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Disillusion (band)

Disillusion is a German progressive metal band from Leipzig.

Beginnings without record deal
Disillusion was founded in 1994 by Andy Schmidt, Tobias Spier, Alex Motz, Markus Espenhain and Jan Stölzel. The band played thrash metal. Despite the departure of bassist Markus Espenhain in early 1996, the first demo Subspace Insanity was recorded in March the same year.

Red followed in 1997 as the band developed their own style. The second demo was mixed and mastered by Andy Schmidt and Alex Tscholakov at TAM Recording in Zwickau. Despite growing local success and the prospect of the band becoming more serious, Disillusion was put on hold because of lack of time of some band members.

With the recruitment of guitarist Rajk Barthel and drummer Jens Maluschka in 1999 and 2000 Disillusion started again. They played some concerts and recorded their third demo Three Neuron Kings in summer 2001 (again with Alex Tscholakov at TAM Recording). The record received positive reviews by the music press. In spring of 2002 Disillusion went on tour again and won an EP production at the Legacy Band Contest. The record was recorded at TAM Recording in 2002 and called The Porter. It also reached international reputation in the music press and attracted the attention of larger labels.

Back To Times of Splendor
Disillusion signed a contract with Metal Blade Records and released the first album Back to Times of Splendor in 2004. Stylistically, the music is mostly progressive death metal. Back to Times of Splendor was very well received by the critics. The magazine Rock Hard even spoke of a hot contender for the title "Debut of the Year."

After the release Disillusion performed at several festivals (including Summer Breeze Open Air) and a European tour as support for Amon Amarth and Impious. During this time, the album was presented in special shows together with Leipzig musicians from Dark Suns and Unloved.

Gloria
The successor named Gloria was released on October 20, 2006. With the album, Disillusion entered new musical territory and relied heavily on distorted vocals as well as more electronic sounding elements. The latter was developed mainly by the production duo Philipp Hirsch and Heiko Tippelt of film-m. The new album showed a clear change of style compared to the predecessor. Disillusion did not want stylistically a successor to Back To Times of Splendor, because from the perspective of the band in the album everything was said. This is evident in the Gloria song "Save the Past". Fans and reviewers took Gloria very controversially. After the release Disillusion played European-wide concerts, although this time the band did not play a cohesive tour but played several individual shows as headliners.

Post Gloria and hiatus
On December 8, 2009, Andy Schmidt announced that the band had been separated from guitarist Rajk Barthel. At the end of 2010, Sebastian Hupfer joined the band as the new guitar player. In 2011 some shows were played. This was followed by a hiatus, which Andy Schmidt explained with private challenges of the individual band members.

Alea: Comeback
In 2015 a fan asked the band to play an exclusive concert in Vienna. After Matthias Becker was no longer available because of his band SAFI, the French bassist Djon joined the band. Until then he played in a local project called echo.mensch together with Sebastian Hupfer. On May 29, 2015, Disillusion played Back to Times of Splendor for the first time in its entirety in Vienna. There were further shows in Germany and a final comeback concert in the sold-out Werk 2 in Leipzig on December 4, 2015. The new ten minute single Alea was presented live for the first time. In April 2016, Ben Haugg was officially introduced as a new bass player, as Djon had to return to France due to private obligations. On October 7, 2016 Alea was released digitally and as a CD via Kick the Flame Publishing (the publisher of the former guitarist Rajk Bartel). There followed a mini-tour at the end of the year through Germany and Austria.

Third album - The Liberation
In March 2017 Disillusion announced that they would begin writing a third album. To aide with the writing process, Andy Schmidt isolated himself to a small cabin in the woods somewhere in the Czech Republic for 3 weeks to work undisturbed on new songs. Simultaneously the band asked for fan support via Patreon to finance the production. The first goal - support for Andy - was reached within two days. The band then announced to complete the third album within 12 months, but later extended that deadline to another year as the band did not want to feel rushed to provide their fans with an inadequate and incomplete experience. During this time, the band announced another line-up change. This time, bass player, Ben Haugg, would be moving on to third guitar and the band announced two new members. Josh Saldanha, a drummer from Dubai and Felix Tilemann who would be replacing Ben on the Bass. The album, The Liberation was eventually released in 2019 and entered the German Top100 Album Charts at 45. Following the release of the album, Saldanha was replaced by Martin Schulz on drums. After Tilemann had to leave the band for personal reasons, Frank Schumacher took over the bass for live shows in 2019, until Robby Kranz took over bass and additional backing vocal duties as a full member at the beginning of 2020. Following the cancelation of further shows due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Disillusion did a livestream event in April 2020. Following this, the band started with the songwriting process for the next album.

AYAM
After performances in the summer of 2022 at festivals such as Graspop Metal Meeting and Dong Open Air, the band announced in early August that the fourth album will be called AYAM and will be released worldwide on November 4 of the same year. At the same time they released Am Abgrund, the album's opener, as the first single. This was followed by a joint European tour in September with Obscura (band) and Persefone, which brought Disillusion to countries such as Italy and the UK for the first time. After the release of the second single Tormento, the band released the album AYAM at the beginning of November, which was highly praised by fans and the press alike and reached number 35 in the German album charts, marking the highest chart entry in the band's history.

Current

 * Andy Schmidt: vocals/guitar (1994–present)
 * Ben Haugg: guitar (2016–present)
 * Martin Schulz: drums (2019–present)
 * Robby Kranz: bass/vocals (2020–present)
 * Frederic Ruckert: keyboards (2023–present; session and live 2019–2023)

Past

 * Tobias Spier: vocals, guitar (1994–1997)
 * Alex Motz drums: (1994–1997)
 * Clemens Frank: drums: (live only, 2007)
 * Markus Espenhain: bass guitar (1994–1996)
 * Shya Hely: backing vocals (live only, 2005)
 * Alex Tscholakov: drums (2007–2008)
 * Alla Fedynitch: bass guitar (live only, 2007–2008)
 * Rajk Barthel: guitar (1999–2009)
 * Matthias Becker: bass guitar (2008–2015)
 * Djon: Bass guitar (2015)
 * Jens Maluschka: drums (2000–2007, 2008−2018)
 * Felix Tilemann: bass (2018–2019)
 * Josh Saldanha: drums (2018–2019)
 * Frank Schumacher: bass (live only, 2019)
 * Sebastian Hupfer: guitar (2010–2022)

Studio albums

 * Back to Times of Splendor (2004)
 * Gloria (2006)
 * The Liberation (2019)
 * Ayam (2022)

Demos and EPs

 * Rehearsal (1995) (demo)
 * Subspace Insanity (1996) (demo)
 * Red (1997) (demo)
 * Three Neuron Kings (2001) (EP)
 * Alea (2016) (EP)

Singles

 * The Porter (2002) (single)
 * Between (2020) (single)
 * Am Abgrund (2022)

Other

 * Fate of Norns Release Shows (2004) (split album including; Amon Amarth, Fragments of Unbecoming and Impious)

title: Disillusion (band)


text:
Claude of Lorraine

Claude of Lorraine may refer to:
 * Claude, Duke of Guise (1496–1550), called "Claude of Lorraine" prior to his creation as Duke of Guise in 1528
 * Claude Lorrain: French artist (1600–1682)
 * Claude Françoise de Lorraine (1612–1648), French nobleman

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

title: Claude of Lorraine


text: User talk:210.213.138.144

title: User talk:210.213.138.144


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Nightclubbing (Grace Jones album)

Nightclubbing is the fifth studio album by Jamaican singer and songwriter Grace Jones, released on 11 May 1981 by Island Records. Recorded at Compass Point Studios with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records' president Chris Blackwell, as well as a team of session musicians rooted by rhythm section Sly and Robbie, the album marked her second foray into a new wave style that blends a variety of genres, including reggae, R&B, dub and funk. The album has cover versions of songs by Bill Withers, Iggy Pop, Astor Piazzolla, and others, and original songs, three of which were co-written by Jones.

The album received positive reviews upon its release, including being voted best album of the year by writers of the UK music magazine NME, and has continued to be praised by critics over time, with some reviewers commending the singer's unique sound and organic fusion of genres. The album entered in the top 10 in five countries, and became Jones' highest-ranking record on the US Billboard 200 and R&B charts. Six singles were released from the album, including the hits "Pull Up to the Bumper" and "I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)".

Critics and scholars have noted the album's influence on popular music, citing its unique sound that has been emulated by both pop and alternative acts, and how the persona Jones adopted – deeply inspired by art and fashion – has had an enduring influence on modern female pop singers. Around the time of the album's release, she adopted her characteristic androgynous look which would become popular in fashion. Nightclubbing is now widely considered Jones' magnum opus and the record that cemented her pop icon status.

Background and production
Jones was a popular fashion model and Studio 54 habituée before starting her recording career. Her first three albums "were heavily influenced by disco and cemented her presence in the club scene." These records "operated around the camper end of the spectrum," and built a large gay cult following around the singer. According to Pitchfork, these albums "were fun but somewhat facile, cover-filled reflections of the druggy hedonism of the disco era". T. Cole Rachel writes: "For someone whose very image was seen as somehow deeply transgressive, Jones' music had not yet caught up." When her 1977 rendition of Edith Piaf's "La Vie en rose" was an international hit, she caught the interest of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. After Jones' 1979 album Muse found little success in nightclubs and charts, he took over as her producer. He sought to "treat her not as a model, but to involve her as a musician", and wanted "her to feel as though she were a member of a band, and record her the way bands used to make albums, with the singer and the players doing their thing all at once." Blackwell assembled a sextet of studio ringers at his Nassau studio, Compass Point, pulling together a band that included Sly and Robbie (consisting of bass guitarist Robbie Shakespeare and drummer Sly Dunbar), French keyboardist Wally Badarou, guitarists Mikey Chung and Barry Reynolds, and percussionist Uziah Thompson. Jones has described the group as "the united nations in the studio".

