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Whitewater controversy

The Whitewater controversy, Whitewater scandal, Whitewatergate, or simply Whitewater, was an American political controversy during the 1990s. It began with an investigation into the real estate investments of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater Development Corporation. This failed business venture was incorporated in 1979 with the purpose of developing vacation properties on land along the White River near Flippin, Arkansas.

A March 1992 New York Times article published during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign reported that the Clintons, then governor and first lady of Arkansas, had invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation. The article stimulated the interest of L. Jean Lewis, a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who was looking into the failure of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, also owned by Jim and Susan McDougal.

Lewis looked for connections between the savings and loan company and the Clintons, and on September 2, 1992, she submitted a criminal referral to the FBI naming Bill and Hillary Clinton as witnesses in the Madison Guaranty case. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Charles A. Banks and the FBI determined that the referral lacked merit, but Lewis continued to pursue the case. From 1992 to 1994, Lewis issued several additional referrals against the Clintons and repeatedly called the U.S. Attorney's Office in Little Rock and the Justice Department regarding the case. Her referrals eventually became public knowledge, and she testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee in 1995.

David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against the Clintons, claimed in November 1993 that Bill Clinton had pressured him into providing an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal. The allegations were regarded as questionable because Hale had not mentioned Clinton in reference to this loan during the original FBI investigation of Madison Guaranty in 1989; only after coming under indictment himself in 1993, did Hale make allegations against the Clintons. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation resulted in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project. Jim Guy Tucker, Bill Clinton's successor as governor, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years of probation for his role in the matter. Susan McDougal served 18 months in prison for contempt of court for refusing to answer questions relating to Whitewater.

Neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton were ever prosecuted, after three separate inquiries found insufficient evidence linking them with the criminal conduct of others related to the land deal. The matter was handled by the Whitewater Independent Counsel, Republican Kenneth Starr. The last of these inquiries came from the final Independent Counsel, Robert Ray (who replaced Starr) in 2000. Susan McDougal was granted a pardon by President Clinton before he left office.

Nomenclature
The term "Whitewater" is sometimes used to include other controversies from the Bill Clinton administration, such as Travelgate, Filegate, and the circumstances surrounding Vince Foster's death, that were also investigated by the Whitewater Independent Counsel.

But Whitewater proper refers only to the matters stemming from the Whitewater Development Corporation and subsequent developments.

Origins of Whitewater Development Corporation

Bill Clinton had known Arkansas businessman and political figure Jim McDougal since 1968, and had made a previous real estate investment with him in 1977. In the spring of 1978, McDougal proposed that the Clintons join him and his wife, Susan, in buying 230 acre of undeveloped land along the south bank of the White River near Flippin, Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains. The goal was to subdivide the site into lots for vacation homes, intended for the many people coming south from Chicago and Detroit who were interested in low property taxes, fishing, rafting, and mountain scenery. The plan was to hold the property for a few years and then sell the lots at a profit.

The four borrowed $203,000 to buy the land and subsequently transferred ownership of it to the newly created Whitewater Development Corporation, in which all four participants had equal shares. Susan McDougal chose the name "Whitewater Estates" and their sales pitch was, "One weekend here and you'll never want to live anywhere else." The business was incorporated on June 18, 1979.

Failure of Whitewater Development Corporation and Castle Grande
By the time the Whitewater lots were surveyed and available for sale at the end of 1979, interest rates had climbed to near 20%. Prospective buyers could no longer afford to buy vacation homes. Rather than take a loss on the venture, the four decided to build a model home and wait for better economic conditions.

Following the land purchase, Jim McDougal asked the Clintons for additional funds for interest payments on the loan and other expenses; the Clintons later claimed to have no knowledge of how these contributions were used. When Bill Clinton failed to win re-election in 1980, Jim McDougal lost his job as the governor's economic aide and decided to go into banking. He acquired the Bank of Kingston in 1980 and the Woodruff Savings & Loan in 1982, renaming them the Madison Bank & Trust and the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, respectively.

In spring 1985, McDougal held a fundraiser at Madison Guaranty's office in Little Rock that paid off Clinton's 1984 gubernatorial campaign debt of $50,000. McDougal raised $35,000; $12,000 of that was in Madison Guaranty cashier's checks.

In 1985, Jim McDougal invested in a local construction project called Castle Grande. The 1,000 acres (400 ha), located south of Little Rock, were priced at about $1.75 million, more than McDougal could afford on his own. According to then current law, McDougal could borrow only $600,000 from his own savings and loan, Madison Guaranty. Therefore, McDougal involved others to raise the additional funds. Among these was Seth Ward, a Madison official, who helped funnel the additional $1.15 million required. To avoid potential investigations, the money was moved back and forth among several other investors and intermediaries. Hillary Clinton, then an attorney at Rose Law Firm (which is based in Little Rock) provided legal services to Castle Grande.

In 1986, federal regulators realized that all of the funds for the real estate venture had come from Madison Guaranty; regulators called Castle Grande a sham. In July of that year, McDougal resigned from Madison Guaranty. Ward fell under investigation along with the lawyer who helped him draft the agreement. Castle Grande earned $2 million in commissions and fees for McDougal's business associates, as well as an unknown amount in legal fees for Rose Law Firm, but in 1989, it collapsed, at a cost to the government of $4 million. This in turn helped trigger the 1989 collapse of Madison Guaranty, which federal regulators then had to take over. Taking place in the midst of the nationwide savings and loan crisis, the failure of Madison Guaranty cost the United States $73 million.

The Clintons lost between $37,000 and $69,000 on their Whitewater investment; this was less than the McDougals lost. The reasons for the unequal capital contributions by the Clintons and McDougals are unknown but the President's critics cited the discrepancy as evidence that then-Governor Clinton was to contribute to the project in other ways.

The White House and the President's supporters claimed that they were exonerated by the Pillsbury Report. This was a $3 million study done for the Resolution Trust Corporation by the Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro law firm at the time that Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan was dissolved. The report concluded that McDougal, who had set up the deal, was the managing partner, and Bill Clinton was a passive investor in the venture; the Associated Press characterized it as "generally support[ing] the Clintons' description of their involvement in Whitewater". However, Charles Patterson, the attorney who supervised the report, "refused ... to call it a vindication" of the Clintons, stating in testimony before the Senate Whitewater Committee that "it was not our purpose to vindicate, castigate, exculpate."

Bill Clinton's run for president
During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run, he was asked by New York Times reporters about the failure of the Whitewater development. The subsequent New York Times article, by reporter Jeff Gerth, appeared on March 8, 1992.

Removal of documents
Within hours of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster in July 1993, chief White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum removed documents, some of them concerning the Whitewater Development Corporation, from Foster's office and gave them to Maggie Williams, Chief of Staff to the First Lady. According to The New York Times, Williams placed the documents in a safe in the Clinton residence on the third floor of the White House for five days before turning them over to the Clinton family lawyer.

Interference by White House officials
White House counsel Nussbaum was accused of obstructing both the Justice Department investigation and National Park Service investigation into Foster's death by refusing to hand over documents found in Foster's briefcase.

On February 25, 1994, presidential aides George Stephanopoulos and Harold M. Ickes attempted to interfere with the Madison Guaranty investigation. Stephanopoulos and Ickes had a conference call with Roger Altman in which they protested the hiring of Jay Stephens, who was heading the investigation. On the call Stephanopoulos asked if Stephens could be removed.

In April 1994 after Webster Hubbell resigned from his position as Associate Attorney General and was facing fraud charges, there was the potential that he might cooperate with Ken Starr's investigation. During the time there was pressure for Hubbell to cooperate, Clinton's chief of staff Mack McLarty, Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, and Clinton friend Vernon Jordan arranged for Hubbell to be paid from consulting contracts. They did so with the approval of the first lady and President Clinton. In the Starr Report, Starr said "the jobs and money paid to Mr. Hubbell by friends and contributors to the President had raised serious questions about whether such assistance was designed to influence Mr. Hubbell’s testimony about Madison-related matters".

Subpoena of the president and his wife
As a result of the exposé in The New York Times, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the failed Whitewater deal. Media pressure continued to build, and on April 22, 1994, Hillary Clinton gave an unusual press conference under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the State Dining Room of the White House, to address questions on both Whitewater and the cattle futures controversy; it was broadcast live on several networks. In it, she claimed that the Clintons had a passive role in the Whitewater venture and had committed no wrongdoing, but admitted that her explanations had been vague. She said that she no longer opposed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. Afterwards, she won media praise for the manner in which she conducted herself during the press conference; Time called her "open, candid, but above all unflappable...the real message was her attitude and her poise. The confiding tone and relaxed body language...immediately drew approving reviews". By that time there was growing backlash from Democrats and other members of the political left against the press' investigations of Whitewater. The New York Times was criticized by Gene Lyons of Harper's Magazine, who felt its reporters were exaggerating the significance and possible impropriety of what they were uncovering.

