title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 27 September 2013, the Moldovan-flagged cargo ship set sail from Batumi, Georgia, to Beira, Mozambique, carrying of ammonium nitrate. "Rhosus" was owned by a company based in Panama but was regarded by the captain as under the "de facto" ownership of Russian businessman Igor Grechushkin. The shipment had been ordered by an African explosives manufacturing company for mining in Mozambique. However, reporting by "Der Spiegel" has found that it was not Grechushkin who owned "Rhosus", but rather Cypriot businessman Charalambos Manoli, who maintained a relationship with the bank used by Hezbollah in Lebanon.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 21 November 2013, the ship made port in Beirut. Some sources said it was forced to port due to mechanical issues and possibly engine problems, while other sources claimed the owner did not have sufficient funds to pay tolls for the Suez Canal and attempted to take on a shipment of heavy machinery in Beirut. The heavy machinery was stacked on top of the doors to the cargo space containing the ammonium nitrate, causing the doors to buckle, which damaged the ship. After inspection by port state control, "Rhosus" was deemed unseaworthy, and was forbidden to set sail. Eight Ukrainians and one or two Russians were aboard, and with the help of the Ukrainian consul, five Ukrainians were repatriated, leaving four crew members to care for the ship.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Grechushkin reportedly went bankrupt, and after the charterers lost interest in the cargo he abandoned "Rhosus". The ship soon ran out of provisions, and the remaining crew were unable to disembark due to immigration restrictions. According to "Lloyd's List", port state control seized "Rhosus" on 4February 2014 due to US$100,000 in unpaid bills. The ship had accrued port fees and been fined for refusing cargo. Lawyers argued for the crew's repatriation on compassionate grounds because of the danger posed by the cargo still aboard the ship, and an Urgent Matters judge in Beirut allowed them to return home. They had been forced to live aboard the ship for about a year.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: By order of the judge, "Rhosus"s cargo was brought ashore in 2014 and placed in Warehouse 12 at the port, where it remained for the next six years. "Rhosus" sank in the harbor in February 2018.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Lebanese customs officials had sent letters to judges requesting a resolution to the issue of the confiscated cargo, proposing that the ammonium nitrate be either exported, given to the Lebanese Armed Forces or sold to the private Lebanese Explosives Company. Letters had been sent on 27 June and 5 December 2014, 6 May 2015, 20 May and 13 October 2016, and 27 October 2017. One of the letters sent in 2016 noted that judges had not replied to previous requests, and pleaded:


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Around 17:45 local time (14:45 UTC) on 4 August 2020, a fire broke out in Warehouse 12 at the Port of Beirut. Warehouse 12, which was waterside and adjacent to the grain elevator, stored the ammonium nitrate that had been confiscated from "Rhosus" alongside a stash of fireworks. Around 17:55 local time (14:55 UTC), a team of nine firefighters and one paramedic, known as Platoon 5, was dispatched to fight the fire. On arrival the fire crew reported there was "something wrong" as the fire was immense and produced "a crazy sound."


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The initial explosion, at about 18:07 local time (15:07 UTC), likely triggered by the stored fireworks, sent up a large cloud of smoke and a crackle of bright firework flashes, and heavily damaged the structure of Warehouse 12 itself with a force equivalent to around 1.5–2.5 tons of TNT.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The second explosion, 33 to 35 seconds later, was much more substantial and was felt in northern Israel and in Cyprus, away. It rocked central Beirut and sent a red-orange cloud into the air, which was briefly surrounded by a white condensation cloud. The red-orange color of the smoke was caused by nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of ammonium nitrate decomposition.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Despite inefficient transmission of the shock waves into the ground, the United States Geological Survey measured the event as a 3.3 local magnitude earthquake, while the Jordan Seismological Observatory reported that it was equivalent to a 4.5 local magnitude earthquake. A study of seismic signatures of the explosion by the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Germany produced a yield estimate between 0.5 and 1.1 kt of TNT. Experts from the Blast and Impact Research Group at the University of Sheffield estimated that the explosion was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. Later, they were able to quantitatively support this rapid estimate as they compiled more distance versus time of arrival data as new videos of the explosion became available on social media platforms. Their study found that a best estimate and upper bound prediction of the yield of the explosion are 0.5 and 1.12 kt of TNT, respectively. This is equal to around 1 GWh of energy. Another study used several videos of the explosion to describe the evolution of the fireball size and estimated the Beirut explosion yield to be 0.6 ± 0.3 kt of TNT. The Beirut explosion was similar to explosions of large amounts of ammonium nitrate in Tianjin, China, in 2015; in Texas City, United States, in 1947; or in Toulouse, France, in 2001.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: An independent estimate by the International Monitoring System of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization based on infrasonic data obtained an explosive yield equivalent to 0.5–1.1 kt of TNT, making it the sixth-largest accidental artificial non-nuclear explosion in human history.