost of reaching the Clear state in Scientology is $128,000.


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: In "", L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, states that becoming a Clear strengthens a person's native individuality and creativity, and that a Clear is free with his emotions. In "The State Of Clear," a Clear is defined as "a being who no longer has his own reactive mind, and therefore suffers none of the ill effects the reactive mind can cause". Hubbard states that merely knowing what the cognition is does not have the effect of realizing it for oneself:


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: Hubbard described Clears as having "an awareness which can create energy at will, and can handle and control, erase or re-create an analytical or reactive mind". Hubbard claimed that Clears have complete memories and know why events in their lives have happened, which leaves them free to pursue their goals without hindrances (the "reactive mind") emanating from past experiences. Religious scholar Pat Cook compared being "Clear" to the concept of nirvana in Zen Buddhism: like nirvana in Buddhism, Clear is a state of being that is highly desired and respected in Scientology.


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: The Clear state is said to be achieved through the Scientology practice of auditing. A person undergoing auditing is called a "pre-clear", often abbreviated to "PC", in Scientology terminology. The Church of Scientology claims that if all individuals in the world were “Clear”, the world would be “free of drugs, war, pollution, crime, mental illness and other ills.”


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: After attaining the state of Clear, a person may go on to study the Operating Thetan levels, which are described in Scientology materials as states where the ability to operate outside the body via "exteriorization" becomes commonplace. Beyond that comes "Cleared Theta Clear", which Hubbard describes this way:


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: A thetan who is completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move <nowiki>MEST [matter, energy, space, and time]</nowiki> and control others from a distance, or create his own universe; a person who is able to create his own universe or, living in the MEST universe is able to create illusions perceivable by others at will, to handle MEST universe objects without mechanical means and to have and feel no need of bodies or even the MEST universe to keep himself and his friends interested in existence.


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: There are several conflicting accounts of who first attained the state of Clear, and under what circumstances. In August 1950, amidst the success of "", Hubbard held a demonstration in Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium where he presented a young woman called Sonya Bianchi to a large audience including many reporters and photographers as "the world's first Clear." Science-fiction author Arthur Jean Cox's April 1952 letter to skeptic Martin Gardner would later claim that the event was a "fiasco", which Gardner repeated: "in the demonstration that followed, she failed to remember a single formula in physics (the subject in which she was majoring) or the color of Hubbard's tie when his back was turned. At this point, a large part of the audience got up and left." Cox had also claimed that Bianchi was unable to answer questions from the audience testing her memory and analytical abilities including the question of the color of Hubbard's tie. Parade magazine, published two months after the event, wrote: "Other reports are even more impressive. Sonya Bianchi, a favorite student of founder Hubbard, and a winsome graduate student at Wellesley College, made this report to 6,000 dianetics enthusiasts in Los Angeles: 'I had violent sinus trouble. I also had a strange and embarrassing allergy to fresh paint for days after I came in contact with it. I had a painful itching in my eyebrows. Both conditions have cleared up, and I feel like a million dollars.' End of Bianchi’s report."


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: Later, in the late 1950s, Hubbard would claim that several people had reached the state of Clear by the time he presented Bianchi as the world's first; these others, Hubbard said, he had successfully cleared in the late 1940s while working "incognito" in Hollywood posing as a swami.


title: Clear (Scientology)

text: In 1966, Hubbard declared South African Scientologist John McMaster to be the first true Clear. McMaster had joined Scientology around 1962, having experienced relief of chronic stomach pain after his first auditing session. He became a leading public spokesman for Scientology and later a member of the Sea Org. He left in November 1969, expressing continuing belief in the Scientology Tech, but disapproval of the way Scientology was managed.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: Limetown is an American drama series, based on the podcast of the same name created by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, that premiered on Facebook Watch on October 16, 2019. The series stars Jessica Biel and Stanley Tucci.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: "Limetown" follows Lia Haddock, a journalist for American Public Radio (APR), as she unravels the mystery behind the disappearance of over 300 people at a neuroscience research facility in Tennessee.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: On October 8, 2018, it was announced that Facebook had given a series order to a television series adaptation of Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie's podcast "Limetown", for a first season comprising 10 episodes. Akers and Bronkie were expected to write the series and serve as executive producers alongside Jessica Biel, Michelle Purple, Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Adrienne Erickson. Production companies involved with the series were slated to include Iron Ocean Productions, Endeavor Content, and Midnight Radio.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: Alongside the series order announcement, it was confirmed that Jessica Biel would star in the series. On December 6, 2018, it was announced that Stanley Tucci had been cast in a series regular role and that Marlee Matlin, Kelly Jenrette, John Beasley, and Louis Ferreira would appear in a recurring capacity. On January 12, 2019, it was announced that Sherri Saum had joined the series in a recurring role. On February 26, 2019, it was reported that Rekha Sharma has joined the cast in a recurring capacity.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: Principal photography for the series was scheduled to last from December 5, 2018 to March 16, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: In advance of its broadcast premiere, several episodes of the series received a preview screening in the Primetime program of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Limetown (TV series)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the series has an approval rating of 69% based on reviews from 13 critics. The site's critical consensus is: "Guided by an excellent turn from Jessica Biel, Limetown sustains an impressively creeping atmosphere that makes up for its occasionally fuzzy plotting." On Metacritic it has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Good Morning Football