At Clinton's request, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske, to investigate the legality of the Whitewater transactions in 1994. Two allegations surfaced: 1) that Clinton had exerted pressure on an Arkansas businessman, David Hale, to make a loan that would benefit himself and the owners of Madison Guaranty; 2) that an Arkansas bank had concealed transactions involving Clinton's gubernatorial campaign in 1990. In May 1994, Fiske issued a grand jury subpoena to the President and his wife for all documents relating to Madison Guaranty, with a deadline of 30 days. They were reported as missing by the Clintons. Almost two years later, the subpoenaed billing records of the Rose Law Firm were discovered in the Clintons' private residence in the White House, with fingerprints of Hillary Clinton, among others.

The Kenneth Starr investigation
In August 1994, Kenneth Starr was appointed by a three-judge panel to continue the Whitewater investigation, replacing Robert B. Fiske, who had been specially appointed by US attorney general Janet Reno, prior to the re-enactment of the Independent Counsel law. Fiske was replaced because he had been chosen and appointed by Janet Reno, Clinton's attorney general, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest.

David Hale
The key witness against President Clinton in Starr's Whitewater investigation, was banker David Hale who alleged in November 1992 that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater deal.

Attorney Randy Coleman's defense strategy was to present Hale as the victim of high-powered politicians who forced him to give away all of the money. This characterization was undermined by testimony from November 1989, wherein FBI agents investigating the failure of Madison Guaranty had questioned Hale about his dealings with Jim and Susan McDougal, including the $300,000 loan. According to the agents' official memorandum of that interview, Hale described in some detail his dealings with Jim Guy Tucker (then an attorney in private practice, later Bill Clinton's lieutenant governor), both McDougals, and several others, but never mentioned Governor Bill Clinton.

Clinton denied that he pressured Hale to approve the loan to Susan McDougal. By this time, Hale had already pleaded guilty to two felonies and secured a reduction in his sentence in exchange for his testimony against Bill Clinton. Charges were made by Clinton supporters that Hale had received numerous cash payments from representatives of the so-called Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million campaign established to assist in Hale's defense strategy, and to investigate Clinton and his associates between 1993 and 1997.

These charges were the topic of a separate investigation by former Department of Justice investigator, Michael E. Shaheen Jr. Shaheen filed his report in July 1999 to Starr, who stated that the allegations that Hale had been paid in hopes of influencing his testimony were "unsubstantiated or, in some cases, untrue". No further charges were brought against Hale or the Arkansas Project outlet, The American Spectator, though Hale later pled guilty in the Whitewater case to two felonies and served 21 months of a 28-month sentence. Writers from Salon have complained that the full, 168-page report had not been made public, a complaint still being reiterated by Salon as of 2001.

State prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Hale in early July 1996, charging that Hale had misrepresented the solvency of his insurance company, National Savings Life, to the state insurance commission. The prosecutors also alleged in court papers that Hale had made those misrepresentations to conceal the fact that he had looted the insurance company. Hale said that any infraction was a technicality and that no one had lost any money. In March 1999, Hale was convicted of the first charge, with the jury recommending a 21-day jail sentence.

Starr drafted an impeachment referral to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1997, alleging that there was "substantial and credible evidence" that Bill Clinton had committed perjury regarding Hale's allegations. Hale pleaded guilty in the Whitewater case to two felonies and served 21 months of a 28-month sentence.

Webster Hubbell
Attorney Theodore B. Olson, who with several associates launched the plan that later became known as the "Arkansas Project", wrote several essays for The American Spectator, accusing Clinton and many of his associates of wrongdoing. The first of those pieces appeared in February 1994, alleging a wide variety of criminal offenses by the Clintons and others, including Webster Hubbell. These allegations led to the discovery that Hubbell, a friend and former Rose Law Firm partner of Hillary Clinton, had committed multiple frauds, mostly against his own firm. Hillary Clinton, instead of being complicit in Hubbell's crimes, had been among his victims. In December 1994, one week after Hubbell pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, Associate White House Counsel, Jane C. Sherburne, created a "Task List" which included a reference to monitoring Hubbell's cooperation with Starr. Hubbell was later recorded in prison saying to his wife, "I need to roll over one more time" regarding the Rose Law firm lawsuit. In his next court appearance, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination (see United States v. Hubbell).

In February 1997, Starr announced he would leave the investigation to pursue a position at the Pepperdine University School of Law. However, he "flip flopped" in the face of "intense criticism" by conservatives and new evidence of sexual misconduct, diverted to some degree by the burgeoning Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. Starr's investigations in Arkansas were winding down, with his Little Rock grand jury about to expire.

Susan McDougal
Hubbell, Jim Guy Tucker, and Susan McDougal had all refused to cooperate with Starr. Tucker and McDougal were later pardoned by President Clinton. When the Arkansas grand jury did conclude its work in May 1998, after 30 months in panel, it came up with only a contempt indictment against Susan McDougal. Although she refused to testify under oath regarding the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater, Susan McDougal did make the case in the media that the Clintons had been truthful in their account of the loan, and had cast doubt on her former husband's motives for cooperating with Starr. She also claimed that James McDougal felt abandoned by Clinton, and told her "he was going to pay back the Clintons". She said to the press, again not under oath, that her husband had told her that Republican activist and Little Rock lawyer, Sheffield Nelson, was willing to "pay him some money" for talking to The New York Times about Bill Clinton, and in 1992, he told her that one of Clinton's political enemies was paying him to tell The New York Times about Whitewater.

From the beginning, Susan McDougal charged that Starr had offered her "global immunity" from other charges if she would cooperate with the Whitewater investigation. McDougal told the jury that refusing to answer questions about the Clintons and Whitewater wasn't easy for her, or her family. "It's been a long road, a very long road...and it was not an easy decision to make", McDougal told the court. McDougal refused to answer any questions while under oath, leading to her being imprisoned by the judge for civil contempt of court for the maximum 18 months, including eight months in isolation. Starr's subsequent indictment of McDougal for criminal contempt of court charges resulted in a jury hung 7–5, in favor of acquittal. President Clinton later pardoned her, shortly before leaving office (see list of people pardoned by Bill Clinton).

Starr Whitewater Report
In September 1998, Independent Counsel Starr released the Starr Report, concerning offenses alleged to have been committed by President Clinton, as part of the Lewinsky scandal. The report mentioned Whitewater only in passing; Clinton friend and advisor, Vernon Jordan, Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, and Clinton chief of staff Mack McLarty had helped Webster Hubbell financially by getting him "no-show" consulting contracts while he was under pressure to cooperate with the Whitewater investigations. Indeed, it was on this basis that Starr took on the Lewinsky investigation, under the umbrella of the Whitewater Independent Counsel mandate.

There was much acrimony from the most fervent critics of the Clintons, after the release of the Starr report on the Foster matter and after Starr's departure and return to the case. The death of Foster had been the source of many conspiracy theories. Christopher Ruddy, a reporter for Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and later CEO of Newsmax, helped fuel much of this speculation with claims that Starr had not pursued this line of inquiry far enough.

Criminal referrals
Starr received several criminal referrals from Congress but declined to prosecute. Susan Thomases and Webster Hubbell were alleged to have lied to Congress, and Harold M. Ickes was accused of misleading Congress.

Reaction of the Clintons
On January 26, 1996, Hillary Clinton testified before a grand jury concerning her investments in Whitewater. This was the first time in American history that a First Lady had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. She testified that they never borrowed any money from the bank, and denied having caused anyone to borrow money on their behalf.

Reaction of Congress
Parallel to the Independent Counsel track, both houses of the United States Congress had been investigating Whitewater and holding hearings on it. The House Committee on Financial Services had been scheduled to begin hearings in late March 1994, but they were postponed after an unusually angry, written communication from Democratic Banking Committee chair Henry B. Gonzalez to Republican Jim Leach. Gonzalez called Leach "obstinate", "obdurate", "in willful disregard" of House etiquette, and "premeditatedly" plotting a "judicial adventure". The House Banking Committee began its hearings in late July 1994.

The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee also began hearings on Whitewater in July 1994. These hearings intensified in May 1995, following the Republican's gain of control, when the Republican Banking Committee chairman Al D'Amato also became chair of the newly formed Special Whitewater Committee. The Whitewater committee's hearings were much more extensive than those held previously by the Democrats, running for 300 hours over 60 sessions across 13 months, and taking over 10,000 pages of testimony and 35,000 pages of depositions from almost 250 people. The hearings' testimony and senatorial lines of investigation mostly followed partisan lines, with Republicans investigating the President and the Democrats defending him. The Senate Special Whitewater Committee issued an 800-page majority report on June 18, 1996, which only hinted at one possible improper action by President Clinton, but spoke of the Clinton Administration as "an American presidency [that] misused its power, circumvented the limits on its authority and attempted to manipulate the truth". The first lady came in for much stronger criticism, as she was "the central figure" in all aspects of the alleged wrongdoings. The Democratic minority on the Committee called these findings "a legislative travesty", "a witch hunt", and "a political game".

On November 19, 1998, Independent Counsel Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee in connection with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton over charges related to the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. Starr said that in late 1997, he had considered preparing an impeachment report regarding the fraudulent $300,000 loan to Susan McDougall and the question of whether the President had testified truthfully regarding the loan. Starr said that he held back the charges because he was not sure that the two major witnesses had told the truth, but that the investigation was still ongoing.