As the disco backlash began in earnest, Jones veered towards the contemporary new wave style. Blackwell had been impressed by Black Uhuru's 1980 album Sinsemilla and, along with engineer Alex Sadkin, decided that Jones' new sound should take elements from that record's sonority. Besides reggae, the band also incorporated dance music. Sly Dunbar said, "We loved dance music, we'd listen to everything, because we were always working and wanting the reggae we did to move a bit forward, so anything that we could drag to it, we would bring that – as ideas, or as musicians coming to play with us." Ditching the camp quality of Jones' previous work, Blackwell realised new forms around the likes of The Pretenders' "Private Life", Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug" and The Normal's "Warm Leatherette"; Ian Wade of The Quietus writes: "Nightclubbing was where all these ideas coalesced into perfection." The band Blackwell assembled later became known as the "Compass Point Allstars", taking up residency in the Bahamian studio and animating hits by Tom Tom Club, Robert Palmer, Joe Cocker and Gwen Guthrie, among others.

The recording sessions "moved with disarming speed and ease"; Blackwell recounts: "If Grace or the group hadn't nailed a song by the third take, it was dropped and they'd move to the next number." Although the band was initially called upon in early 1980 to work on a single album, they ended up recording far more material than could fit one LP. As a result, these sessions resulted in two studio albums: Warm Leatherette – released in 1980 – and Nightclubbing. Final overdubs and additional songs were recorded during 1981. Wally Badarou has recognised Jones' active role in the sessions, stating: "Grace was there even during most instrumental overdubbing sessions. She was a part of the sound and the spirit that came out almost from nowhere. We all knew we were in for something quite experimental."

Style
Continuing the orientation of Jones' previous release Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing is a pop album that forays into new wave and dance. A post-disco album, It features a distinct sound that also incorporates rock, funk and post-punk music. The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992) reads: "Leavening their sprung riddims with a salty dash of funk, Sly and Robbie hipped Jones to rock's new wave on Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing." John Daniel Bull of The Line of Best Fit felt the album "[pinpointed] the peak of [Jones'] Jamaican influences, by way of reggae rhythms blended with R&B beats." The Style Con's Erich Kessel felt the album was an influential exponent of art-pop. Nightclubbing also incorporates elements of electro, and New York club music. According to John Doran of BBC Music, Nightclubbing is a "post-punk pop" album that, "delved into the worlds of disco, reggae and funk much more successfully than most of her 'alternative' contemporaries, while still retaining a blank-eyed alienation that was more reminiscent of David Bowie or Ian Curtis than most of her peers." The influence of David Bowie (Who co-wrote the title track) was also noted by Joe Muggs of Fact.

The "languid reggae-influenced" tracks allowed Jones to showcase her singular vocal style, characterized by low alto singing and a Jamaican style of vocal delivery – "that of 'chatting' over onto tracks" – within a framework of androgyny. This style of delivery has been likened to that of The Velvet Underground's Lou Reed, Blondie's Debbie Harry, the New York City punk scene, and Gil Scott-Heron in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Pitchfork described Jones' voice as a "flat monotone speak-singing." T. Cole Rachel, writing for the same publication, argued that Jones succeeds not by the power of her voice, but by the power of her persona, writing: "As she would go on to prove in later efforts, it was the monolithic force of her personality—imperious, feral, queer in the truest sense of the word—that would make these songs so compelling. She is, to put it simply, impossible to ignore."

Songs
The original version of "Libertango" was discovered by Jones's boyfriend at the time, artist Jean-Paul Goude, and the video for the song was filmed on the outdoor terrace of Jones's penthouse apartment on 16th Street in New York. The song also features a verse sung in French: the text was translated for Jones by Blackwell's girlfriend, actress Nathalie Delon, for which Delon received a writing credit. Two of the album's tracks, "I've Done It Again" and "Demolition Man" were written specifically for Jones to record on Nightclubbing. The latter song was written by Sting and would also be recorded in a more uptempo style by his band the Police for their album Ghost in the Machine, released six months after Nightclubbing.

The remaining three new compositions on the record were all co-written by Jones. "Pull Up to the Bumper" began as an instrumental track by the Compass Point Allstars rhythm section Sly and Robbie (credited on the track under their collective alias "Koo Koo Baya"), and provisionally called "Pour Yourself Over Me Like Peanut Butter". Jones's friend, singer Dana Mano, came up with the song's new title, which inspired the two women to write a set of suggestive lyrics for the track. Despite this, Jones denied that the lyrics were explicitly sexual, insisting that she felt the words were just written to suit the music, but stated that she was happy to accept whatever interpretation someone might put on the lyrics, saying, "I don't want to sing sweet things, though I don't mind sweetness so long as it has a little sour meaning underneath". Jones admitted that "Art Groupie" was highly autobiographical as many of her boyfriends had been artists and she was attracted to the whole art scene.

Cover
Nightclubbing's iconic artwork is a 1981 painted photograph titled Blue-Black in Black on Brown, created in New York by Goude. This was the singular image that accompanied the original LP, as it "was concealed in a plain, black inner sleeve, no lyrics and with no photo on the back cover." Composed by right angles, the photograph shows Jones cut to waist, bare chested, and dressed in an Armani man's wide shouldered suit, with an unlit cigarette aiming downward from her lip. She is shot with her signature flat top haircut and her chest bones showing; her dark skin confers upon the image a violet, blue-black colour. The image is noted for its androgyny, with Jones not only "[unpicking] some of the boundaries of unconventionality, but [choosing] to confuse such boundaries." Rick Poynor writes: "Goude admired Jones for her mixture of beauty and threat, and the Nightclubbing portrait expresses this duality with absolute composure and no false histrionics." Piers Martin of Uncut felt the cover was "arresting", and wrote: "the indigo mood, cool gaze and cigarette suggested Marlene Dietrich, the gender-bending a touch of Bowie."

In 2015, Dazed included the album cover in an article dedicated to their "favourite Armani cult crossovers." Biju Belinky wrote: Although Armani became known for deconstructing the suit, removing the over-the-top padding and offering a relaxed option to formalwear in American Gigolo, the cover for Grace Jones' iconic 1981 album Nightclubbing plays up with the angles like nothing else before it. Hailed as a pioneer of the androgynous look, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth and a flattop haircut, complemented by the padded shoulders of an Armani jacket, the avant-garde singer's album cover became known for years to come.

Writing for DIY, Simon Russell Beale listed the album cover as one of the greatest of all time, highlighting Jones' "smouldering noir-bisexuality". Graphic designer Storm Thorgerson included the picture in his 1999 book, 100 Best Album Covers. Moreover, American Photo placed it in its list of The 30 Best Album Covers. NME included it in its list of 20 Original Album Covers That Are Actually Works of Art, with the entry reading: "Can any other artist boast as many iconic album covers? Grace is a work of art herself, as are the covers for Island Life, Slave to the Rhythm and Living My Life, but best of all is the louche image of Nightclubbing by Jean-Paul Goude, part Tretchikoff's Green Lady, part the best advert for smoking you've ever seen." Time Out listed the image as one of the "sexiest album covers of all time", with Brent DiCrescenzo writing: "[Grace Jones] was a work of art, a statue." According to i-D, "it was a series of consistently stellar album artwork that helped propel [the singer] from musician to icon." The artwork was held in display at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan, Italy, as part of the 2016 So Far So Goude exhibition, focused on the French artist.

Video
According to Barry Waters of The Pitchfork Review, "Jones' singular appearance and meticulously crafted presentation made her a natural fit for the burgeoning music video medium, especially in its early, experimental days." Jean-Paul Goude directed the music videos for "I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)" and "Pull Up to the Bumper", as well as the celebrated 1982 VHS release A One Man Show. The latter – a montage of still photography, concert footage and music videos – "asserted [Jones] as an astute visual artist" and was nominated for Best Long Form Music Video at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards. Nelson George, reviewing the release for Billboard in early 1983, called it "one of the more fascinating and defiantly visual concert videos yet produced." According to Ernest Hardy of CraveOnline, the film "seamlessly blends cabaret, performance art and underground nightclub cool."

Release
Nightclubbing became Jones' chart breakthrough and remains one of the greatest commercial triumphs of her entire career. It entered the top five in no less than four countries, and became the singer's highest-charting record on the US Billboard mainstream albums and R&B charts. The album brought Jones from being a former disco diva with a loyal cult following but dropping sales figures to an international star with mainstream chart success. It later formed the basis of her groundbreaking concept tour A One Man Show.

Universal Music Group re-released the album on vinyl in 2009.

Release of a two-disc deluxe set, containing most of the 12" single versions of singles, plus two unreleased tracks from the Nightclubbing sessions, occurred on 28 April 2014, and Jones enjoyed a UK top 50 chart placing the following week – her first since 2008.

To promote the album, Jones appeared on various TV shows in 1981, including the French Palmarès, the Spanish Esta noche, and Aktuelle Schaubude in West Germany.

Singles
The lead single from the album was "Demolition Man". The single was not a commercial success and did not chart, although would later become one of Jones' signature songs. "I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)" was released as the second single and became one of the most commercially successful songs in Jones' repertoire. It secured top 20 positions in several European countries and became another signature song for Jones.