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Aouad et al. (2021) derived the kinematics of the fireball from publicly available videos. Considering a time of separation between the fireball and the shock wave at about 170 milliseconds, they concluded a TNT equivalent mass of 0.2 +/- 0.08 kt of TNT or 520 +/- 200 tons of ammonium nitrate at a distance of 130 meters from the explosion center. This result is consistent with Dewey 2021 that suggests that the Beirut explosion TNT equivalence is an increasing function of distance.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Temsah et al. 2021 estimated the magnitude of the explosion. The research was based on a structural engineering approach with numerical non-linear finite element modeling of the grain elevator facing Warehouse 12 where the explosion took place. The numerical study model was based on silos data (geometrical and material properties) and the use of the Conventional Weapons Effects Blast Loading (CONWEP), and the Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) methods to generate the blast load. The analysis results proved that an amount equivalent to 564 t of AN (or 220 t of TNT) was adequate to generate damages similar to those resulting from the explosion. This amount represents 20.5% of the original stored amount (2750 t). As for the state of the grain elevator, results showed it was structurally unstable and should be demolished or properly strengthened.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Warehouses at the Port of Beirut were used to store explosives and chemicals including nitrates, which are common components of fertilizers and explosives. The General Director of General Security, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, said the ammonium nitrate confiscated from "Rhosus" had exploded. The of ammonium nitrate was the equivalent to around . The failure to remove the materials from the warehouse and relocate them was attributed to mismanagement of the port, corruption of the government, and inaction of the flag registry's country and ship owner.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International (LBCI) reported that, according to attendees of a Higher Defence Council briefing, the fire was ignited by workers welding a door at a warehouse. A former port worker said that "[t]here were 30 to 40 nylon bags of fireworks inside warehouse 12" that he had personally seen. An American diplomatic cable on 7 August said it "remains unclear ... whether fireworks, ammunition or something else stored next to the ammonium nitrate might have been involved" in worsening the warehouse fire and igniting the ammonium nitrate. A port worker said Warehouse 12 was "not in regular use", and that "those in charge only used to open the warehouse to stack inside it materials confiscated upon judicial orders or perilous products", though he had not seen this to include any armaments.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: A total of 218 people were confirmed dead from the explosion, with over 7,000 people were injured. Foreigners from at least 22 countries were among the casualties. Also, several United Nations naval peacekeepers who were members of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were injured by the blast. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that 34 refugees were among the dead and missing, and an additional 124 refugees were injured. At least 150 people became permanently disabled as a result of the explosion.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: All ten members of Platoon 5 died at the scene of the blast. Nazar Najarian, the secretary-general of the Kataeb Party, died after sustaining severe head injuries. French architect Jean-Marc Bonfils died after sustaining serious injuries at his apartment in the East Village building in Mar Mikhaël. He had been live-streaming the fire at the warehouse on Facebook at the time. Lady Cochrane Sursock, philanthropist and member of the Sursock family, died on 31 August from injuries sustained from the blast.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The explosion overturned cars and stripped steel-framed buildings of their cladding. Within the port area, the explosion destroyed a section of shoreline and left a blast crater roughly in diameter and in depth. Homes as far as away were damaged by the blast, and up to 300,000 people were left homeless by the explosion. The grain elevator was largely destroyed, exacerbating food shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the financial crisis. About of grain were lost, leaving the country with less than a month's worth of grain in reserve. However, part of the elevator's sturdy structure survived, shielding a large area of western Beirut from greater destruction.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The damage from the blast affected over half of Beirut, with the likely cost above US$15 billion and insured losses at around US$3 billion. Approximately ninety percent of the city's hotels were damaged and three hospitals completely destroyed, while two more suffered damage. Dozens of injured people brought to nearby hospitals could not be admitted because of the damage to the hospitals. Windows and other installations of glass across the city were shattered.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Saint George Hospital, one of the city's largest medical facilities, was less than from the explosion, and was so badly damaged that staff were forced to treat patients in the street. Four nurses died from the initial blast, fifteen patients died after their ventilators stopped working, and several child cancer patients were injured by flying glass. Within hours, after discharging all its patients and sending some to other facilities, Saint George Hospital was forced to close. The hospital's director of intensive care, Dr. Joseph Haddad, was quoted as saying: "There is no Saint George Hospital any more. It's fallen, it's on the floor... It's all destroyed. All of it."