Regarding the reappearance of Hillary Clinton's Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House residential section, Starr said the investigation had found no explanation for the disappearance or the reappearance. "After a thorough investigation, we have found no explanation how the billing records got where they were or why they were not discovered and produced earlier. It remains a mystery to this day." Starr also chose this occasion to completely exonerate President Clinton of any wrongdoing in the Travelgate and Filegate matters; Democrats on the committee immediately criticized Starr for withholding these findings, as well as the Whitewater one, until after the 1998 Congressional elections.

Convictions
The Clintons were never charged with any crime. Fifteen other people were convicted of more than 40 crimes, including Jim Guy Tucker, who resigned from office.
 * Jim Guy Tucker: Governor of Arkansas at the time, resigned (fraud, 3 counts)
 * John Haley: attorney for Jim Guy Tucker (tax evasion)
 * William J. Marks Sr.: Jim Guy Tucker's business partner (conspiracy)
 * Stephen Smith: former Governor Clinton aide (conspiracy to misapply funds). Bill Clinton pardoned.
 * Webster Hubbell: Clinton political supporter; U.S. Associate Attorney General; Rose Law Firm partner (embezzlement, fraud)
 * Jim McDougal: banker, Clinton political supporter: (18 felonies, varied)
 * Susan McDougal: Clinton political supporter (multiple frauds). Bill Clinton pardoned.
 * David Hale: banker, self-proclaimed Clinton political supporter: (conspiracy, fraud)
 * Neal Ainley: Perry County Bank president (embezzled bank funds for Clinton campaign)
 * Chris Wade: Whitewater real estate broker (multiple loan fraud). Bill Clinton pardoned.
 * Larry Kuca: Madison real estate agent (multiple loan fraud)
 * Robert W. Palmer: Madison appraiser (conspiracy). Bill Clinton pardoned.
 * John Latham: Madison Bank CEO (bank fraud)
 * Eugene Fitzhugh: Whitewater defendant (multiple bribery)
 * Charles Matthews: Whitewater defendant (bribery)

Tax returns
In March 1992, during his presidential campaign, the Clintons acknowledged that on their 1984 and 1985 tax returns, they had claimed improper tax deductions for interest payments made by the Whitewater Development Company. Due to the age of the mistake, the Clintons were not obligated to make good the error, but Bill Clinton announced that they would nonetheless do so.

Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster looked into this matter, but did not take any action before his death. On December 28, 1993, almost two years after the original announcement, the Clintons did make a reimbursement payment, for $4,900, to the Internal Revenue Service. This was done just before Justice Department investigators started seeking the Clintons' Whitewater files. The payment was made without filing an amended return (possibly because the three-year period for amended return filing had passed), but did include full interest on the amount of the error, including the additional two-year delay. The Whitewater files in question, publicly released in August 1995, cast some doubt on the Clintons' assertions in the matter, as they showed that the couple was aware that the interest payments in question were paid by the Whitewater corporation, and not them personally.

Ray report
Kenneth Starr's successor as Independent Counsel, Robert Ray, released a report in September 2000, that stated "This office determined that the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct." Nevertheless, Ray criticized the White House saying that delays in the production of evidence and "unmeritorious litigation" by the president's lawyers severely impeded the investigation's progress, leading to a total cost of nearly $60 million. Ray's report effectively closed the Whitewater investigation.

Aftermath
Bill and Hillary Clinton never visited the actual Whitewater property. In May 1985, Jim McDougal sold the remaining lots of the failed Whitewater Development Corporation to local realtor, Chris Wade. By 1993, there were a few occupied houses on the site, but most of the properties were still for sale. One owner, tired of the many reporters who visited the site, hung a sign saying "Go Home, Idiots". By 2007, there were about 12 houses in the subdivision, with the last lot up for sale by son, Chris Wade Jr., for $25,000. In Flippin, Arkansas, Jim McDougal's savings and loan bank had been replaced by a variety of small businesses, most recently a barbershop.

The length, expense, and results of the Whitewater investigations turned the public against the Office of the Independent Counsel; even Kenneth Starr was opposed to it. The Independent Counsel law was allowed to expire in 1999.

title: Whitewater controversy


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Gipsy Kings

Gipsy Kings (originally Los Reyes) are a musical group founded in 1979 in Arles, France. The band, whose members have Catalan heritage, play a blend of Catalan rumba, flamenco, salsa, and pop. They perform mostly in Spanish but also mix in Catalan and languages of southern France, such as Occitan.

Although the group members were born in France, their parents were mostly gitanos (Spanish Romani) who fled Spain during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. They are known for bringing rumba flamenca, a pop-oriented music distantly derived from traditional flamenco and rumba, to a worldwide audience, and for their interpretations of English-language pop hits.

Beginnings: 1970s–1980s
In the 1970s, José Reyes and Manitas de Plata were a duo who played rumba flamenca in the southern French town of Arles. When they split up, Reyes began performing with his sons, Nicolas, François (Canut), André, Patchaï, and Paul (Pablo), as José et Los Reyes (as well as being their family name, reyes means "kings" in Spanish). After their father's death in 1979, the brothers continued to perform, joined by their cousins Diego, Paco, and Tonino Baliardo (nephews of Manitas de Plata), as well as French Moroccan musician Chico Bouchikhi, who was then married to Marthe Reyes, José's daughter. Traveling around France and playing at weddings, festivals, and in the streets as a gypsy band, they adopted the moniker Gipsy Kings, with Nicolas as lead vocalist and Tonino on lead guitar. Later, they were hired to play at upper-class parties in such places as Saint-Tropez.

Their first two albums, Allegria (1982) and Luna de Fuego (1983), attracted little notice.

Success: 1987–present
Success came for Gipsy Kings with their self-titled third album, released in 1987 (1989 in the United States), which included the songs "Djobi Djoba", "Bamboléo", and the ballad "Un Amor". The record spent forty weeks on the US charts, one of few Spanish-language albums to do so.

Pablo Reyes left the group in 1988, due to hearing problems.

Chico Bouchikhi, one of the group's founding members, left in 1991 due to financial disagreements with their then-manager, Claude Martinez, and went on to start his own group, Chico & the Gypsies.

Between 1989 and 2013, the band released nine studio albums: Mosaïque (1989), Este Mundo (1991), Love and Liberté (1993), Estrellas (1995), Compas (1997), Somos Gitanos (2001), Roots (2004), Pasajero (2006), and Savor Flamenco (2013). Their latest, Evidence, came out in 2018. Savor Flamenco won a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album in 2014. In 1992, they issued the concert album Live.

The band have been criticised by flamenco purists, but Nicolas Reyes has said in an interview that the flamenco world is not in great shape itself, and that the band are proud of their success. Their 1997 album, Compas, however, contains more traditional flamenco music.

Collaborations and covers
Gipsy Kings recorded a cover of Frank Sinatra's "My Way", entitled "A Mi Manera", which was included on their 1987 self-titled album. They covered "I've Got No Strings" for the 1991 Disney Records direct-to-video album Simply Mad About the Mouse: A Musical Celebration of Imagination. Their version of Eagles' "Hotel California" was an example of fast flamenco guitar leads and rhythmic strumming; it was featured in the 1998 Coen Brothers' movie, The Big Lebowski. The 2010 film Toy Story 3 featured their rendition of Randy Newman's "You've Got a Friend in Me" in a Spanish-language version, titled "Hay un Amigo en Mi", and the group performed it in a recognizable flamenco style.

They have also collaborated with various musical artists, including Joan Baez, recording a version of "A Mi Manera" for her 1989 album, Speaking of Dreams. They recorded the song "Get Up!" with Captain Jack, from the Eurodance group's 1999 album, The Captain's Revenge. They published a cover of Bob Marley's "One Love" with his son Ziggy in 2001, and they recorded a cover of the Doobie Brothers' "Long Train Running" with Bananarama, under the pseudonym Alma de Noche, which was included on a 2013 re-issue of the girl band's 1991 album, Pop Life. In 2020, they featured on the song "Ciclone" by Takagi & Ketra, with vocals by Elodie and Mariah Angeliq. A year later, they shared credits with Spanish rapper C. Tangana on the song "Ingobernable", which appeared on his album El Madrileño.

Solo projects

Individual members of the band have toured with their own projects and released solo albums. In 1989, Canut Reyes published Boléro, and in 2012, his second album, Gitano, came out.

Tonino Baliardo released an instrumental album in 2001, titled Essences. He followed it two years later with Tonino Baliardo. In 2023, he issued Renaissance, under the name of his touring band, Gipsy Kings featuring Tonino Baliardo.

In 2022, Nicolas Reyes and Moroccan musician Saad Lamjarred collaborated to pay tribute to King Mohammed VI on Throne Day, releasing a song called "Viva El Rey Habibna".

André Reyes performs with his own band, under the name Gipsy Kings by André Reyes. The group consists of André and a number of his relatives, including his son Thomas, his nephews Kakou and Tambo, his brother Patchaï, and his first cousin Mario, as well as four backing musicians. In 2022, they released the album Nací Gitano.