The R&B-dance track "Pull Up to the Bumper" was a quick follow-up to "Libertango". It met with a great success on the US club market, but turned out a modest hit in Europe upon original release. The song would re-emerge in Europe in 1985 as a major success, especially in the UK, where backed with "La Vie en rose" it became one of Jones' highest-charting singles in that country.

"Use Me" and "Feel Up" were then released as singles, but were unsuccessful in the charts. The final single off Nightclubbing, "Walking in the Rain", was a minor chart success.

Critical reception
In the UK Adrian Thrills of NME said, "I spent an otherwise-miserable weekend afternoon with the sound of Grace swirling around my little earphones, grooving on songs effortlessly sung but put together with a jeweller's eye for detail", and stated that the musicians "combine to etch out a shifting, soulful surface, an exotic ice-water backdrop for Grace's vocal veneer", noting that "the only times Grace seems ill-at-ease are as she swops Trenchtown patois with, presumably, the sharp-lipped Sly and then tries to rock out on Sting's 'Demolition Man. Roz Reines of Melody Maker called it "an album with something for everyone: reggae, electronics, disco, blues – even a snatch of salsa funk. The incredible thing is that it all gels together so well – the common denominator is the danceability, which lasts all the way through: changes in tempo and pace only help to sustain the energy level." Deanne Pearson of Smash Hits said that Jones' voice has "neither range nor power", but "the arrangements and production almost make up for this." Record Mirror critic Simon Ludgate found that Jones transcends her vocal limitations through "her character and sense of the surreal".

Andy Kellman of AllMusic praised the album in a retrospective review, stating: "Sly & Robbie provide ideal backdrops for Jones yet again, casting a brisk but not bristly sheen over buoyant structures. Never before and never since has a precisely chipped block of ore been so seductive." Mark Coleman wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide that Sly and Robbie's introduction of new wave rock to Jones and the "throbbing polyrhythmic" covers of rock songs suited her better than the Edith Piaf-meets-Barry White routines" of her records. Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic. He was unmoved by Jones' own songs and said while the covers on Warm Leatherette were superior to the originals simply because of her "weird force of personality", she could not match "Use Me" and the title track.

Nightclubbing continued to gather favorable reviews with the release of the deluxe edition in 2014. Andy Beta from Pitchfork labeled the album's reissue as "Best New Reissue", describing the album as "the record that further cemented her iconic status in pop culture". He also stated: "She treats each cover not as a singer tackling a song, but as an actor inhabiting the skin of a role". Mojo called it "probably the greatest of Grace Jones' Compass Point trio". Uncut's Piers Martin called Nightclubbing "the album that came to define Jones as the complete performer, in her own way, as singer, muse, actress, alien and androgyne. Its sound, a sublime mix of reggae, funk, new wave and disco, was as arresting as its cover image... No one had seen or heard anything quite like this". In Record Collector Kris Needs said that "Nightclubbing still sounds like nothing else released during the 80s, though its colossal influence repeatedly reveals itself". John Harris of Q wrote that "the music on Nightclubbing is as stripped-down and full of space as Jones's froideur demanded. Then again, when it evokes more emotional qualities, it also triumphs."

Legacy
Nightclubbing distinctive amalgamation of rock, funk, post-punk, pop and reggae set Jones apart from other musical acts of the 1980s. It is considered one of the early convergences of "fashion, art, and music". According to Pitchfork's Andy Beta, it "altered the face of modern pop". He further argued that the album's musical and visual influence is easily palpable in the musical landscape of the 21st century, specially among female musicians such as Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Grimes and FKA Twigs, among others. Other acts influenced by the record include Róisín Murphy, Janelle Monáe, Azealia Banks and Adam Lambert. Beyond pop music, the template set by Jones and her Compass Point backing band was also influential to alternative music, including Massive Attack, Todd Terje, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem – who "emulate those rubbery yet taut grooves of Sly & Robbie and cohorts". In Q, John Harris wrote: "The fact that this music was first released 33 years ago beggars belief: it showcases great minds alighting on the future, and points the way to Madonna, Björk, Lady Gaga, Gorillaz, M.I.A. and more." According to Molly Beauchemin, Jones "pioneered the way for Shamir, Stromae, and countless other dance mavericks of today – not just with her bewitching candor but through her use of androgynous innuendo". Polari Magazine considered Nightclubbing to be "a defining moment in the history of pop music".

The album further cemented Jones' pop icon status. According to Erich Kessel, "[the singer's] performances were a source of rich critiques on race, gender, and blackness." Her pioneering androgynous aesthetic – conceived alongside Jean-Paul Goude – had a strong impact on the pop culture of the 1980s; for example, it was a precursor to Annie Lennox's persona. According to Abigail Gardner, "Jones was an androgynous audiovisual experience, one who sat comfortably within the context of early 1980s pop, where image had become even more central to pop performance through the emergence of MTV." She further argued that the singer "problematises ideas of black feminine in performance art that contributed to a reconceptualisation of Afrocentric culture and identity." Miriam Kershaw positioned Jones "not as a singer or a diva, but as a piece of art", and argued that she "worked to destabilise racist and sexist clichés as she charted a dynamic course through the history of the Black diaspora, to celebrate its vibrant contemporary form." The singer's gender-bending and unrestrained sexuality also won the acclaim of the gay community, being included in Out "The 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums of All Time" and Attitude's "Top 50 Gay Albums of All Time". i-D writes: "Jones transcended definition in almost every realm of her life. She is often referred to as a queer icon. [...] She rejects all labels of sexuality, and her musical output is similarly fluid, switching from pop and disco to dub and reggae without hesitation."

In The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll of 1981, Nightclubbing placed at number 31, while "Pull Up to the Bumper" was voted the year's 11th best single. It also appeared in the year-end lists of Sounds, Rockerilla, OOR, The Face, Melody Maker and NME – the latter considering it the best album of 1981. Slant Magazine listed Nightclubbing as the 40th best album of the 1980s, with Henderson writing it "performs double duty, building up the singer's legend even as it makes attempts at deconstructing it." NME included the album in its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, with its entry stating: "A glimpse into the sordid disco depravities behind the velvet rope at Studio 54, Nightclubbing and its standout smash "Pull Up to the Bumper" shunted new wave, reggae and disco firmly into the seductive neon '80s with a single arse/car metaphor." The Guardian listed Nightclubbing as one of the "1000 albums to hear before you die".

Track listing

 * The two-disc deluxe remastered version states that the writer(s) of "If You Wanna Be My Lover" is unknown.

Personnel
Credits adapted from Nightclubbing's liner notes.

Musicians
 * Wally Badarou – keyboards
 * Monte Browne – rhythm guitar
 * Mikey Chung – guitar
 * Masai Delon – vocals
 * Tyrone Downie – keyboards, vocals
 * Sly Dunbar – drums, syndrums
 * Jack Emblow – accordion
 * Grace Jones – vocals, backing vocals

 * Barry Reynolds – guitar
 * Jess Roden – vocals
 * Robbie Shakespeare – bass guitar
 * Mel Speller – percussion, vocals
 * Uziah Thompson – percussion

Production
 * Chris Blackwell, Alex Sadkin – production
 * Ted Jensen – mastering

title: Nightclubbing (Grace Jones album)


text:
Talk:Propellerheads

Untitled
Why is Decksanddrumsandrockandroll not in the discography section, but only in the main text?

Would you really classify their genre as Trip-Hop Decksanddrums... is a long way from Portishead et al.

title: Talk:Propellerheads


text:
Kneeboard

A kneeboard is a board ridden in a kneeling stance. Kneeboards are ridden in ocean surf, or while being towed behind a boat on a lake or river.

Background
Kneeboard riders generally wear life jackets or wet suits and catch the wave by paddling and kicking or dipping their hand in the water. Advantages to kneeboarding include an extremely low center of gravity, less wind resistance, the ability to ride higher and farther back in the tubes, and taking off on a steeper part of the wave.

Towed kneeboarding is an offshoot of kneeboard surfing; kneeboard riders compete tricks, and expression session events. Towed kneeboards have a padded deck contoured to the shape of the shins and knees and a strap holds the rider to the board. Towed kneeboarding declined in popularity with the advent of wakeboarding and other modern watersports; however, it still enjoys popularity among water skiers and newer models of the kneeboard are still in production. A kneeboard is a good piece of equipment to start out on for boat-towed sports—the low center of gravity often makes it easier to get up on than a waterski or wakeboard, which both require standing up.

Surf kneeboard innovators include George Greenough, Steve Lis, Peter Crawford and Ron Romanosky. Till Wipperfuerth is one of the actual top performers in kneeboarding, since he became champion of the Tunilake Kneeboard Masters.

title: Kneeboard


text:
Talk:John Negroponte/Archive 1

Roadblock
I have removed the following from the article:

'''=== Negroponte and the Calipari and Sgrena shootings ===

On March 4, 2005 Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed at a temporary American roadbloak at an on-ramp to route Irish, the expressway to Baghdad International Airport, while on a rescue mission for Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was being held hostage. Ms Sgrena was also injured.

Initial press reports explained that the temporary roadblock was in place to keep the route clear of traffic so it would be safe for the use of a "diplomatic VIP". That "diplomatic VIP" was subsequently identified as Ambassador Negroponte.

When the American Military Report was accidentally released in unredacted form it was revealed that Mr. Negroponte's trip left the soldiers providing security for him exposed several times longer than was safe. The Americans don't try to keep route Irish safe at all times. There are too many highrises that overlook the route, where snipers, or artillery spotters can be stationed. So the procedure is to shut it down, without warning, only when necessary. The procedure is to leave the soldiers manning the roadblocks exposed for a maximum of fifteen to twenty minutes, to prevent the resistance forces having time to organize an attack.