text: Good Morning Football is a live NFL morning television program on NFL Network. The program premiered on Monday, August 1, 2016. It airs from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET.


title: Good Morning Football

text: The program is hosted by Kyle Brandt, Jamie Erdahl, Jason McCourty and Peter Schrager weekdays, and Colleen Wolfe on weekends. Analysts Michael Robinson and DeAngelo Hall appear throughout the week, rotating as a fill in host on weekdays. NFL insider Mike Garafolo is featured all throughout the week.


title: Good Morning Football

text: "Good Morning Football" replaced earlier attempts by NFL Network at a morning television program, including "NFL AM" and "NFL HQ". Unlike its predecessors, which were filmed in Los Angeles, the show is produced live on the east coast. The move was made, in part, because doing the show required the live broadcasts to begin at 4 a.m. Pacific Time. According to chief content officer of NFL Media Jordan Levin, "There’s an energy to morning programming. The challenge is compounded when you have people who are literally doing the show in the middle of the night." The weekday program first utilized the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street as a condition of CBS holding the rights to "Thursday Night Football".


title: Good Morning Football

text: "Good Morning Football" is the first NFL Network program to originate in New York since the network's launch in 2003. Sony Pictures Television's Embassy Row handles production of the show, with CEO Michael Davies as the executive producer.


title: Good Morning Football

text: In May 2018, the weekday program moved from the CBS Broadcast Center to 20 Times Square, inside a studio constructed within the new NFL Experience attraction. With the planned closure of the attraction, the show moved to SportsNet New York's studios at 4 World Trade Center with a new set debuting November 5, 2018. The weekend program is broadcast from NFL Films in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey.


title: Good Morning Football

text: On April 25 and 26, 2019, the program was simulcast by ESPN2 as part of coverage of the 2019 NFL Draft (which would see personalities from ESPN and NFL Network appearing as contributors on each other's studio programs).


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Little Caesar is a 1931 American pre-Code crime film distributed by Warner Brothers, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and starring Edward G. Robinson, Glenda Farrell, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The film tells the story of a hoodlum who ascends the ranks of organized crime until he reaches its upper echelons. The storyline was adapted from the novel of the same name by William R. Burnett. "Little Caesar" was Robinson's breakthrough role and immediately made him a major film star. The film is often listed as one of the first fully-fledged gangster films and continues to be well received by critics.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: In 2000, "Little Caesar" was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation. The Library of Congress maintains a print.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Small-time criminals Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello and his friend Joe Massara move to Chicago to seek their fortunes. Rico joins the gang of Sam Vettori, while Joe wants to be a dancer. Olga becomes his dance partner and girlfriend.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Joe tries to drift away from the gang and its activities, but Rico makes him participate in the robbery of the nightclub where he works. Despite orders from underworld overlord "Big Boy" to all his men to avoid bloodshed, Rico guns down crusading crime commissioner Alvin McClure during the robbery, with Joe as an aghast witness.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Rico accuses Sam of becoming soft and seizes control of his organization. Rival boss "Little Arnie" Lorch tries to have Rico killed, but Rico is only grazed. He and his gunmen pay Little Arnie a visit, after which Arnie hastily departs for Detroit. The Big Boy eventually gives Rico control of all of Chicago's Northside.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Rico becomes concerned that Joe knows too much about him. He warns Joe that he must forget about Olga and join him in a life of crime. Rico threatens to kill both Joe and Olga unless he accedes, but Joe refuses to give in. Olga calls Police Sergeant Flaherty and tells him Joe is ready to talk, just before Rico and his henchman Otero come calling. Rico finds, to his surprise, that he is unable to take his friend's life. When Otero tries to do the job himself, Rico wrestles the gun away from him, though not before Joe is wounded. Hearing the shot, Flaherty and another police officer give chase and injure and capture Otero. With information provided by Olga, Flaherty proceeds to crush Rico's organization.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Desperate and alone, Rico "retreats to the gutter from which he sprang." While hiding in a flophouse, he becomes enraged when he learns that Flaherty has called him a coward in the newspaper. He foolishly telephones the police to announce he is coming for him. The call is traced, and he is gunned down by Flaherty behind a billboard – an advertisement featuring dancers Joe and Olga – and, dying, utters his final words, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Clark Gable was sought out for a role in the film, albeit with conflicting perspectives in memoirs; Jack L. Warner said that LeRoy wanted Gable for the lead role, while LeRoy stated that he wanted Gable for the second lead role, but at any rate Warner turned Gable down. Robinson had already played a gangster in plays such as "The Racket" and "The Widow from Chicago" (1930), a First National Pictures production.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, "Little Caesar" holds an approval rating of 92%, based on 25 reviews, and an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads: ""Little Caesar" achieves epic stature thanks to Edward G. Robinson's volcanic charisma, forging a template for the big-screen mobster archetype that's yet to be surpassed."