Patchaï Reyes performs as Gitano Family with his son.

Founding member Chico Bouchikhi tours with his band Chico & the Gypsies. They have released numerous albums since 1992.

Band members
Gipsy Kings originally consisted of two parent families: Reyes and Baliardo. The Reyes brothers, sons of Jose Reyes, are nephews of Manitas de Plata, while the Baliardo brothers are his sons.

Current
 * Nicolas Reyes – lead vocals (1978–present)
 * Tonino Baliardo – lead guitar (1978–present)

Past

 * Canut Reyes – vocals, guitar (1978–?)
 * Chico Bouchikhi – guitar (1978–1991)
 * André Reyes – guitar, backing vocals (1978–?)
 * Diego Baliardo – guitar (1978–?)
 * Paco Baliardo – guitar (1978–?)
 * Pablo Reyes – guitar, backing vocals (1978–1988)
 * Patchaï Reyes – guitar, backing vocals (1978–?)

Discography

 * Allegria (1982)
 * Luna de Fuego (1983)
 * Gipsy Kings (1987)
 * Mosaïque (1989)
 * Este Mundo (1991) – nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album
 * Love and Liberté (1993) – nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album
 * Estrellas (1995) – released in the US as Tierra Gitana, with minor track list differences
 * Tierra Gitana (1996) – US version of Estrellas; nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album
 * Compas (1997) – nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album
 * Somos Gitanos (2001)
 * Roots (2004)
 * Pasajero (2006)
 * Savor Flamenco (2013) – won a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album
 * Evidence (2018)

Awards and recognition

 * Victoires de la Musique 1990 Group of the Year

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Gipsy Kings


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Holy Living and Holy Dying

Holy Living and Holy Dying is the collective title of two books of Christian devotion by Jeremy Taylor. They were originally published as The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living in 1650 and The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying in 1651. Holy Living is designed to instruct the reader in living a virtuous life, increasing personal piety, and avoiding temptations. Holy Dying is meant to instruct the reader in the "means and instruments" of preparing for a blessed death. Holy Dying was the "artistic climax" of a consolatory death literature tradition that had begun with Ars moriendi in the 15th century.

Description
Holy Living and Holy Dying is the collective title of two books of Christian devotion by Jeremy Taylor, originally published as The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living in 1650 and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying in 1651. The two books represent one of the high points of English prose during the period of the early Stuarts. According to historian Nancy Lee Beaty, Holy Dying was the "artistic climax" of a consolatory death literature tradition that had begun with Ars moriendi in the 15th century. Other works in this tradition include The Waye of Dying Well and The Sick Mannes Salve.

Holy Living is designed to instruct the reader in living a virtuous life, increasing personal piety, and avoiding temptations. Holy Dying is meant to instruct the reader in the "means and instruments" of preparing for a blessed death. Each book contains discussions of theology, moral instruction, often prefaced as "The Consideration reduc'd to practise," and model prayers requesting divine assistance in achieving them.

Morality
Holy Living is largely concerned with questions of practical morality, of a type that has hardly changed from the 17th century to today. The companion volume, Holy Dying, was occasioned by the death of the wife of Taylor's patron and employer, the Earl of Carbery. That book is half Christian instruction and half memorial sermon, with Taylor displaying his gift for poetic prose. Coupled with the 17th century cult of melancholia, the result is prose that is simultaneously stately and rapturous, "half in love with easeful death", and reads like prose poetry:

 * But so have I seen a Rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the Morning, and full with the dew of Heaven, as a Lambs fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on a darknesse, and to decline its softnesse, and the symptomes of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night having lost some of its leaves, and all of its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. (See also period (rhetoric)).

Legacy
Taylor's work was much admired by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, for its devotional quality; and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Edmund Gosse for its literary qualities. John Osborne said that the book demonstrates how the English language can be used "beautifully and simply".

title: Holy Living and Holy Dying


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Unicycle trials

Unicycle trials is a form of unicycling which involves participants attempting to ride a unicycle over obstacles without any part of the rider touching the ground. The obstacles traversed can be set up specifically for the purpose of unicycle trials, but are often walls, railings, ledges and other "street furniture" found in an urban environment. The sport is derived from (or at least inspired by) bike trials and motorcycle trials.

Obstacles are traversed using various moves. Hopping is achieved by suddenly forcing the unicycle pedals downwards while holding the seat, the reactive forces resulting from the compression of the tyre lift the unicycle into the air. Jumping is a similar to hopping, except that the unicycle seat is held in front of the rider to allow greater height to be achieved. Pedal grabs and crank grabs involve a hop or jump to land the unicycles pedal or crank on the edge of an object, and then a second hop or jump to land the unicycle fully on the object.

Although unicycle trials can be performed on a standard unicycle, many are not designed for the forces which are caused by unicycle trials. A trials unicycle is built with unicycle trials in mind, and is therefore designed to better cope with these stresses.

Trials unicycle

A trials unicycle is a unicycle designed for unicycle trials. Trials unicycles are stronger than standard unicycles in order to withstand the stresses caused by jumping, dropping, and supporting the weight of the unicycle and rider on components such as the pedals and cranks.

The wheel diameter on a trials unicycle is usually 19″ or 20″, as this allows greater maneuverability due to the short circumference of the wheel. Most Trials unicycles come with 19″ rear rims as used on 20″ (or mod) trials bicycles. This allows for larger tyres to be fitted which can help provide bounce and preload for jumping, and aid stability being generally quite wide (some up to 2.5 inches). A smaller wheel also means the unicycle is lighter, although some riders prefer larger wheels. The tire is generally wide and thick, giving a large air volume. This is to cushion drops and allow large hops and jumps. The tire will often have a deep tread to allow greater grip to obstacles. Strong high tension spokes and a strong rim wheel rim is used to prevent the wheel from deforming under the great stresses exerted on it by jumping. Unicycle wheels have to withstand large lateral stresses because, unlike in conventional riding, the rider may jump sideways. Many trials unicycles have a splined hub and cranks, as this design tends to be more resistant to bending and breaking than the more common cotterless, or square taper, equivalent. Long cranks give the rider extra torque and pedals with a large amount of grip (often with pins or teeth) are used to prevent the rider's feet from slipping. Unicycles with shorter cranks are generally referred to as street unicycles, as they let the rider keep up their momentum easier and do smooth tricks. Whereas Trials unicycles usually have longer cranks that are better for hopping, as the rider has better control of the rotation of the wheel, and can therefore keep the unicycle from slipping out from under him.

title: Unicycle trials


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Talk:Tree of the knowledge of good and evil/off-topic

Its about the law of God vs the law of man

There was only one forbidden fruit in Eden: the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

When Adam ate the fruit, Yahweh’s response was: "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." So Adam (man) was banished from Paradise and condemned to mortality, with freedom to decide for himself what's good and evil.

The tower of Babel incident was man trying to get back to paradise (and the tree of life). To thwart this, Yahweh divided us into separate peoples with separate languages.

Much later, Yahweh hands Moses the commandments – what’s good and what’s evil according to Yahweh. A deal is done, a covenant entered into: we submit to God’s law and He gives us immortality in Paradise... eventually. So, one thousand five hundred years later, man is still waiting for deliverance, when Jesus appears. Calling himself the son of Adam.

Jesus taught freedom from the law of Yahweh. We can make our own laws, guided only by the "golden rule" and the invisible hand of the Holy Ghost. Never mind Yahweh’s circumcision, dietary regulations and stoned adulteresses. What's more, he was promising eternal life, raising the sick and the dead: overturning the mortality to which Yahweh had condemned us.

His apostles were speaking in tongues, overturning Yahweh's Babel mischief. The kingdom of heaven was immanent or imminent, close by anyway.

Jesus was a rebel, storming the gates of Eden, who got what was coming to him. Good and proper. Yahweh’s priesthood took control and presided over 2000 years of fascistic oppression, all the while dangling the image of a crucified Jesus before us, lest we forget what Yahweh does to those who challenge his rule.

The US Defence department is currently working on a little box that you can speak English into and out pops a spoken Arabic translation. Another attempt to undo Yahweh's Babel mischief. Marvellous to think that it may be first deployed in Babylon in a battle between man's law and God's law.

Anthony Cole

Response to Anthony Cole
Anthony:

Jesus came to fulfill the Law of the Father (Yahweh). Man (either Jew or Gentile) disobeyed the Father over and over throughout history and today. Man cannot save himself. Only God, the creator, can save man. Man created a debt of sin (disobedience) that must be paid in order to condemn the accusor, Satan. That debt has been paid in full by Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

The Law is not changed or reversed. Law is forced but love is given. God, the Father, loved us so much that He sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the debt of sin created by man. His grace is sufficent. We are righteous in His eyes again when we believe and trust in His Son. This is the love of God, His unyielding and everlasting grace.

The Bible will show you this great unfolding Truth, if you will pray and read God's Word earnestly.

Vic O'Dell

Human Shared Knowledge
The thing that makes humans different from the animals is our ability to share and pass on knowledge from one person to another. When an individual animal learned something new it was lost upon the death of the individual. But humans evolved language which allowed new discoveries to be taught to others. Eventually humans learned to draw symbols and then a written language.