The report of the Calipari/Sgrena incident revealed that the American soldiers manning the roadblock made several calls to their headquarters, seeking clarification as they were left exposed long past the amount of time they expected. at the time of the shooting Ambassador Negroponte's trip had left them exposed for almost an hour and a half.''

This doesn't seem to belong in the article: it is a really specific story and has only a tenuous relation to Negroponte's career. If there was, say, a pattern of abuses like this, the entire story might merit a single paragraph, but as it is, there is not much here. I say this as a critic of Negroponte and his human rights record.

"Contra Attacks"
I have removed:

" He is also accused of inciting Contra attacks on civilians."

from the page. I've never heard of this before, and there seems to be no external source for it. I have also removed:

"He is accused of sponsoring terrorism for supporting the Contra insurgency against the left wing Sandinistas, the first ever democratically elected government of Nicaragua."

The allegations are that Negroponte was involved in suppressing information about human rights abuses and that he turned a blind eye to the activities of the Contras and the CIA. I have not seen any credible evidence that Negroponte 'sponsored' terrorism, meaning provided funds for. If anything, perhaps it might be said that he "aided the US government's sponsorship of the Contras..." Anyway, to say that Negroponte went out and sponsored the terrorists on his own is incorrect.

Iraq Extrajudicial killings?
Ferkelparade, Wizzy et al. -- following your complaints, I've moved my earlier contribution to this page. Those who wish to use it as a reference for expanding the section on Negroponte in Iraq are welcome to do so. I do believe that the wiki is an excellent place to consolidate information on Negroponte in Iraq -- a difficult task that the media is probably unwilling to do. But I don't want to violate NPOV.

 * On July 14th, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald reported claims by two witnesses that Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, had pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station . The Herald established that at least thirty other people were witnesses to the extra-judicial killings, including US soldiers who were providing Allawi with security at the time. Negroponte, in his new role as US Ambassador to Iraq, refused to comment on the allegations while at the same time asking that the case be closed in a direct echo of his work to minimize and deny US-sanctioned human-rights abuses in Honduras. Negroponte's office replied to the Herald in an e-mail:

 * If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed.

How about this ? However, Negroponte was not there himself - just (as I read it) four of his bodyguards. How may does he have ? So, while I initially just wanted the Honduras comment removed, I am not sure it belongs here at all. I first read it that Negroponte was there.

 * On July 14th, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald reported claims by two witnesses that Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, had pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station . Negroponte's office replied to The Herald that they would not be persuing the matter.

Now it looks like News, not Encyclopedia ? Wizzy 12:20, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

-

 * I am disappointed that my addition to this page, covering Negroponte's office's response to extrajudicial killings was removed. It could certaintly stand editing for NPOV, but wholesale removal strikes me as clearly out of the spirit of the wiki. Why should this be included? It is a major human rights scandal in Iraq committed while Negroponte was amabassador to the country. His embassay's non-response is an important fact. I don't think that we should include every press release; I do think that this scattered material should be consolidated at some point as we get a better picture of how Negroponte is running the show. But if material similar to that which I contributed gets deleted, future editors will not be able to perform such a consolidation.

 * I don't think the paragraph in question is too POV (that's not why I deleted it), and I don't want to question its factual accuracy - it merely seemed to me to be a bit too detailed for a biography article, and the paragraph doesn't really make clear why the event is important for a Negroponte biography. Major news events deserve their own article anyway, which could then be linked from here...maybe the paragraph could be shortened to something like "Negroponte recently came under attack for tacitly accepting Ahmed Allawi's alleged extrajudicial killing of insurgents". Anyway, that's my opinion...I'm willing to discuss. -- Ferkelparade 00:31, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Hi Ferkelparade, thanks for taking this to the discussion. I definitely think the encyclopedia entry should be more than just a biography, and that the article is a good place to consolidate information about the activities of the current US Embassy in Iraq -- I don't know of a better place on the wiki. This is essentially what others have done re: Honduras. I see the article as always "in development": as we learn more about what the embassy is doing, this stuff can be consolidated. So, in essence -- make it as short as you like but (I think) keep the following bits: a reference to the news source (SMH), hyperlink to article, and the quote of the embassy's response. I would want to contextualize it by reference to N's role in Honduras, OTOH, that's maybe going into NPOV territory; if we can't find a quote from someone attacking Negroponte, we probably shouldn't write "recently came under attack."

 * Hmm, but that's exactly the point: so far, nobody has attacked Negroponte over this issue, and the killings by Allawi themselves are still disputed - this information should definitely be in the Allawi article, but at this point, it seems a bit premature to have it here... -- Ferkelparade 12:32, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Pheonix Program in Vietnam?
Dear Wikipedia,

Thank you for your excellent work. Here is a question regarding Mr. Negroponte that I haven't found addressed anywhere, I hope you can help:

When John Negroponte was named U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, I felt it was an announcement to world of international diplomacy that the George W. Bush administration was asserting its intention to use the dirtiest methods of "counter-insurgency" at all levels of international policy implementation. There was extensive reporting in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 on Negroponte?s role in covering up human-rights abuses in Honduras during the Contra war against Nicaragua. However, I remembered hearing Mr. Negroponte's name connected with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. The most I have been able to ascertain was that he served as chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the war. At the time, it seemed to be common knowledge that he supervised the program, which has been characterized as one of torture and summary execution of possibly thousands of Vietnamese believed to be supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. If you could verify or refute these charges it would be of undoubted service to the world's right to know the truth about those who speak in our name - especially now with Mr. Negroponte being appointed ambassador to a nominally sovereign Iraq. Thank you very much, Carl Glenn

 * Hi, welcome to wikipedia. If you are certain about a fact, you yourself can edit the article and put it in - read Wikipedia:Welcome,_newcomers about this. I too have seen some sources on the web stating that he was a "political officer" at the Saigon embassy, albeit a junior one. It would be nice to at least know the time span which he spent there.

 * As to the charges in connection with the Phoenix Project, you could try and post your question at wikipedia's Reference desk. Please be aware that some topics such as U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam war can be highly controversial, so if you make edits try to follow wikipedia's Neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. High on a tree 00:42, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

POV
This article is a pretty-straightforward example of POV writing. Virtually all the cites are to left-wing or far-left (the Guardian or Common Dreams) articles....
 * Is it really so POV though? I guess it would be good to also have more comprehensive sections about his later career as a diplomat, but the sections that exist now are all of well documented events, which Negroponte is accused of knowing about and ignoring --Jacobolus 11:44, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

John Negroponte
Is this supposed to be factual or a fact-salted conjectural hit-piece? "...he is accused of....", "...possible involvement in....", "...critics say..., critics charge....", etc. In the intrest of fact or at least pretense of fact, the following whole sections of this article should be removed or, perhaps, separated under the sub-heading "Detractor's viewpoint": Ambassador to Honduras, What did Negroponte Know, and Appointment to the UN. The rest of the article seems straight forward; these dections of obvious detraction seem to have been added as the styles are disjointed.

 * If you have a problem with a particular paragraph, you should quote it in full and explain why. In all cases, the people quoted in this article who critical of Negroponte are "real" sources: Congressmen, Human Rights investigators, etc.. If you want to talk about other aspects of Negroponte's work, you are welcome to do so.

Negroponte in Iraq

 * "..in a direct echo of his work to minimize and deny US-sanctioned human-rights abuses in Honduras."

Should go. Wizzy 16:52, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

NPOV concerns
I tend to agree with the NPOV concerns of some comments here. They seem to be more along the lines of what is *not* included than what is. To be fair, a google search returned far more of the 'critical' sources than any other. Now that he has been named National Intelligence Director, these concerns are of particular significance.

However, I was able to make a minor edit I regard as an improvement. I replaced one Guardian article, "Iran contra men return to power" with another from the same publication, the "Negroponte: Amercia's voice of experience" article.

I believe the former article is redundant to many of the others, and as the least specific to Mr. Negroponte is the least relevent. The latter article I believe balances the collective tone of the references, and does not omit mention of the Honduras accusations.

However, I have retained the old article here:

 * "Iran-contra men return to power"(from The Guardian)

If anyone sees the need to restore it.

- stancollins

question
Why is... "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." ...in quotes?

 * I believe it's a direct quotation from the NYT, but it should be found and attributed --Jacobolus 10:56, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

edit for NPOV
Major problems with the wording of this article and a complete lack of balance...took a stab at it. Also removed far-out wacko sources...the World Socialist Network website anyone?

News Articles to think about
I'm not sure that some of what was edited is necessarily POV... from the NYT 1 November 1982:

 * "The United States Ambassador to Honduras is 'overseeing' a covert campaign to arm, train and direct thousands of Nicaraguan exiles in Honduras to 'harass and undermine' Nicaragua's three-year-old Marxist Sandinist Government, according to an article in Newsweek magazine.

 * "In its Nov. 8 issue, Newsweek quoted an unidentified 'Washington insider' as having said that the Ambassador, John D. Negroponte, had been sent to Honduras by former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Thomas O. Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, as the 'spearhead of the clandestine operation.'"''

--Jacobolus 10:59, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

From NYT, 5 June 1988:

 * "In 1982, with strong American encouragement, Honduras's newly-elected civilian President, Roberto Suazo Cordova, promoted Alvarez to general and named him commander of the army. Even before his promotion, Alvarez was organizing a new army intelligence unit with C.I.A. support, which would be known as Battalion 316. Sgt. Florencio Caballero, who had already received American training, says he was among the first of those recruited to serve in the new unit."