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: Together with "The Public Enemy" (1931) and "Scarface" (1932), "Little Caesar" proved to be influential in developing the gangster film genre, establishing many themes and conventions that have been used since then.


title: Little Caesar (film)

text: The film's box office success also spawned the production of several successful gangster films, many of which were also made by Warner Brothers. It is listed in the film reference book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", which says "Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar" helped to define the gangster movie while serving as an allegory of production circumstances because it was produced during the Great Depression— Leavening this theme alongside the demands of social conformity during the early 1930s means that LeRoy's screen classic is far more than the simple sum of its parts."


title: Klein four-group

text: In mathematics, the Klein four-group is a group with four elements, in which each element is self-inverse (composing it with itself produces the identity)


title: Klein four-group

text: It can be described as the symmetry group of a non-square rectangle (with the three non-identity elements being horizontal and vertical reflection and 180-degree rotation),


title: Klein four-group

text: The Klein four-group, with four elements, is the smallest group that is not a cyclic group. There is only one other group of order four, up to isomorphism, the cyclic group of order 4. Both are abelian groups. The smallest non-abelian group is the symmetric group of degree 3, which has order 6.


title: Klein four-group

text: All non-identity elements of the Klein group have order 2, thus any two non-identity elements can serve as generators in the above presentation. The Klein four-group is the smallest non-cyclic group. It is however an abelian group, and isomorphic to the dihedral group of order (cardinality) 4, i.e. D (or D, using the geometric convention); other than the group of order 2, it is the only dihedral group that is abelian.


title: Klein four-group

text: The Klein four-group is also isomorphic to the direct sum , so that it can be represented as the pairs under component-wise addition modulo 2 (or equivalently the bit strings under bitwise XOR); with (0,0) being the group's identity element. The Klein four-group is thus an example of an elementary abelian 2-group, which is also called a Boolean group. The Klein four-group is thus also the group generated by the symmetric difference as the binary operation on the subsets of a powerset of a set with two elements, i.e. over a field of sets with four elements, e.g. formula_2; the empty set is the group's identity element in this case.


title: Klein four-group

text: Another numerical construction of the Klein four-group is the set with the operation being multiplication modulo 8. Here "a" is 3, "b" is 5, and is .


title: Klein four-group

text: The Klein four-group has a representation as 2×2 real matrices with the operation being matrix multiplication:


title: Klein four-group

text: On a Rubik's Cube the "4 dots" pattern can be made in three ways, depending on the pair of faces that are left blank; these three positions together with the "identity" or home position form an example of the Klein group.


title: Klein four-group

text: Geometrically, in two dimensions the Klein four-group is the symmetry group of a rhombus and of rectangles that are not squares, the four elements being the identity, the vertical reflection, the horizontal reflection, and a 180 degree rotation.


title: Klein four-group

text: In three dimensions there are three different symmetry groups that are algebraically the Klein four-group V:


title: Klein four-group

text: The three elements of order two in the Klein four-group are interchangeable: the automorphism group of V is the group of permutations of these three elements.