As human evolution progressed the printing press was invented and then radio, television, telephones, computers, and the Internet made the storage and transfer of knowledge more efficient. As our technologies grew, our knowledge base grew and humanity as a species evolved forward.

Our common knowledge base which we call the Tree of Knowledge is the benchmark of human evolution. Realists make it their duty to grow the tree as they expand their knowledge of the reality that we all exist in.

Subject Censorship - Please stop it!
Please quit censoring information on the Church of Reality's interpretation of the Tree of Knowledge. Realists aren't deleting Christian interpretations.

In the Church of Reality the Tree of Knowledge represents the sum total of all human understanding. It represents the shared knowledge of the human race. The tree is represented by a fractal and is a reference to a mathematical tree indicating that all knowledge is interconnected. The growth of the Tree of Knowledge is equated the the positive evolution of the human race.

--Marcperkel 06:58, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Creationist Chronicles: Wicca?
interesting idea...although you'll find that MANY people would be insulted with the idea that the Torah, Bible and Qur'an are rooted in Wicca. Arch O. La  Grigory Deepdelver  17:40, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Never mind...Wetman removed it. Arch O. La  Grigory Deepdelver  18:13, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

So let me see if I get this straight. I follow the npov guideline on what another groups belief structure is on a particul subject and it gets removed. Yes the idea may insult some but there are those that share these particular beliefs. If google books has no problem publishing the full text of this groups belief structure on this particular subject matter than why should Wikipedia. The fact is there are people that believe this to be true. When Wetman deletes this fact stating "removed vanity-published anonymously-authored simplistic rant: "knowledge=books". Wetman is clearly ignorant on this particular subject matter and those people who hold this particular belief structure.--Creationistguy 21:52, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm sure Wetman's just concerned about WP:NOTABILITY. Arch O. La  Grigory Deepdelver  21:57, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

NOTABILITY Nonetheless there is no dictum against any book that is reasonably spread or otherwise well-known or remarkable. Ask yourself if several libraries or bookshops, or a no-subscription website have a copy of the book, so that other wikipedians can easily consult the book, or at least have access to on-line or press-published reviews of the book.

Usually, books with an ISBN-number and/or availability in a couple dozen of libraries and/or a Project Gutenberg type website, and with a notability above that of an average cookbook or programmers manual would qualify.

The book I referred to has LCCN 2003097908 and a ISBN-number 1-4107-9815-1 although the paperback version of the book has been sold out for sometime and only available in secondary markets, the electronic version is available free through google books. The point of the post was not to promote the entire book but only refer to that portion of the book that refers to the subject at hand. The belief structure of a particular group on what the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" is.Creationistguy 23:01, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, there was a dispute over the Church of Reality's views some time back... see Talk:Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil/off-topic. Other than that, I suggest you Talk to Wetman. Arch O. La  Grigory Deepdelver  06:19, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

What if the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" is exactly what it says?
If human beings had no concept of "good" or "evil" how would they behave? Is it possible that what is being represented here is either litterally or metaphorically the ability to categorize ourselves, others, and things as having an intentional agency committed to our well being or our destruction? Perhaps, we ate and continue to eat from the tree of "unforgiveness of anything not like me". Maybe we should consider eating instead from the tree of the knowledge of what works for everyone. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.66.45.94 (talk) 15:27, 9 July 2011 (UTC)


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Pachyrhizus

Pachyrhizus is a genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae. It includes five or species of herbs and subshrubs native to the tropical and subtropical Americas, ranging from northern Mexico to northwestern Argentina. Typical habitat is seasonally-dry tropical forest and thicket, often at forest margins, in scrub vegetation, and in open grassy areas. Plants in the genus grow from large, often edible taproots.

Jícama
The jícama or yam bean (P. erosus) is a vine widely grown for its large (10–15 cm diameter and up to 20 kg weight), spherical or elongated taproot. After removal of the thick, fibrous brown skin, the white flesh of the root can be eaten cooked or raw. Crisp, moist, and slightly sweet, the flesh draws comparison with that of the apple. The plant produces seeds that are comparable to lima beans, and that are sometimes eaten when young in places where the jicama is native. The mature seeds contain high levels of rotenone, a chemical used as an insecticide and pesticide. The remainder of the jícama plant is very poisonous.

Jícama comes from the New World; the name jícama is used in Central / South America. Today, pachyrhizus erosus is grown throughout Asia. In China, the root is known as cold potato; in Malaysia, sengkuang; in Indonesia, bengkoang; in the Philippines, singkamas; in Thailand, mankew. It is eaten raw and used in stir fried dishes.

Pachyrhizus tuberosus
Goiteño, nupe, jacatupe or Amazonian yam bean (Pachyrhizus tuberosus) is an annual vine that is characterized by a wrapped and herbaceous stem and a ligneous base. It has white and lilac flowers, pods from 10 to 20 cm in length and beans with a high protein content (32%). Each plant has two or more tubercles from 15 to 25 cm in length that are succulent, sweet and rich in starch and protein (9%). They are consumed both raw and cooked. The leaves (20 to 24% protein) and pods are also edible. This plant prospers in acid soils in South America's tropical rainforests. It is cultivated by the native peoples of the Amazon Rainforest.

Ahipa
The ahipa, ajipa, or Andean yam bean (Pachyrhizus ahipa) is very similar to the jicama  and goitenyo in characteristics and uses. Unlike the jícama, it is not a vine and it grows up 2000 m above sea level in the highest Bolivian mountains. The root is smaller and more elongated. It is little known outside of the Andes, where it is mostly grown for personal or local consumption. In the 19th century, British scientists introduced ahipa to the West Indies, where it is also enjoyed by the residents of those islands.

All three above Pachyrhizus species are popular cultivated varieties, mainly jicama or P. erosus, which is common in the US as imported jicama, while another species,  P. palmatilobus, is less agreeable in taste.

title: Pachyrhizus


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Fields of the Nephilim

Fields of the Nephilim are an English gothic rock band formed in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, in 1984. The band's name refers to a Biblical race of angel-human hybrids known as the Nephilim.

Early years (1984–1991)
The band's debut EP, Burning the Fields, was released in 1985 by Situation Two records (an imprint of Beggars Banquet Records). The band "upgraded" to Beggars Banquet in 1986 to release "Power" and "Preacher Man", and their first album, Dawnrazor which topped the Indie chart in 1987. The next release, "Blue Water", was the first Fields of the Nephilim single to reach the UK Singles Chart (number 75). It was followed by "Moonchild", lead single from the second LP The Nephilim which reached number 28 in the UK chart.

Psychonaut was released in May 1989 and peaked at number 35; the ten-minute track indicated a slight shift for the band toward a more experimental and intense sound. This single/EP was a precursor for the polished and highly produced Elizium album (1990). Produced by Pink Floyd / David Gilmour engineer Andy Jackson (taking over from previous band producer Bill Buchanan), the album was preceded by the single "For Her Light", which clipped the British Top 40 in its first week of release. A remixed version of "Sumerland (Dreamed)" (this version is on the CD single only and differed from the 7" vinyl format of the same release), released in November 1990, peaked at number 37.

In 1991, the band played their final gigs, a two-day 'Festival of Fire' in London. The final releases of this era are the live CD Earth Inferno and video Visionary Heads, followed by the compilation Revelations.

Departure of McCoy and hiatus (1991–1998)
Frontman McCoy left the band in 1991. The remaining members, together with singer Andy Delaney, chose not to continue with the "Fields of the Nephilim" name and recorded instead under the name Rubicon. The band released two albums before disbanding: What Starts, Ends in 1992 and Room 101 in 1995.

Meanwhile, Carl McCoy formed a new project called Nefilim in 1991 after the disbanding of Fields of the Nephilim.

The band played some gigs in 1993, showcasing some new material. According to McCoy, the release of their debut album, Zoon, was delayed for several years due to disagreements with the record label. Zoon was eventually released in 1996 and featured a distinctly heavier sound than McCoy's previous works.

Reunion and Fallen (1998–2002)
On 15 August 1998, McCoy and original bassist Tony Pettitt held a press conference at the Zillo Festival in Germany, announcing their future plans to collaborate under two separate monikers, Fields of the Nephilim (along with the Wright brothers) and The Nefilim (an altered spelling of McCoy's solo project).

According to different original band members, the band was rehearsing and writing the next Fields of the Nephilim album (with the exception of Yates). However, the awaited reunion of the original band line-up never happened.

In May 2000, McCoy released "One More Nightmare (Trees Come Down)", the first Fields of the Nephilim single with their new label, Jungle Records. It contained newly worked versions of "Trees Come Down" and "Darkcell," both originally released on the Burning the Fields EP in 1984. Between June and August 2000, the band made four live appearances at European festivals; Woodstage, Eurorock, Roskilde and M'era Luna music festivals.

In 2002, Jungle Records and Metropolis Records released the album Fallen. The release was not authorised by the band, and consists of unfinished recordings from 1997–2001, the 2000 reworkings of "Trees Come Down" and "Darkcell", and a previously unreleased demo by The Nefilim. The release is disowned by the band for many years, and only one song from it, "From The Fire," has been performed live.