 * "In Texas, said Mr. Caballero, the Americans 'taught me interrogation, in order to end physical torture in Honduras. They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.
 * "In Texas, said Mr. Caballero, the Americans 'taught me interrogation, in order to end physical torture in Honduras. They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.

 * "'When I returned to Honduras, I was trained in assaults, bombs and explosives by Americans, Chileans and Argentines,' Mr. Caballero recalled. 'Then I joined an intelligence unit as an interrogator. We seized and investigated subversives.'"

Jacobolus 11:21, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Washington Post, 28 November, 1993

 * "The nightmare began for Honduras in August 1980. Twenty-five Honduran army officers were flown from Central America to a desert air strip in the southwestern United States, according to the sworn testimony in international court of one Honduran intelligence officer who participated. They spent six months learning interrogation techniques from a team of CIA and FBI trainers. Florencio Caballero, the Honduran officer, says that the U.S. instructors taught different methods of eliciting information from uncooperative prisoners without resorting to violence.

 * "When the officers returned to Honduras, the courses continued. The American trainers were joined by instructors fresh from the 'dirty wars' in Argentina and Chile in which thousands of suspected leftists were abducted and executed by security forces. These sessions, according to Caballero, focused on surveillance and techniques for following suspects and rescuing kidnap victims. This group of officers went on to become a secret division of Honduran military intelligence known as Battalion 3-16.

 * "That Battalion 3-16 engaged in a systematic program of disappearances and political murder from 1981 to 1984 is beyond question. In 1981, the U.S. State Department, in its annual report on human rights practices, noted some 60 'mysterious' disappearances in Honduras, whereas none was reported in previous years. By March 1984, 100-150 students, teachers, unionists and travelers had been picked up and secretly executed by plainclothes squads. These squads, according to a judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued in July 1988, belonged to Battalion 3-16."

--Jacobolus 11:36, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * If the Post says it's "beyond question", then adding lots of "alleged"s seems just as POV (if not more so) than omitting them. Leaving out nasty details of US past history in the name of NPOV seems just misleading. --Jacobolus 11:39, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

POV sites?
removed hardcore POV sites (the World Socialist Website, Noam Chomsky and The Guardian are not news sources).
 * Wikipedia's job is to direct readers to relevant commentary, and sometimes that commentary is located at sites which are clearly POV, but still add value. For the same reason I could remove links to the white house from George Bush's page, claiming that it is POV. OF COURSE it is POV, but Wikipedia aims only to maintain POV on its own site, not necessarily on all links.  Furthermore, the Guardian is a respected British newspaper, certainly credible as a source. --Jacobolus 12:37, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * I second the above and would like add that while the World Socialist Website has an obvious ideological agenda, it publishes excellent reporting. The same goes for, of course, the Economist or the Wall Street Journal. -- Viajero 13:27, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * if you put WSW in the same category as mainstream publications as the Economist and the WSJ I am going to have a hard time taking you seriously. J. Parker Stone 09:24, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

NPOV Problems
this page needs major cleaning-up.....lots of NPOV selection of material....both sides of the aisle seem to consider him to be highly competent...why only stuff from his detractors on here?
 * Add some stuff about his competence. His brutal history is certainly relevant.  If you know more about good things he's done, speak up. --Jacobolus 12:47, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

that you think the the Guardian is respected and credible as well as your comment as to "brutal history" shows your innate NPOV issues.....since you are so personally invested with this topic perhaps you should switch to other topics to write on.

 * backatcha. don't just delete, give us something to explain your point of view.  If you don't like the external links, give us some that counter their viewpoint.  don't delete the ones that are there.  RickK 20:25, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)

 * I haven't done really any editing or adding to this article... I just put things back in that had been deleted with no reason given or discussion. I think it is fair to say that death squads in Honduras were "brutal," and equally fair to say that the Guardian does excellent reporting, with careful fact checking, even if they are to the left of the American press.  I agree that I am POV.  So are we all.  I still would appreciate to hear of the good things that Negroponte has done.  Wikipedia is a reference and a source of information, and I seek for it to be as complete as balanced as possible.  That doesn't mean pulling punches about well-documented events. --Jacobolus 02:39, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Controversial, or despised?
Cut from article:

 * He is a controversial figure because he was involved in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua (see Iran-Contra Affair) and knowingly denied human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s.

Shouldn't this say He is opposed by X because he was involved in funding the Contras - whom X hoped would be wiped out by the Sandinistas. Or, Z blames him for human rights abuses in Honduras, in its battle against Y - again, Z was hoping for a takeover by Q, etc.

In otherwords, don't say "he is controversial because" as a polite way of saying A opposes him because of B.

We need to know WHY he is opposed, and WHO opposes him. Don't hide it behind nice-sounding language.

Also, is it a FACT that he helped covertly fund the Contras? If so, we should document this, so our readers will be taught the truth (re-educated? ;-) and if it's NOT an undisputed fact, then we STILL need to document it (but as a claim rather than the truth) - along with the claims of the other side. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 16:19, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

any chance of neutrality here?
Okay, I took a stab at it. Mostly, re-organizing the section headings. But I also rewrote the 2 intro paragraphs.

basicly, the critics hate him because they wanted the Communists to win in Central America. To me, this means they don't give a hoot in hell about human rights. Everyone knows that Communisits are the world's worst violators of human rights. They make Hitler look good, if you measure purely be the magnitude of the genocide they've done.

Even China's PRC government admits that Mao murdered 20 million people. That's three times worse than the Jewish holocaust.

The usual argument, when someone tries to stop tyranny, is that the "violate human rights" of the tyrant's supporters. Or, for the unsophisticated, they downplay the "tyrant" angle and just paint the good guys as "killing people right and left". But think about it, why would Honduras just go around killing its own people, especially nuns? Random murder is pretty rare. And goverments usually just want to stay in power, so I figure they must have THOUGHT that the dead folks were in league with the commies. (Not that this justifies them.)

Buried in the article is the fact that the US tried to reform Honduras, to wean it away from torture for example and use less extreme (but still rough) methods of interrogation.

If you're wondering (not that it's really any of you business), I don't support ANY human rights violations by ANY side in the cold war. I'm just saying, let's not magnify one side's violations as a way of making the other side look good - especially when the other side is ten times worse.

In any case, the solution does not lie in the application of military force. But that's another story. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 16:52, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

 * The death squads murdered innocents to terrorise the people. A few deaths pour encourager les autres. I would like to add that even if nuns are communists, killing them should at the very least be frowned on. Grace Note 01:59, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

 * If you can prove that (1) the people the death squads killed were innocent and/or (2) that the motivation for the killings was to create terror amoung "the people", please add that fact, with a source, to the article. Or if it's not a fact, but a charge or claim, still it should go in the article (properly sourced).

 * We should also put in any evidence we can find that the Sandinistas or other Marxist groups murdered and terrorized the people. The documentary Nicaragua Was Our Home contains eyewitness testimony about this. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 21:31, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

 * One reminds you that we are talking about nuns.

 * It's rather illuminating of your commitment to neutrality that you think that mention of what the Sandinistas or other "Marxist" groups did has to do with an article on Negroponte's encouragement of terrorism. Grace Note 04:17, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

 * Don't mind Grace Note, he's of the mindset that anything and everything anti-American is automatically noble and just. (and again, Marxists can't admit that Marxists are Marxists -- they have to put quotes around them)

 * BTW, I never heard about nuns being killed in Honduras. I did hear about them being killed in El Salvador by an extremist political faction that opposed the PDC, the government the U.S. was supporting. J. Parker Stone 21:44, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Specific article flaws
Okay, I'm done with my rant. Here are some specific article flaws.

 * Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was involved in "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

This paragraph accuses Negroponte of human rights violations. It consist of three sentences, of which the 1st and 3rd merely assert that Negroponte is to blame for (un-mentioned) human rights violations.

The second sentence, which would have been an excellent place to mention at least one violation, complains that Negroponte supported Reagan's anti-Communism strategy. This conflates anti-communism with "violation of human rights".

I can only suppose that this is a deliberate POV tactic. Communists routinely accuse their opponents of all sorts of things, to discredit and undermine them and NOT because the Communists have any real concern about those things. Here, however, in a paragraph devoted to HR violations we find (thrown in for the bargain) a complaint that Negroponte was anti-Communist!

Either this means that being anti-Communist is in itself a HR violation, or more likely the writer just wanted to list the reasons which (in his opinion) JN is "bad". Both are unacceptalbe to Wikipedia's NPOV policy. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 19:18, May 13, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps you could have waited for discussion before inserting your POV? Just a thought. Grace Note 02:01, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Ed, I am having trouble separating the wheat from the chaff in all the verbiage above.

To begin with, you changed this:

 * ''He is a controversial figure because he was involved in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua (see Iran-Contra Affair) and knowingly denied human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s.

to this:

 * ''He has come under harsh criticism from Bush administration opponents, primarily because of his support of anti-Communist movements and governments in Central America. Much of the criticism alleges that he aided or covered up human rights abuses. See "controversy", below.

I object to this because
 * 1) it implies that he is critisised because of partisan politics (Bush opponents)
 * 2) there is substantial evidence, such as declassified cables, all well documented in the article, that he did in fact cover up abuses. No need, at this point in time, to be coy about it and say "alleges".