title: Klein four-group

text: The Klein four-group's permutations of its own elements can be thought of abstractly as its permutation representation on four points:


title: Klein four-group

text: (and also the symmetric group S) on four letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective group homomorphism from S to S.


title: Klein four-group

text: According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, the permutation representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals, as established by Lodovico Ferrari:


title: Klein four-group

text: In the construction of finite rings, eight of the eleven rings with four elements have the Klein four-group as their additive substructure.


title: Klein four-group

text: If R denotes the multiplicative group of non-zero reals and R the multiplicative group of positive reals, R × R is the group of units of the ring , and is a subgroup of (in fact it is the component of the identity of ). The quotient group is isomorphic to the Klein four-group. In a similar fashion, the group of units of the split-complex number ring, when divided by its identity component, also results in the Klein four-group.


title: Klein four-group

text: The simplest simple connected graph that admits the Klein four-group as its automorphism group is the diamond graph shown below. It is also the automorphism group of some other graphs that are simpler in the sense of having fewer entities. These include the graph with four vertices and one edge, which remains simple but loses connectivity, and the graph with two vertices connected to each other by two edges, which remains connected but loses simplicity.


title: Klein four-group

text: In music composition the four-group is the basic group of permutations in the twelve-tone technique. In that instance the Cayley table is written;


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich is an establishment on the south bank of the River Thames in Woolwich in south-east London, England, that was used for the manufacture of armaments and ammunition, proofing, and explosives research for the British armed forces. It was originally known as the Woolwich Warren, having begun on land previously used as a domestic warren in the grounds of a Tudor house, Tower Place. Much of the initial history of the site is linked with that of the Office of Ordnance, which purchased the Warren in the late 17th century in order to expand an earlier base at Gun Wharf in Woolwich Dockyard.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: Over the next two centuries, as operations grew and innovations were pursued, the site expanded massively. At the time of the First World War the Arsenal covered and employed close to 80,000 people. Thereafter its operations were scaled down. It finally closed as a factory in 1967 and the Ministry of Defence moved out in 1994. Today the area, so long a secret enclave, is open to the public and is being redeveloped for housing and community use.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The Royal Arsenal had its origins in a domestic warren at Tower Place in Old Woolwich. Tower Place was a Tudor mansion built in the 1540s for Martin Bowes, a wealthy goldsmith and merchant, later Lord Mayor of London. The house with its octagonal tower stood nearby Gun Wharf (the original site of Woolwich Dockyard where the "Henry Grace à Dieu" had been built around 1515). After the Dockyard moved west in the 1540s, Gun Wharf was acquired by the Office of Ordnance and mainly used for gun storage.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In 1651, the owners of Tower Place gave the board permission to prove its guns on the warren that formed part of their land. That same year the first proof butts were built on the site, under the board's direction (24 years later they were enlarged, to enable more guns to be proved at each firing).


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In 1667, in response to the raid on the Medway, a gun battery (known as Prince Rupert's Battery, being under the command of the King's cousin) was built in the grounds of the house, designed to defend London in the event of a similar raid on the Thames. The following year, Tower Place was acquired by Sir William Pritchard who promptly entered into negotiations to sell it to the Board of Ordnance; and in 1671, the estate was given to the board in exchange for the Gun Wharf and a substantial amount of cash. The board at the time declared the site to be "a convenient place for building a storehouse for powder and other stores of war, and for room for the proof of guns". The first Storekeeper, Captain Francis Cheeseman, was appointed in 1670 by Warrant of the Master-General of the Ordnance.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In 1681, King Charles II visited the Warren and observed Richard Leake, Master Gunner of England, conduct an experiment with fire-shot in the proof butts. In 1682 what had till then been the board's main proving ground (in 'Old Artillery Garden' near its headquarters in the Tower of London) was closed and its staff and activities were promptly moved to Tower Place. That year a thousand cannon and ten thousand cannonballs were sent to Woolwich from the Tower, and the proof butts were further expanded.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: When the constitution of the Board of Ordnance was formalised by Charles II in 1683, two Proof Masters were appointed, under the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, to ensure that proofs and trials were conducted correctly and the results duly certified. In 1684 the King paid another visit, when Leake conducted a trial of his newly-developed mortar design.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In 1688 it was ordered that 'all guns, carriages and stores now at Deptford, be removed to Woolwich, and from henceforth new ordnance and carriages be laid there'. No manufacturing took place at this stage, however, except for the periodical production of fireworks for state celebrations; (between 1681 and 1694 saltpetre, a key ingredient of gunpowder, was regularly refined on the site).