Mourning Sun and Ceromonies (2005–2014)
Fifteen years after Elizium, McCoy released Mourning Sun, his fourth full-length studio album under the name Fields of the Nephilim. The album had seven original songs, with a cover version of Zager and Evans's "In the Year 2525" included as a bonus track on the first 5,000 copies.

In interviews following the release of the album Mourning Sun, McCoy mentions collaborating with ghost musicians but only John "Capachino" Carter is officially credited on the album.

In 2006, some European venues announced a tour was to take place, although this was never officially confirmed. In spite of high ticket sales, none of the gigs occurred. Through the band's official website, McCoy emphasised that he had at not confirmed these dates with promoters or venues, and reiterated that people should not buy tickets for such events until official announcements through the band's website that such live performances were to go ahead.

In May 2007, McCoy performed as Fields of the Nephilim for the first time in seven years, at the London Astoria. According to the band's website, the event was filmed by video director Richard Stanley, who had directed videos for the original band's singles: however, due to quality issues with the audio recording & filming it was abandoned.

Ceromonies was the culmination of a two night event sponsored by Metal Hammer magazine in which the band played material spanning the band's career. Performed at London's O2 Shepherds Bush Empire the band performed to sell-out crowds. The 'Ceromonies' line-up for this event that featured on the live album and DVD was McCoy, Carter, King, Edwards and Newell. Highlights of this period included the band's biggest ever headline show to date at the 2008 M'era Luna Festival, where the 'Ceromonies' line-up performed in front of over 23,000 people. The rapturous encore from this show, "Last Exit for the Lost", was also included on Ceromonies.

In June 2008, a DVD entitled Live in Düsseldorf 1991 was released. Sacred Symphony released the DVD and double CD box set as well as a double LP vinyl version of Ceromonies (Ad Mortem Ad Vitam) on 16 April 2012, consisting of recordings and footage from the two concerts. The vinyl version does not come with the live DVD. It was also released as a Collectible box set coming in a wooden box with the Ceromonies logo and title branded on the wooden lid.

2014–present
On 1 July 2014, Carl McCoy announced that the band was back in the studio "...recording and compiling the most important elements created and gathered." In December 2014, the band debuted two new songs live onstage, "Earthbound" and "Prophecy". "Prophecy" was Produced, Engineered and mixed by Carl McCoy and Mastered by Maor Appelbaum. The single was released as a 7" Vinyl single and as an online single on the Sacred Symphony label available only as download on iTunes on 17 March 2016. It was promoted as a band single, but the track did not feature Pettitt. News reports said that a release on both CD and vinyl, containing exclusive artwork and bonus material would follow, though this did not happen.

Tom Edwards died in 2017 from heart failure, whilst touring in the US with Adam Ant.

Drummer Lee Newell announced that he quit the band citing personal reasons regarding a move to the US. All shows up until July have been cancelled with no explanation from the band though promoters have issued statements and apologies to fans. As yet there is no word from the band’s management on whether a replacement drummer has been secured and if any existing shows will be fulfilled.

July 6th - M’era Luna organisers have officially announced via social media that Fields of the Nephilim will not be performing at this year’s festival. Again, no word from the band’s representative, Noise Management.

Musical style and imagery
Fields of the Nephilim's initial sound incorporated elements of hard rock, gothic rock, heavy metal and psychedelic rock, and comprised a bass- and guitar-driven sound underpinned by McCoy's growled vocals. Lyrically, the band incorporated themes concerning magic (specifically chaos magic), the Cthulhu Mythos, the Sumerian religion, and the works of Aleister Crowley. The band had a "dust and death" image, associated with characters from Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns and often wore cowboy dusters with a weather-beaten look during photoshoots. This weather-beaten look was attained by dusting themselves down with, by their own admission, Mother's Pride flour. This also proved problematic for the band as in May 1988, Nottinghamshire Police detained the band whilst a suspect substance was tested for drugs. This was later determined to be nothing but flour from the stage set.

Legacy
In 2001, Nod and Paul Wright formed a new band, Last Rites. They released two full-length albums: Guided by Light (2001) and The Many Forms (2005).

Pettitt performed in The Eden House and NFD.

Cian Houchin has performed and recorded albums as the frontman for Saints of Eden.

Fields of the Nephilim have been cited as influence by musicians including Watain, Katatonia, Enslaved, Harald Nævdal of Immortal and Old Funeral and Mille Petrozza of Kreator.

Parody
From 1988, during the band's period of mainstream attention following the release of Dawnrazor and Psychonaut, the music newspaper Melody Maker published various spoof articles about the band. This culminated in a regular feature called The Nod Corner, which purported to be written by Nephilim drummer Nod Wright and which took a satirical view on the band's baleful and dramatic image, usually portraying McCoy as a prima donna who exploited and bullied Nod. Wright appeared to take the spoof graciously.

Current lineup

 * Carl McCoy – vocals (1984–present)
 * Tony Pettit – bass (1984–1991, 1998–2000, 2013–present)
 * Gavin King – guitar (2007–present)
 * Adam Leach – guitar (2018–present)

Former members

 * Gary Wisker – saxophone (1984–1985)
 * Peter Yates – guitar (1985–1991)
 * Paul Wright – guitar (1984–1991, 1998–2000)
 * "Nod" Alexander Wright – drums (1984–1991, 1998–2000)
 * Gizz Butt - guitar
 * John "Capachino" Carter – bass (drums/guitars/keys/vocals – studio) (2000–2009)
 * Andy James - guitar
 * Tom Edwards – guitar (2008–2016, died 2017)
 * Lee Newell - drums (2007-2023)

Discography

 * Dawnrazor (1987)
 * The Nephilim (1988)
 * Elizium (1990)
 * Fallen (2002)
 * Mourning Sun (2005)

title: Fields of the Nephilim


text:
Prose poetry

Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.

Characteristics
Prose poetry is written as prose, without the line breaks associated with poetry. However, it makes use of poetic devices such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, rhyme, metaphor, and figures of speech.

History
Although the Bible is written in prose, it maintains poetic features such as rhythms and lyricism.

In 17th-century Japan, Matsuo Bashō originated haibun, a form of prose poetry combining haiku with prose. It is best exemplified by his book Oku no Hosomichi, in which he used a literary genre of prose-and-poetry composition of multidimensional writing.

In the West, prose poetry originated in early-19th-century France and Germany as a reaction against the traditional verse line. The German Romantics Jean Paul, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich Heine may be seen as precursors of the prose poem. Earlier, 18th-century European forerunners of prose poetry had included James Macpherson's "translation" of Ossian and Évariste de Parny's "Chansons madécasses". At the time of the prose poem's establishment as a form, French poetry was dominated by the alexandrine, a strict and demanding form that poets starting with Maurice de Guérin (whose "Le Centaure" and "La Bacchante" remain arguably the most powerful prose poems ever written ) and Aloysius Bertrand (in Gaspard de la nuit) chose, in almost complete isolation, to cease using. Later Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé followed their example in works like Paris Spleen and Illuminations. The prose poem continued to be written in France into the 20th century by such writers as Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Gertrude Stein, and Francis Ponge.

In 1877–1882 Russian novelist Turgenev wrote several 'Poems in prose' (Стихотворения в прозе) which have neither poetic rhythm nor rhymes but resemble poetry in concise but expressive form.

The writings of Syrian poet and writer Francis Marrash (1836–73) featured the first examples of prose poetry in modern Arabic literature. From the mid-20th century, the great Arab exponent of prose poetry was the Syrian poet Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, born 1930), a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Modernist poet T. S. Eliot wrote vehemently against prose poems. He added to the debate about what defines the genre, writing in his introduction to Djuna Barnes' highly poeticized 1936 novel Nightwood that it could not be classed as "poetic prose" as it did not show the rhythm or "musical pattern" of verse. By contrast, other Modernist authors, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, consistently wrote prose poetry. Poet and critic Donald Sidney-Fryer, a leading scholar of the works of American poet Clark Ashton Smith, praised "the extremely picturesque or pictorial character of many of Smith's typical, far-ranging, and most polished fantasies, his extended poems in prose." Canadian author Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) is a relatively isolated example of mid-20th-century English-language poetic prose.

Prose poems made a resurgence in the early 1950s and in the 1960s with American poets Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, and James Wright. Edson worked principally in this form, and helped give the prose poem a reputation for surrealist wit. Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn't End.

Since the late 1980s, prose poetry has gained in popularity. Journals have begun specializing in prose poems or microfiction. In the United Kingdom, Stride Books published a 1993 anthology of prose poetry, A Curious Architecture.

title: Prose poetry


text:
Tree of life (biblical)

In Judaism and Christianity, the tree of life (עֵץ הַחַיִּים; Lignum vitae) is first described in of the Book of Genesis as being "in the midst of the Garden of Eden" with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע; Lignum scientiae boni et mali). After the fall of man, "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever", cherubim and a flaming sword are placed at the east end of the Garden to guard the way to the tree of life. The tree of life has become the subject of some debate as to whether or not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the same tree.