You object to this text:
 * ''Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was involved in "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

saying:
 * The second sentence, which would have been an excellent place to mention at least one violation, complains that Negroponte supported Reagan's anti-Communism strategy. This conflates anti-communism with "violation of human rights".

No it doesn't. It simply implies that human rights violations occurred in the course of activities undertaken on behalf of Reagan's anti-Communism. As for mentioning the violations, that occurs in the subsequent paragraphs which you have unhelpfully separated with a subheading. As for the second sentence, I think it should be moved to another position. -- Viajero 13:41, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Wheat and chaff
Viajero, I value our working relationship far above any one article. And I appreciate your wheat from the chaff remark. I'm not going to let this turn into an edit war; I've used up my one and only revert on this article for the week!

Just one point, and I'll turn it over to you, trusting in your fundamental honesty and ever-present good judgment.

There's a difference between:

 * opponents object to his appointment because of X, Y and Z; and,
 * opponents (or people generally) "consider him controversial" because of X, Y and Z

The controversy is betwen those who favor and those who oppose his appointment.

I wish I had more time for this, but I gotta go. Bye! -- Uncle Ed (talk) 17:19, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Turned a blind eye to vs. Cover up
OK, i think it's pretty well-established that there are serious questions about what Negroponte knew and whether he intentionally shut himself up about it because the Honduran government was an ally. that's all well and good. but i have not seen evidence that he intentionally tried to cover up evidence of military misconduct. there is a difference. J. Parker Stone 05:57, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Will an admin PLEASE either tag this article for POV, or else edit it to neutrality?
I am neither a Wiki admin, nor a particular fan of Negroponte's. I don't know the man, and have not spent years researching his activities in Honduras or elsewhere. That said, however, I consider myself to be both rational and neutral, and I find this article to be highly POV, verging on character assassination. Indeed, the fact that a small but determined group of anti-Negroponte activists continues its campaign of layering on one-sided attacks, means that in the absence of Negroponte partisans (is there some rule that says every article needs champions as well as detractors?) this article represents a low point of Wikipedia, and a great example of the kind of stuff that Wiki-detractors point to with glee. "Good Article"? You've got to be kidding! [sigh] Yorker 23:23, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I have not spent years researching Negroponte either but I don't think the article is a hatchet job. It appears to report accurate and sourced information that is consistent with my memory of this material.  There may be exculpatory material in the public record that you should include if you know of it, but I certainly never saw it in the 1980s when I read about him in mainstream newspapers.  There are definitely places in the article where citations would be helpful, but I don't think this is made up or just a bunch of baseless attacks.  If you think something is incorrect, by all means look it up and correct it!--csloat 05:19, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Edited for NPOV/Reverted/Tagged
This article, as discussed in the archived peer review, is highly biased and inappropriate for Wikipedia. I removed the whole swath of attack detail, ALL of which is amply referenced in the external links, as well as the mention (which Kiaparowits had correctly questioned) about Skull & Bones, and re-edited the article back to neutral facts, which is what this is alll supposed to be about. As it is, there are four times as many negative external links as there are positive ones. 23 December 2005 ''NOTE: For procedural reasons, an Administrator reverted these edits, but has acknowledged the obvious bias of the article (and its clearcut violation of Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View rules) by tagging it with a warning. Readers without an axe to grind are invited to continue editing the article to return it (or, more accurately, bring it for the first time) back to a Wikipedia-appropriate, objective piece. 31 December 2005''

Ummm...reality check here?
I just happened across this page in search for some background information about Negroponte, and I must say that I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion or 'peer review' of this article. I've never met the guy, have no axe to grind, and don't know much about him (which is why I came here in the first place), but I can certainly tell a hatchet job when I see one. This article is so completely biased, and so obviously unfair, that it clearly violates the Wikipedia NPV guidelines. Frankly, I'm almost tempted to rewrite the whole thing from scratch as a community service! Isn't there someone around who knows something about this subject who could do a decent editing job on this piece of blatant character assassination? 28 November 2005

Skull and Bones
Some anon IP just added the following info to the :
 * At Yale, he was, like many members of the Bush family, a member of Skull & Bones.

Now, given the subject, this affiliation is certainly possible, but the Skull and Bones article has no mention of him. Does anyone have a reference to his membership? Also, the phrase "like many memebers of the Bush family" seems unneccessary. Thoughts? Kiaparowits 16:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

POV tag
I added the npov tag because this article is too criticism-heavy. The Skull and Bones bit is completely irrelevant, and at least a couple of paragraphs do not have anything to do with Negroponte, but rather with the Honduras incidents. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 20:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Whether something is relevant or not is a POV, isn't it? I agree that criticism shouldn't be in articles unless it relates opinions/critisms of credible sources. --Rebroad 16:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Re: "reality check" and this article being "too criticism-heavy"
Aside from the Skull and Bones issue, none of the claims are refuted, are they? Officially denied maybe, but not refuted. Negroponte had a significant role in worsening the human rights situation in Central America, particularly Honduras, in the 1980s. Should we leave that out? It seems to me we are aiming for balance when the facts are clearly not in Negroponte's favor. What if balance means leaving out enough facts so he seems like not quite such a bad guy? While Negroponte is not quite a Hitler or a Stalin, it makes me wonder if similar objections about neutrality would arise if someone were to tell the truth about those two individuals. What if the truth of Negroponte is as bad as this article or worse? Should we strive to moderate the article because the truth seems too extreme? Please tell me if I misunderstood the issue. - Ron Leighton,
 * That is not my complaint. The Neutral point of view policy states that articles should not present any sort of accusatory bias, which this article has. Here's a relevant quote:

 * 1) An encyclopedic article should not argue that corporations are criminals, even if the author believes it to be so. It should instead present the fact that some people believe it, and what their reasons are, and then as well it should present what the other side says.
 * I'm not asking for the article to be "moderated" by removing all criticism; I'm saying that a response to the criticism should be included in this article. Also, the article must not have any posture on the controversial issues; we're just reporting what happens, not taking a stance on it. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 07:51, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
 * If the critism is from credible sources it should stay. If you are aware of rebuttals to the critism also from credible sources, then please feel free to add these to the article. --Rebroad 16:52, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm re-adding the npov tag until at the very least the uncited material is removed, e.g. He is sometimes considered... - brenneman (t) (c)  23:19, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
 * So we have tried and failed to disprove that JN was all mobbed up with the death squads. Why is that a problem? A wiser course might be to explain why death squads and other forms of US intervention in other nations is so widely cherished by many Americans.

I think that what "Tito" (ironic name here, dude) wants is for us to include Rich Lowry's defense of the guy. But a point to note is that even Lowry doesn't deny that he was closely linked to the human rights abuses, Lowry just argues that though he was closely linked, he was neutral, and that such measures may have been necessary to defeat communism.--User:Zaorish

Skull & Bones Links
I just heard that he was in Skull & Bones on the radio and came here looking for the years to find fellow members. It is a left wing show, The Randi Rhodes Show, which I know has used Wikipedia to research in the past; so it could have used as its source the disputed line.

I don't think that the original author of the sentence: "At Yale, he was, like many members of the Bush family, a member of Skull & Bones." meant to show bias. It can be useful in drawing conclusions about how he was linked to people like the Bushs and Reagan. The wording comes across as expressing a POV, so that problem must be fixed before even thinking about putting it back into the text. Denis Diderot II 04:18, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

'death squads'?
Any of y'all know wtf the newly added 'death squad' section is about? I have no idea or context, and am mulling its deletion, unless it gets cleaned up. --moof 07:27, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I removed it. Wikipedia is not a place for such apologetics.  If Negroponte made such a statement somewhere, it is likely quotable here, but it is neither necessary nor desirable for wikipedia editors to make up arguments that we think Negroponte should have said.--csloat 07:48, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

"irrelevant miscellany"
Unfortunately, my commit comment got accidentally truncated. If documents that previously weren't released have actually been released, please cite such, rather than just removing a big hunk of text. --moof 09:43, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Failed GA
The article has no references and is not set out in wiki style which I personally feel makes it hard to follow.--Childzy 12:39, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

"Secret prisons" claim
Time magazine claimed that Negroponte
 * confirmed the existence of CIA "secret prisons"

However, this was a case of creative misquoting, context manipulation and extrapolation. Actually, the interview cited as "confirming" the existence of the alleged "secret prisons" didn't mention them at all.

The journalists asked about some prisoners, and Negroponte refused to say where they were being held. Logically, this means either:
 * they are being held in regular (non-secret) prisons, i.e., prisons whose existence is on record - but Negroponte just won't say which ones!
 * or secret prisons exist, and that's where the prisoners are (the journalists' conclusion)

The following is clearly a misquotation by Time:
 * "Exclusive: John Negroponte says accused Al-Qaeda members will remain in secret prisons as long as 'war on terror continues.'"

What he actually say was:
 * "... These people are being held, they're bad actors, and as long as the situation continues, the situation with the war on terror continuing, I'm not sure I can tell you what the ultimate disposition of those detainees would be."

Can someone help me go through Wikipedia and make sure the Liberal POV that there are "secret prisons" is not inserted "as fact", but is labelled the POV of Time or whoever it was who chose to interpret Negroponte's statement that way? --Uncle Ed 15:00, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

 * Are you saying that they don't exist? Can you show where Negroponte criticized Time's interpretation of his statement?  Surely he would be all over such a blatant distortion of his words, if that's what it was?  I haven't been following this closely enough to get involved here, but based on what I have seen in the media and what Ed Poor has pointed out here, I don't think it would be incorrect to infer that they do exist.  Isn't there a whole section on them in James Risen's book?  Has the Administration ever denied their existence?--csloat 19:31, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

 * No, and no. You'll note that I haven't edited the article based on the AIM report. I wanted to get a little discussion going first.