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The Board of Ordnance was both a civil and a military office of State, independent of the Army, overseen by a high-ranking official, the Master-General of the Ordnance. Both branches, civil and military, were represented at the Warren; indeed there was a great deal of overlap: military officers for the most part headed up the civil departments, and civilians often worked alongside the military personnel.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: For most of its history, the civil establishment of the Warren/Arsenal consisted of the following four departments:


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In addition, proof butts continued to be maintained by the Board of Ordnance to test guns beyond their normal operational limits and for experimenting with new types of ammunition.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: First and foremost, the Warren was established as an Ordnance storage depot. As at the board's other depots, the site was overseen by an official called the storekeeper, who was provided with an official residence in Tower Place itself. The Storekeeper not only controlled the receipt, safekeeping and issue of all the items that were stored on the site; he was also responsible (until the early 1800s) for issuing payments on the board's behalf to all personnel across the different departments. He was assisted by a clerk of the cheque, clerk of the survey and other administrative staff.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: To begin with much of the Warren was preserved as open space with cannons stored in the open air and guns proved on ranges to the east. (Proof-testing was overseen at this time by the Master Gunner of England, who was also accommodated in Tower Place.) Gunpowder was stored in a converted dovecote initially; but before long specialist buildings began to appear.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: An ammunition laboratory (i.e. workshop) was set up at the Warren in 1695, overseen by the Comptroller of Fireworks. Manufacture of ammunition had previously taken place within a Great Barn on the tilt-yard at Greenwich Palace (an offshoot of the royal armoury there); but in 1695 construction of Greenwich Hospital began on the palace site, so the laboratory was relocated downstream at Woolwich (the barn building itself was even disassembled and rebuilt at the Warren). In 1696 Laboratory Square was built to house its operations, which included manufacture of gunpowder, shell cases, fuses and paper gun cartridges; it consisted of a quadrangle with a gateway at the north end, buildings along either side and a clock tower at the south end, beyond which further buildings were ranged. The manufacturing process was conducted by hand, overseen by a Chief Firemaster; early paintings show artisans at work in the courtyards among pyramid stacks of shells. A pair of pavilions, which once faced each other across the centre of the courtyard, are now the oldest surviving buildings on the Arsenal site; they were being restored for residential use in 2013.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The Comptroller, Royal Laboratory, had oversight of the Royal Gunpowder Mills in addition to the Woolwich manufactory. From time to time there were public demonstrations of the work of the Laboratory, often in Hyde Park, and by the mid-18th century it was customary for the Royal Laboratory to provide an official 'fireworks display' on occasions such as coronations, peace treaties, royal jubilees etc.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: A gun foundry, overseen by a Master Founder, was established in 1717. (The decision of the Board of Ordnance to set up and supervise its own foundry operations followed a devastating explosion at the private foundry it had previously used in Moorfields.) In Woolwich, the original Royal Brass Foundry building survives (built on the site of the relocated "Greenwich Barn"). Its handsome exterior encloses a space designed for pure industrial functionality, with height to accommodate a vertical boring machine, and tall doors permitting easy removal of newly made cannons.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: Completed guns could then be taken through what is now Dial Arch into a complex known as the 'Great Pile of buildings' (built 1717-20) to be finished and stored. Behind the surviving frontage and archway was a small courtyard in which the newly forged guns were turned, washed and engraved; beyond which two large gun-carriage storehouses stood (one for the Navy, one for the Army) at either end of a larger quadrangle, with workshops alongside.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The first Master Founder, Andrew Schalch, served in post for 54 years before retiring in 1769 at the age of 78. In 1770 a revolutionary horse-powered horizontal boring machine was installed in the Foundry by his successor, Jan Verbruggen which inspired Henry Maudslay (who worked at the foundry from 1783) to his inventions improving the lathe. Remarkably, it remained in use until 1843 when a steam-powered equivalent replaced it.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: From 1780 a new official, the Inspector of Artillery, was given oversight of the Royal Brass Foundry and of other aspects of gun manufacture including carriage-making (for the time being) and proof-testing, which continued to take place on ranges to the east; (over the next hundred years the proof ranges were moved progressively further eastwards as the Arsenal continued to expand).