In the Bible outside of Genesis, the term "tree of life" appears in Proverbs and Revelation. It also appears in 2 Esdras and 4 Maccabees, which are included among the Jewish apocrypha.

According to the Greek Apocalypse of Moses, the tree of life is also called the Tree of Mercy. Adam believed the oil of the tree of Life would relieve him of his ailments and sent Seth and Eve to the doors of the Garden to beg for some oil of the tree of Life.

Number of trees
Karl Budde, in his critical study of 1883, proposed that there was only one tree in the body of the Genesis narrative, and that it had been portrayed in two ways: one as the tree in the middle of the Garden, and two as the forbidden tree. Claus Westermann gave recognition to Budde's theory in 1976.

Ellen van Wolde noted that among Bible scholars "the trees are almost always dealt with separately and not related to each other" and that "attention is almost exclusively directed to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whereas the tree of life is paid hardly any attention."

Eastern Christianity

The Eastern Orthodox Church has traditionally understood the tree of life in Genesis as a prefiguration of the Cross, which humanity could not partake of until after the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Western Christianity
In The City of God (xiii.20–21), Augustine of Hippo offers great allowance for "spiritual" interpretations of the events in the garden, so long as such allegories do not rob the narrative of its historical reality. Enlightenment theologians (culminating perhaps in Brunner and Niebuhr in the twentieth century) sought for figurative interpretations because they had already dismissed the historical possibility of the story.

Others sought very pragmatic understandings of the tree. In the Summa Theologica (Q97), Thomas Aquinas argued that the tree served to maintain Adam's biological processes for an extended earthly animal life. It did not provide immortality as such, for the tree, being finite, could not grant infinite life. Hence after a period of time, the man and woman would need to eat again from the tree or else be "transported to the spiritual life." The common fruit trees of the garden were given to offset the effects of "loss of moisture" (note the doctrine of the humors at work), while the tree of life was intended to offset the inefficiencies of the body. Following Augustine in the City of God (xiv.26), “man was furnished with food against hunger, with drink against thirst, and with the tree of life against the ravages of old age.”

John Calvin (Commentary on Genesis 2:8), following a different thread in Augustine (City of God, xiii.20), understood the tree in sacramental language. Given that humanity cannot exist except within a covenantal relationship with God, and all covenants use symbols to give us "the attestation of his grace", he gives the tree, "not because it could confer on man that life with which he had been previously endued, but in order that it might be a symbol and memorial of the life which he had received from God." God often uses symbols; he doesn't transfer his power into these outward signs, but "by them He stretches out His hand to us, because, without assistance, we cannot ascend to Him." Thus he intends man, as often as he eats the fruit, to remember the source of his life, and acknowledge that he lives not by his own power, but by God's kindness. Calvin denies (contra Aquinas and without mentioning his name) that the tree served as a biological defense against physical aging. This is the standing interpretation in modern Reformed theology as well.

Judaism
According to Jewish mythology, in the Garden of Eden there is a tree of life or the "tree of souls" that blossoms and produces new souls, which fall into the Guf, the Treasury of Souls. The Angel Gabriel reaches into the treasury and takes out the first soul that comes into his hand. Then Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the embryo until it is born.

Kabbalah
The tree of life is represented in several examples of sacred geometry and is central in particular to the Kabbalah, where it is represented as a diagram of ten nodes called sefirot (singular sefirah), or the ten emanations or attributes of God. It portrays how God, the Creator, demonstrates his creative energy throughout the universe, via angels and then to humans. Each of the tree's branches (sefirot) represents a different category of creative force that is overseen by a different Archangel. Believers claim that by focusing on the various energies one by one, people can develop a closer spiritual union with God. Kabbalah is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism.

In popular culture
The tree of life is mentioned explicitly in the 2006 film The Fountain; it is discussed in connection with the Hebrew Genesis book.

In the 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, beings known as Angels possess the “fruit of life”, which provides them with infinite energy, enabling regeneration and shapeshifting, among other abilities.

title: Tree of life (biblical)


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Talk:Melancholy/Archive 1

I included a link to "melancholy" in my new bit on Holy Living and Holy Dying, only to learn that "melancholy" redirects to clinical depression. This is mildly disconcerting.

I plan to create new pages shortly on Robert Burton and the Anatomy of Melancholy as soon as I have assembled the information shortly. I believe that I will need to write up a new page on literary melancholy, that probably should go here. How should this be best handled?

 * I've redirected this to melancholia, which is far more appropriate. If a separate page on literary melancholy is needed, it can be made at literary melancholy, but I would think that melancholia would be the place to handle the subject. --Camembert

 * I have checked through the only links to melancholy, and found only one other than mine, a piece on a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Since it also seemed more appropriate targetted at melancholia I made that minor change as well. --IHCOYC

title: Talk:Melancholy/Archive 1


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Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Their sexual relationship began in 1995—when Clinton was 49 years old and Lewinsky was 22 years old—and lasted 18 months, ending in 1997. Clinton ended televised remarks on January 26, 1998, with the later infamous statement: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Further investigation led to charges of perjury and to the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives. He was subsequently acquitted on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day U.S. Senate trial.

Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones case regarding Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years; shortly thereafter, he was disbarred from presenting cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lewinsky was a graduate of Lewis & Clark College. She was hired during Clinton's first term in 1995 as an intern at the White House through the White House Internship Program and was later an employee of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. It is believed that Clinton began a personal relationship with her while she worked at the White House, the details of which she later confided to Linda Tripp, her Defense Department co-worker who secretly recorded their telephone conversations.

In January 1998, Tripp discovered that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, denying a relationship with Clinton. She delivered tapes to Ken Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating Clinton on other matters, including the Whitewater scandal, the White House FBI files controversy, and the White House travel office controversy. During the grand jury testimony, Clinton's responses were carefully worded, and he argued "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is", with regard to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship".

This scandal is sometimes referred to as "Monicagate", "Lewinskygate", "Tailgate", "Sexgate", and "Zippergate", following the "-gate" construction that has been used since the Watergate scandal.

Allegations of sexual contact

Lewinsky said she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton on nine occasions from November 1995 to March 1997. According to her published schedule, First Lady Hillary Clinton was at the White House for at least some portion of seven of those days.

In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon, because they felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. According to his autobiography, then-United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the United Nations. Richardson did so, and offered her a position, which she declined. The American Spectator alleged that Richardson knew more about the Lewinsky affair than he declared to the grand jury.

Lewinsky confided in Linda Tripp about her relationship with Clinton. Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress in order to keep it as an "insurance policy." Tripp reported their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to secretly record them, which Tripp began doing in September 1997. Goldberg also urged Tripp to take the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and bring them to the attention of people working on the Paula Jones case. In the fall of 1997, Goldberg began speaking to reporters (including Michael Isikoff of Newsweek) about the tapes.

In the Paula Jones case, Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit that denied any physical relationship with Clinton. In January 1998, she attempted to persuade Tripp to commit perjury in the Jones case. Instead, Tripp gave the tapes to Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater controversy and other matters. Starr was now armed with evidence of Lewinsky's admission of a physical relationship with Clinton, and he broadened the investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case.

Denial and subsequent admission
News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report, which reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 in The Washington Post. The story swirled for several days and, despite swift denials from Clinton, the clamor for answers from the White House grew louder. On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a denial in which he said:

"Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you."

Pundits debated whether Clinton would address the allegations in his State of the Union Address. Ultimately, he chose not to mention them. Hillary Clinton remained supportive of her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's Today she said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

For the next several months and through the summer, the media debated whether or not an affair had occurred and whether or not Clinton had lied or obstructed justice, but nothing could be definitively established beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, a substantial delay after the public break of the scandal, Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress (which Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning) to the Starr investigators. The FBI tested the dress and matched the semen stains to a blood sample from Clinton, thereby providing unambiguous DNA evidence that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.

Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had engaged in an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting that his relationship with Lewinsky was "not appropriate".

On August 20, 1998, three days after Clinton testified on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Operation Infinite Reach launched missiles against al-Qaeda bases in Khost, Afghanistan, and the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for the 1998 United States embassy bombings. Some countries, media outlets, protesters, and Republicans accused Clinton of ordering the attacks as a diversion. The attacks also drew parallels to the then-recently released movie Wag the Dog, which features a fictional president faking a war in Albania to distract attention from a sex scandal. Administration officials denied any connection between the missile strikes and the ongoing scandal, and 9/11 Commission investigators found no reason to dispute those statements. The missile strikes also caused anti-Semitic canards to spread in the Middle East that Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to influence Clinton against aiding Palestine. This conspiracy theory would influence Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell and the September 11 attacks.

Perjury charges
In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was false and perjurious.

During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person"). In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included giving oral sex but excluded receiving oral sex.

Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony regarding his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling, citing financial problems, but still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations. In 2001, his license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court.

Impeachment
In December 1998, Clinton's Democratic political party was in the minority in both chambers of Congress. A few Democratic members of Congress, and most in the opposition Republican Party, claimed that Clinton's giving false testimony and allegedly influencing Lewinsky's testimony were crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury and thus impeachable offenses. After a delay due to a brief bombing campaign in Iraq, the House of Representatives voted to issue two Articles of Impeachment against him which was followed by a 21-day trial in the Senate.