 * Perhaps what the article needs is a mention of the dispute over whether Negroponte confirmed the existence of the "secret prisons". By the way, is the a CIA secret prisons article? --Uncle Ed 14:40, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Negroponte witnessed Kissinger Secret Beijing Meet
John D. Negroponte is listed as a NSA staffer in attendance of a secret meeting between Herny Kissinger and Zhou en-Lai, June 20, 1972, in Beijing. the NSA archives recently released a transcript of the meeting.

 * "Memorandum of Conversation with Zhou Enlai, 20 June 1972". (3.13 MB PDF File)

In the meeting, Kissinger laid out a proper timeline for a Decent Interval between US disengagement from Vietnam, and the North's continuation of hostilities.

Negroponte has been mum on this for over three decades.

--216.193.1.4

Criticism external links?
Wait, what? Do we really need this? I could understand a criticism section but not a whole area devoted for links. Can somebody just add a section with the links as citations? - JWhitt (talk) 00:16, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Battalion 316
An anon IP user deleted the wikilink to Battalion 316 in the see also section. I just restored it. Negroponte's links to the US support of Battalion 316 has come up repeatedly at his various Senate confirmation hearings and is frequently cited in media coverage. A simple google search of Negroponte Battalion 316 shows many solid sources discussing Negroponte's relationship with the Battalion.Notmyrealname (talk) 20:33, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Plagiarism?
While trying to clean up some of the citations of sources which seem to be so confusing in this article, I discovered that a big chunk of text from "Ambassador to Honduras (1981–1985)" down through "Ambassador to the UN (2001–2004)", seems to have been borrowed from a salon.com article. I question the correctness of this wholesale "borrowing" and hope somebody who is more knowledgeable than I will take a look at the situation.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 23:00, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Career during the Nixon administration
The section on Negroponte's career information during the Nixon administration is much too scanty. It should cover such details as:

" Negroponte quickly ascended from political officer in Vietnam to an aide to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the end of the decade. In 1968, Negroponte became the liaison officer between the U.S. government and North Vietnam's delegation at the Paris peace talks. In late 1970, he became head of the Vietnam office of the National Security Council (NSC) staff. In February 1973, he broke with NSC Advisor Kissinger over the  peace negotiation process, which Negroponte said did not guarantee the security of the government of South Vietnam."

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-16/negroponte3.html

Family? Nicholas NEGROPONTE from the OLPC One Laptop Per Child initiative?
I'm contributing to an article. Anybody can help finding this out? Thy.--SvenAERTS (talk) 23:17, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

POV tag?
The POV tag has been on this page for several months, but the explanation given for why it is here offers no specific suggestion for improving the page. "Too much criticism" is not a good reason for the tag -- couldn't we say the same of this page or this one? NPOV should not mean that we balance every "bad" comment with a "good" one. I think we should remove the tag unless someone can articulate a clear suggestion about what can be done to improve the POV issue.--csloat 07:53, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you're mostly right, but not totally. For example, look at the "Ambassador to the U.N." section. It contains criticism, which looks pretty accurate. But there is one thing that cannot be denied: It contains Zero information on what JN did as amb. to the UN. --User:Zaorish

For positive facts and perspectives, let's try to add from this article: http://www.pwhce.org/negroponte.html

--User:Zaorish

One important member of the US diplomatic delegation against Vietnam?
Was Negroponte one important member of the US diplomatic delegation against Vietnam during the Vietnam war ( 1965-1975) ?

Thanks,

--Redflowers 19:03, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

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title: Talk:John Negroponte/Archive 1


text:
User:4v4l0n42/Images

{| style="border: dotted blue 1px" cellspacing=0 cellpadding=5
 * style="border: solid black 1px; border-right: 0px" valign="top" width="49%"|

Before you should have a look at my wikimedia page, which has all the works that I made myself.

Naruto
Uzumaki Naruto
 * Image:Naruto001.jpg - Image:Naruto002.jpg - Image:Naruto003.jpg
 * Image:Naruto004.jpg - Image:Naruto005.jpg - Image:Naruto006.jpg

Hyuga Hinata
 * Image:Hinata001.jpg - Image:Hinata002.jpg - Image:Hinata003.jpg

Gaara
 * Image:Gaara 002.jpg - Image:Gaara 001.jpg

Uchiha Sasuke
 * Image:Uchiha Sasuke 003.jpg - Image:Uchiha Sasuke 002.jpg - Image:Uchiha Sasuke 001.jpg

Rock Lee
 * Image:Rock Lee 003.jpg - Image:Rock Lee 002.jpg - Image:Rock Lee 001.jpg

Elfen Lied

 * Image:Elfen Lied Mayu 001.jpg - Image:Elfen Lied Kouta 001.jpg - Image:Elfen Lied Nana 001.jpg
 * Image:Elfen Lied 001.jpg - Image:Elfenklimt01.jpg - Image:Elfenklimt01.jpg
 * Image:Elfenklimt02.jpg - Image:Elfenklimt03.jpg - Image:Elfenklimt04.jpg

The Vision of Escaflowne
Hitomi Kanzaki
 * Image:Hitomi002.jpg - Image:Hitomi001.jpg

Allen Schezar
 * Image:Allen003.jpg - Image:Allen002.jpg - Image:Allen001.jpg

Folken Strategos
 * Image:Folken003.jpg - Image:Folken002.jpg - Image:Folken001.jpg

Cowboy Bebop

 * Image:Vicious001.jpg - Image:Ed001.jpg - Image:Ed002.jpg
 * Image:FayeValentine001.jpg - Image:SpikeSpiegel001.jpg - Image:Ein001.jpg
 * Image:JetBlack001.jpg - Image:CB-Julia001.jpg

Great Teacher Onizuka

 * 50px Image:Onizuka002.jpg Image:Onizuka001.jpg Image:Onizuka003.jpg

Whisper of the Heart

 * Image:Whisper of the heart01.jpg

 * style="border: solid black 1px" valign="top" width="51%"|

Ruroni Kenshin
Kenshin Himura
 * Image:Kenshin003.jpg - Image:Kenshin002.jpg - Image:Kenshin001.jpg

Sagara Sanosuke
 * Image:Sanosuke002.jpg - Image:Sanosuke001.jpg

Myojin Yahiko
 * Image:Yahiko003.jpg - Image:Yahiko002.jpg - Image:Yahiko001.jpg

Takani Megumi
 * Image:Megumi003.jpg - Image:Megumi002.jpg - Image:Megumi001.jpg

Kamiya Kaoru
 * Image:Kaoru003.jpg Image:Kaoru002.jpg Image:Kaoru001.jpg Image:Kaorukenshin.jpg

Nadia: The secret of Blue Water
Misc
 * Image:Nadia001.png - Image:Nadia002.png - Image:Nadia003.png
 * Image:Nadia004.png - Image:Nadia005.png - Image:Nadia006.png
 * Image:Nadia007.png - Image:Nadia008.png

Electra
 * Image:Nadia-Electra001.png - Image:Nadia-Electra002.png

Nemo
 * Image:Nadia-Nemo001.png - Image:Nadia-Nemo002.png

Jean and Nadia
 * Image:Nadia-Jean001.png - Image:Nadia-Nadia001.png

Neo and Gargoyle
 * Image:Nadia-Neo001.png - Image:Nadia-Neo002.png - Image:Nadia-Gargoyle001.png

King and Marie
 * Image:Nadia-King001.png - Image:Nadia-Marie001.png - Image:Nadia-Marie002.png

Grandis
 * Image:Nadia-Grandis001.png - Image:Nadia-Grandis002.png - Image:Nadia-Grandis003.png
 * Image:Nadia-Grandis004.png

Sanson and Hanson
 * Image:Nadia-Sanson001.png - Image:Nadia-Hanson001.png

MindGame

 * Image:Mindgame001.gif - Image:Mindgame001.png - Image:Mindgame002.png
 * Image:Mindgame003.png - Image:Mindgame004.png - Image:Mindgame005.png
 * Image:Mindgame006.png - Image:Mindgame_yakuza.png - Image:Mindgame_yakuza2.png
 * Image:Mindgame_yan.png

Other

 * Image:AmaroKdebianppc.png - Image:AMVs.org-shot.png - Image:Blue_Submarine_001.jpg
 * Image:Blue_Submarine_002.jpg - Image:Metropolis-anime-dvd.jpg - Image:Last_Exile_Alvis01.jpg

 * }

title: User:4v4l0n42/Images


text:
Detective (novel)

Detective is a novel by Arthur Hailey. It was written in 1997 and was the author's last book. Hailey depicts the work of a homicide department and its investigation methods. It was published by Crown.

Plot
Detective is the story of Miami Police detective Malcolm Ainslie, who had previously trained to be a Catholic priest. A serial killer breaks free in Miami. He is a religious fanatic and he starts killing people feeling that he is the avenger of God. He leaves certain things at the murder scenes that are symbols from the Book of Revelation. Miami Police Detective Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie and his team start to investigate the murders. They eventually find the killer and arrest him. The murderer is nicknamed The Animal because he kills in such a barbaric manner. Now, when this man is about to be executed for the serial killings he did, he calls for Malcolm. 30 minutes before his execution he confesses to Malcolm that he did all the serial killings he is accused of except one, which was not done by him.