title: Royal Arsenal

text: From the beginning, gun carriages had been stored at the Warren (unlike the guns themselves the wooden carriages had to be kept under cover). The first store ('Old Carriage Yard') had been built as early as 1682, and probably also contained workshops for the repair or scrapping of old carriages. In 1697 a far larger complex of sheds ('New Carriage Yard') was built on what had been Prince Rupert's gun battery.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: By the 1750s manufacture of gun carriages was also taking place on site, overseen by the Constructor of Carriages. This took place around New Carriage Square (a low quadrangle of storehouses built alongside, and as an extension of, the Great Pile storehouses in 1728–1729). In 1803 this activity was formalized as the Royal Carriage Department, a recognition of the importance of effective carriage design and manufacture, alongside that of guns and ammunition, as part of ordnance provision.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: By 1700 the Board of Ordnance had a team of 20 gunners stationed in the Warren, overseen by the Master Gunner of England, who (except in time of war) assisted in the manufacture as well as the proving of cannons. Building, repair and technical work was undertaken by the board's (civil) artificers, who were drafted in from the Tower of London as and when required. In many respects 'there was no distinction between the Ordnance soldier and the Ordnance civilian' at this time, and a close working relationship endured between the two constituencies across subsequent decades.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The military constitution of the Board of Ordnance was strengthened when, on 26 May 1716, a Royal Warrant directed that two companies of artillery (of a hundred men each, plus officers) and a separate corps of twenty-six military engineers (all officers) be formed on a permanent basis: this marked the foundation of the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. Both had their headquarters in the Warren for a time and (when not mobilized for war) they were regularly engaged in its work.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: The two companies of artillery (referred to as 'Royal Artillery' by 1720) were quartered and based at the Warren. By 1722 the detachment had grown and was formally named the Royal Regiment of Artillery. These troops (who were not under the command of the Army but of the Board of Ordnance) provided a versatile workforce on site, as well as helping ensure its security. In 1719 they were provided with their own barracks within the compound, close to Dial Arch: a single block was built, housing 200 men in open barracks accommodation across four floors, with a pair of officers' houses incorporated at each end. (This block has since been demolished, but an identical block (now known as Building 11), survives; it was built alongside the first in 1739–1740, the Regiment having been enlarged).


title: Royal Arsenal

text: After the formation of the Regiment in 1716, the Royal Artillery took on responsibility for conducting proof tests and the (recently renamed) post of Master Gunner of Great Britain was abolished. Proving guns at the Warren became part of routine training for gunners of the Royal Artillery, overseen at first by the Board's proofmaster-general (and then, after 1780, by the Inspector of Artillery). In addition to the proof butts, a range was set up in 1787 for gunnery practice, firing parallel to the river across Plumstead Marshes.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: An Order in Council (dated 22 August 1717) increased the size of the Engineer Corps to fifty officers (including the Chief Engineer). Serving under the Board of Ordnance, they received their commissions from the Master-General until 1757 when the King granted them commission and rank equivalent to officers of the Army. In a Royal Warrant of 1787 the Corps (which was still composed solely of officers) was renamed the Corps of Royal Engineers.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: Initially, civilians were employed as workers, but in 1787 a Corps of Royal Military Artificers was formed: a body of non-commissioned officers and men who were placed under the command of officers from the Corps of Royal Engineers. From 1795 both these Corps were headquartered in the Warren; alongside their other duties, they had responsibility for the design, construction and maintenance of buildings, wharves and other features across the Arsenal site.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: In 1720, the Board sought to establish an on-site military academy for the education of its Artillery and Engineer officers. Tower Place had by this time largely been demolished, and a new building was erected in its place to provide a base for the new academy alongside a Board Room for the Ordnance Board (with a new residence for the Storekeeper added to the rear). It would not be until 1741, however, that the Royal Military Academy was set up on a firm footing and occupied its rooms in the building. Soon, the Academy's cadets were given their own purpose-built barracks alongside the southern boundary wall; dating from 1751, these were entirely demolished in the 1980s for road widening.


title: Royal Arsenal

text: An offshoot of the Academy was the Royal Military Repository. In the 1770s Captain William Congreve built a "Repository for Military Machines" between New Carriage Square and some open ground to the east. The building housed an educative display of cannons and mortars, and the open space was used as a training ground to help develop skills in handling large artillery pieces on various terrains in different conflict scenarios.