Clinton was acquitted on both counts as neither received the necessary two-thirds majority vote of the senators present. Between 45 and 50 senators voted to convict, depending on the charge, short of the 67 votes needed for conviction and removal from office. All the Democrats in the Senate voted for acquittal on both the perjury and the obstruction of justice charges. Ten Republicans voted for acquittal for perjury: John Chafee (Rhode Island), Susan Collins (Maine), Slade Gorton (Washington), Jim Jeffords (Vermont), Richard Shelby (Alabama), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Ted Stevens (Alaska), Fred Thompson (Tennessee), and John Warner (Virginia). Five Republicans voted for acquittal for obstruction of justice: Chafee, Collins, Jeffords, Snowe, and Specter.

President Clinton was thereby acquitted of all charges and remained in office. There were attempts to censure the president by the House of Representatives, but those attempts failed.

Effect on 2000 presidential election
The scandal arguably affected the 2000 U.S. presidential election in two quite different ways. Democratic Party candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore said that Clinton's scandal had been "a drag" that deflated the enthusiasm of their party's base, and had the effect of reducing Democratic votes. Clinton said the scandal had made Gore's campaign too cautious, and that if Clinton had been allowed to campaign for Gore in Arkansas and New Hampshire, either state would have delivered Gore's needed electoral votes regardless of the effects of the Florida recount controversy.

Political analysts have supported both views. Before and after the 2000 election, John Cochran of ABC News connected the Lewinsky scandal with a voter phenomenon he called "Clinton fatigue". Polling showed that the scandal continued to affect Clinton's low personal approval ratings through the election, and analysts such as Vanderbilt University's John G. Geer later concluded "Clinton fatigue or a kind of moral retrospective voting had a significant impact on Gore's chances". Other analysts sided with Clinton's argument, and argued that Gore's refusal to have Clinton campaign with him damaged his appeal.

Collateral scandals
During the scandal, supporters of former president Clinton alleged that the matter should remain private, and called some supporting Clinton's impeachment hypocritical. A highly publicized investigation campaign actively sought information that might embarrass politicians who supported impeachment. According to the British newspaper The Guardian,

"Larry Flynt... the publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a $1million reward... Flynt was a sworn enemy of the Republican party [and] sought to dig up dirt on the Republican members of Congress who were leading the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. [...Although] Flynt claimed at the time to have the goods on up to a dozen prominent Republicans, the ad campaign helped to bring down only one. Robert Livingston—a congressman from Louisiana... abruptly retired after learning that Mr. Flynt was about to reveal that he had also had an affair."

Henry Hyde, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead House manager, also had an affair while in office as a state legislator. Hyde, aged 70 during the Lewinsky hearings, dismissed it as a "youthful indiscretion" (he had been 41).

Republican congressman Bob Livingston had been widely expected to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in the next Congressional session. Then just weeks away after Flynt revealed the affair, Livingston resigned and challenged Clinton to do the same.

Bob Barr (R-GA) another Republican House manager, had an affair while married. Barr had been the first lawmaker in either chamber to call for Clinton's resignation due to the Lewinsky affair. Barr lost a primary challenge less than three years after the impeachment proceedings.

Dan Burton (R-IN) said, "No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties..." In 1998, Burton admitted that he himself had had an affair in 1983 which produced a child.

Newt Gingrich (R-GA) US Representative, Speaker of the House and leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994, admitted in 1998 to having had an affair with then House Agriculture Committee staffer Callista Bisek while he was still married to his second wife, at the same time as he was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury regarding an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Steven C. LaTourette (R-OH) US Representative, voted to impeach Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal while he himself, was having a long-term affair with his chief of staff, Jennifer Laptook. (2003)

Republican Helen Chenoweth-Hage from Idaho aggressively called for the resignation of President Clinton and then admitted to her own six-year affair with a married rancher during the 1980s.

Personal acceptance
Historian Taylor Branch implied that Clinton had requested changes to Branch's 2009 Clinton biography, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, regarding Clinton's revelation that the Lewinsky affair began because "I cracked; I just cracked." Branch writes that Clinton had felt "beleaguered, unappreciated, and open to a liaison with Lewinsky" following "the Democrats' loss of Congress in the November 1994 elections, the death of his mother the previous January, and the ongoing Whitewater investigation". Publicly, Clinton had previously blamed the affair on "a terrible moral error" and on anger at Republicans, stating, "if people have unresolved anger, it makes them do non-rational, destructive things".

title: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal


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Bohr radius

The Bohr radius ($5.29 m$) is a physical constant, approximately equal to the most probable distance between the nucleus and the electron in a hydrogen atom in its ground state. It is named after Niels Bohr, due to its role in the Bohr model of an atom. Its value is

Definition and value
The Bohr radius is defined as $$a_0 = \frac{4 \pi \varepsilon_0 \hbar^2}{e^2 m_{\text{e}}} = \frac{\hbar}{m_{\text{e}} c \alpha} ,$$ where
 * $$ \varepsilon_0 $$ is the permittivity of free space,
 * $$ \hbar $$ is the reduced Planck constant,
 * $$ m_{\text{e}} $$ is the mass of an electron,
 * $$ e $$ is the elementary charge,
 * $$ c $$ is the speed of light in vacuum, and
 * $$ \alpha $$ is the fine-structure constant.

The CODATA value of the Bohr radius (in SI units) is

History
In the Bohr model for atomic structure, put forward by Niels Bohr in 1913, electrons orbit a central nucleus under electrostatic attraction. The original derivation posited that electrons have orbital angular momentum in integer multiples of the reduced Planck constant, which successfully matched the observation of discrete energy levels in emission spectra, along with predicting a fixed radius for each of these levels. In the simplest atom, hydrogen, a single electron orbits the nucleus, and its smallest possible orbit, with the lowest energy, has an orbital radius almost equal to the Bohr radius. (It is not exactly the Bohr radius due to the reduced mass effect. They differ by about 0.05%.)

The Bohr model of the atom was superseded by an electron probability cloud adhering to the Schrödinger equation as published in 1926. This is further complicated by spin and quantum vacuum effects to produce fine structure and hyperfine structure. Nevertheless, the Bohr radius formula remains central in atomic physics calculations, due to its simple relationship with fundamental constants (this is why it is defined using the true electron mass rather than the reduced mass, as mentioned above). As such, it became the unit of length in atomic units.

In Schrödinger's quantum-mechanical theory of the hydrogen atom, the Bohr radius is the value of the radial coordinate for which the radial probability density of the electron position is highest. The expected value of the radial distance of the electron, by contrast, is $52.9 pm$.

Related constants
The Bohr radius is one of a trio of related units of length, the other two being the reduced Compton wavelength of the electron ($$ \lambda_{\mathrm{e}} / 2\pi $$) and the classical electron radius ($$ r_{\mathrm{e}} $$). Any one of these constants can be written in terms of any of the others using the fine-structure constant $$ \alpha $$:
 * $$r_{\mathrm{e}} = \alpha \frac{\lambda_{\mathrm{e}}}{2\pi} = \alpha^2 a_0.$$

Hydrogen atom and similar systems
The Bohr radius including the effect of reduced mass in the hydrogen atom is given by
 * $$ \ a_0^* \ = \frac{m_\text{e}}{\mu}a_0 ,$$

where $\mu = m_\text{e} m_\text{p} / (m_\text{e} + m_\text{p})$ is the reduced mass of the electron–proton system (with $$m_\text{p}$$ being the mass of proton). The use of reduced mass is a generalization of the two-body problem from classical physics beyond the case in which the approximation that the mass of the orbiting body is negligible compared to the mass of the body being orbited. Since the reduced mass of the electron–proton system is a little bit smaller than the electron mass, the "reduced" Bohr radius is slightly larger than the Bohr radius ($$a^*_0 \approx 1.00054\, a_0 \approx 5.2946541 \times 10^{-11}$$ meters).

This result can be generalized to other systems, such as positronium (an electron orbiting a positron) and muonium (an electron orbiting an anti-muon) by using the reduced mass of the system and considering the possible change in charge. Typically, Bohr model relations (radius, energy, etc.) can be easily modified for these exotic systems (up to lowest order) by simply replacing the electron mass with the reduced mass for the system (as well as adjusting the charge when appropriate). For example, the radius of positronium is approximately $$ 2\,a_0$$, since the reduced mass of the positronium system is half the electron mass ($$ \mu_{\text{e}^-,\text{e}^+} = m_\text{e}/2 $$).

A hydrogen-like atom will have a Bohr radius which primarily scales as $$r_{Z}=a_0/Z$$, with $$Z$$ the number of protons in the nucleus. Meanwhile, the reduced mass ($$\mu$$) only becomes better approximated by $$m_\text{e}$$ in the limit of increasing nuclear mass. These results are summarized in the equation
 * $$ r_{Z,\mu} \ = \frac{m_\text{e}}{\mu}\frac{a_0}{Z} .$$

A table of approximate relationships is given below.

title: Bohr radius