It was the killing of the city commissioner and his wife. Malcolm, at first, refuses to believe him because The Animal has a reputation of being a liar. But as he goes deep into the history of cases and studies all the killings he discovers that there are two killings in separate cities, unsolved murders which were confessed by The Animal.

When he carefully studies all the killings done by him, he finds out that the killings of city commissioner and his wife were attempted by someone else, a copy cat killer, and these murders were made to look as if done by the same killer. Thanks to his priestly training, he notices that the pattern of the symbols left by the Animal at scenes of all the other murders is derived from the Book of Revelation, but that the symbols left at the murder of the Mayor do not fit this pattern.

Malcolm suddenly finds himself facing a situation where a copy cat killer is roaming around free. And when the killings are of a city commissioner and his wife the matter became more complicated. His team starts to investigate and finds important people involved in the killings and a famous novelist is also involved.

Television
Detective (a. k. a. Arthur Hailey's Detective) was adapted into a television movie in 2005, directed by David S. Cass Sr., and with a cast that included Tom Berenger (as Malcolm Ainslie), Cybill Shepherd (as Karen Ainslie), Annabeth Gish (as Cynthia Ernst), Rick Gomez (as Detective Rodriguez), Frank Whaley (as Brewmaster), Wanda De Jesus (as Sanchez), J. Karen Thomas (as Ruby Bowe), Charles Durning (as Max Ernst), Sean O'Bryan (as Elroy Doil), and Rutanya Alda (as Judge Agannis).

title: Detective (novel)


text:
User talk:Jsletts

Welcome to Wikipedia!
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If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. Thanks and happy editing, Alf 09:52, 29 August 2005 (UTC).

title: User talk:Jsletts


text:
User:Dinglesxp

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --inks 09:52, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
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title: User:Dinglesxp


text:
Randall Dale Adams

Randall Dale Adams (December 17, 1948 – October 30, 2010 ) was an American man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death after the 1976 shooting of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. His conviction was overturned in 1989.

Throughout his legal ordeal, Adams maintained his innocence. He insisted that the man he believed to be Wood's killer, David Ray Harris, had offered him a ride on the day of the shooting after his own car had run out of gasoline. Under an immunity agreement, Harris testified for the prosecution that Adams was the shooter of Officer Wood. Based on this testimony and other alleged eyewitnesses, Adams was found guilty and imprisoned on death row. In 1980, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

While incarcerated for the crime, Adams was the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, which was cited as being instrumental in his exoneration the following year. Writer-director Errol Morris knew that Harris had, on multiple occasions, bragged about shooting a police officer. He later uncovered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and eyewitness misidentification. Six months after the film's release, Adams's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and prosecutors declined to retry the case. Adams received no compensation from the State of Texas for the 12 years he spent in prison. He died of a brain tumor in 2010.

Early life and education
Adams was born in Grove City, Ohio, the youngest of five children of Ola Mildred Hamilton Adams (known as Mildred, 1923–2011) and Canso Adams (1905–1960), a miner who died of coalworker's pneumoconiosis. Adams graduated from high school in 1967, and spent three years as a U.S. Army paratrooper.

Murder conviction
In October 1976, 27-year-old Randall Adams and his brother left Ohio for California. En route, they arrived in Dallas on Thanksgiving night. The next morning, Adams was offered a contracting job. On the following Saturday, November 27, Adams went to start work but no one turned up because it was a weekend. On the way home, his car ran out of fuel.

David Ray Harris, who had just turned sixteen, passed Adams in a car that he had stolen from his neighbor in Vidor, Texas, before driving to Dallas with his father's pistol and a shotgun. Harris offered Adams a ride. The two spent the day together, during which they drank alcohol and smoked marijuana. That evening they went to a movie, where they saw The Student Body (1976, directed by Gus Trikonis) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974, directed by Jack Hill).

That evening, Robert W. Wood, a Dallas police officer, was working the graveyard shift with his partner, Teresa Turko, one of the first female police officers in Dallas to be assigned to patrol duty. Shortly after midnight on November 28, Wood stopped Harris' stolen car in the 3400 block of North Hampton Road because the car's headlights were not on. As Wood approached, he was shot twice in the forearm and chest by someone in the car. The vehicle sped off almost immediately after the shooting, giving Wood's partner little time to react; she later testified that she managed to fire upon the fleeing vehicle but to no avail.

The Dallas Police Department investigation led back to Harris, who, after returning to Vidor, had boasted to friends that he was responsible for the crime. Harris was arrested, but when he was interviewed by police, he accused Adams of the murder. Harris led police to the car driven from the scene of the crime, as well as to a .22 Short caliber revolver he identified as the murder weapon.

Trial
Dallas prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder charged Adams with the crime, despite the evidence against Harris, apparently because Harris was a juvenile at the time and Adams, as an adult, could be sentenced to death under Texas law. Adams testified that after leaving the drive-in movie, Harris dropped Adams off at his motel, where Adams and his brother watched TV and then went to sleep. He claimed he was not in the car when the shooting happened. Harris testified that Adams was not only in the car, but was the driver, as well as the shooter of Officer Wood.

Testimony by Harris and several questionable eyewitnesses – including Emily Miller and R.L. Miller, who claimed to have driven past Harris' stopped vehicle immediately before the shooting – led to Adams's conviction. Texas forensic psychiatrist James Grigson (who became known as "Dr. Death") was also a witness for the prosecution. Having conducted a psychiatric evaluation of Adams, he told the jury that Adams would be an ongoing menace if kept alive. As a result of this testimony, Adams was given the death penalty. His conviction was unanimously upheld by the Texas Courts of Appeals in 1979.

In 1995, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for unethical conduct relating to expert witness testimony.

Commutation of death sentence
Adams's execution was originally scheduled for May 8, 1979, but U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. ordered a stay three days before the scheduled date. In 1980, the Supreme Court on an 8–1 vote ruled unconstitutional a Texas requirement for jurors to swear an oath that the mandatory imposition of a death sentence would not interfere with their consideration of factual matters, such as guilt or innocence, during a trial. As a result of the decision, Adams's death sentence was reversed and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted him a new trial. Before the trial could begin, however, Texas Governor Bill Clements commuted Adams's sentence to life in prison at the request of the Dallas County District Attorney.

Exoneration
In May 1988, David Ray Harris, by that point himself a prisoner on death row, admitted that Adams was not even in the car on the night of the murder. The August 1988 release of the documentary film The Thin Blue Line, which detailed the many inconsistencies in the prosecution's line of reasoning, further cast doubt on Adams's guilt, but the case remained in legal limbo.

In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Ex parte Adams overturned Adams's conviction on the grounds of malfeasance by the prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder and inconsistencies in the testimony of a key witness, Emily Miller. The appeals court found that prosecutor Mulder withheld a statement by Emily Miller to the police that cast doubt on her credibility and also allowed her to give perjured testimony. Furthermore, the court found that after Adams's attorney discovered the statement late in Adams's trial, Mulder falsely told the court that he did not know the witness' whereabouts. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stated that "conviction was unfair mainly because of prosecutor Doug Mulder." Mulder had returned to practicing private law in Dallas in 1981. Following the appeals court decision, the case was returned to Dallas County for a retrial, but the district attorney's office decided not to prosecute the case again based on the length of time since the original crime, and Adams was subsequently released.

Despite being wrongly imprisoned for twelve years, Adams received no compensation from the State of Texas. It is said that if Adams had been found to be wrongly convicted under present-day Texas law, he would be entitled to receive $80,000 for each year of incarceration. Additionally, at the time his conviction was thrown out, wrongly convicted prisoners could get a lump sum payment of $25,000 if pardoned by the governor. However, since Adams was released because his case was dismissed, and not because he was pardoned, he received no payment from the state after his release.

David Ray Harris
David Ray Harris had testified in the original trial that he was the passenger in the stolen car, that he allowed Adams to drive, and that Adams committed the murder. He recanted this testimony at Adams's habeas corpus hearing, but never admitted guilt in a judicial setting and was never charged in the case. On June 30, 2004, Harris was executed by lethal injection for the unrelated 1985 murder of Mark Mays in Beaumont, Texas, which occurred during an attempted abduction of Mays' girlfriend.

Lawsuit
After his release from prison, Adams ended up in a legal battle with Errol Morris, the director of The Thin Blue Line, concerning the rights to his story. The matter was settled out of court after Adams was granted sole use of anything written or made on the subject of his life. Adams said of the matter: "Mr. Morris felt he had the exclusive rights to my life story. ... I did not sue Errol Morris for any money or any percentages of The Thin Blue Line, though the media portrayed it that way."

Morris, for his part, recalled: "When he got out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed a release giving me rights to his life story. And he felt as though I had stolen something from him. Maybe I had, maybe I just don't understand what it's like to be in prison for that long, for a crime you hadn't committed. In a certain sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was fueled by my relationship with his attorney. And it's a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there's always a mess somewhere."

Activism and personal life
While in prison, Adams earned a correspondence-course degree from Lee College in Baytown, Texas. Adams later worked as an anti-death penalty activist. He wrote a book about his story, Adams v. Texas, which was published in June 1992. In 2001, at an anti-death penalty legislative hearing on behalf of the Texas Moratorium Network, Adams said:"The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12-and-a-half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn't, then that scares the hell out of me."

In 1999, Adams married Jill Fratta, the sister of a death-row inmate.

Death
Adams died of a brain tumor in Washington Court House, Ohio on October 30, 2010, at the age of 61. He lived a quiet life divorced from his past. According to his lawyer, Randy Schaffer, the death was at the time reported only locally and was not widely reported until June 25, 2011.

title: Randall Dale Adams