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The Sursock Museum was severely damaged, as was much of its artwork, and some ceramics were completely destroyed. The atelier for the fashion house Sandra Mansour was heavily damaged by the explosion. Sursock Palace, a 160-year-old Beirut landmark that was listed as a cultural heritage site, also sustained heavy damage, as did its many works of art. Bustros Palace, which hosts the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, was severely damaged. The Armenian Catholicosate in Antelias sustained great damage. All the stained glass windows of the National Evangelical Church were blown out. The FIBA Asia headquarters was also heavily damaged. Embassies in and around Beirut reported varying degrees of damage to their buildings; the embassies of Argentina, Australia, Finland, Cyprus, and the Netherlands, which were close to the blast, sustained heavy damage, while minor damage was reported from the South Korean, Hungarian, Kazakh, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish embassies.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The cruise ship "Orient Queen", berthed near Warehouse 12, suffered extensive damage and capsized overnight. Two members of the crew were killed, and seven crew members were injured. On 7 August, the first lawsuit related to the explosions was filed by the ship's owners, Abou Merhi Cruises, whose offices were also destroyed. The Bangladesh Navy corvette BNS "Bijoy", which participated in UNIFIL, was also damaged.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The edible-oil tanker ship "AmadeoII", being used as a bunker barge at the port, was nearest to the explosion, which deposited the mangled remains of the ship on a nearby quay. The ship's crew died in the explosion. Two large livestock carriers, "Abou KarimI" and "Abou KarimIII", laid up at the end of Berth 09, very close to Warehouse 12, were heavily damaged. "Abou KarimI" became unstable, keeled over onto the adjacent "Abou KarimIII" and shortly afterwards capsized. The livestock carrier "Jouri" and the cargo ships "Mero Star" and "Raouf H" were also close to the blast and suffered serious damage; AIS from these ships stopped broadcasting at the time of the explosion.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Hapag-Lloyd's offices in Beirut were destroyed. CMA CGM's offices, located a few hundred meters away from the site of the explosion, were severely damaged. One employee died and two were severely injured.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport, the city's main airport, about from the site of the blast, sustained moderate damage to the terminal buildings during the explosion. Doors and windows were destroyed, and ceiling tiles were shaken loose by the shockwave, severing electrical wires. Despite the damage, flights continued.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In July 2022, grains remaining in the silo caught on fire due to a combination of fermentation and summer heat. On 31 July, the northern part of the silo collapsed. Two further collapses occurred in August. The government had ordered the demolition of the silos in April 2022, but families of blast victims objected, saying it should be preserved as a memorial site.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The government formed an investigative committee led by Prime Minister Hassan Diab, which announced it would submit its findings to the Council of Ministers of Lebanon by 11 August. The committee includes the justice, interior and defence ministers, and the head of the top four security agencies: the Armed Forces, General Security, Internal Security Forces, and State Security. The investigation was to examine whether the explosion was an accident or due to negligence, and if it was caused by a bomb or another external interference. President Michel Aoun rejected calls for an international probe despite demands from world leaders.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 5 August, the Council agreed to place sixteen Beirut port officials who had overseen storage and security since 2014 under house arrest, overseen by the army, pending the investigation into the explosions. In addition, the general manager of the port, Hassan Koraytem, and the former director general of Lebanon's customs authority, Shafiq Merhi, were arrested. Later, on 17 August, the incumbent director-general of Lebanon's customs authority, Badri Daher, was also arrested. Also, former ministers of both finance and public works were due to be interrogated by a judge appointed by the council. In the meantime, state prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat ordered a travel ban on seven individuals, including Koraytem. While Acting Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm unsuccessfully demanded an international investigation into the blast, she also noted that "...this case is a chance for the Lebanese judiciary to prove they can do their jobs and win back the confidence of the people". On 19 August, a Lebanon judge ordered the arrests of more suspects over the explosion, making the total number of accused 25.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The Lebanese judge Fadi Sawan, who has been responsible for the investigation, summoned former Minister of Transportation and Public Works Ghazi Aridi, Labor Ministers Ghazi Zaiter, Youssef Fenianos, and Michel Najjar, General Director of the Lebanese State Security Tony Saliba, Director General of Lebanon's Land and Maritime Transport division, Abdul-Hafeez Al-Qaisi, and General Director of General Security, Major General Abbas Ibrahim.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In September, Lebanon's state prosecution asked Interpol to detain two Russian citizens, the captain and the owner of "Rhosus", as its cargo of ammonium nitrate was blamed for the explosion. In January 2021, Interpol issued Red Notices against the two Russians as well as a Portuguese man.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In December 2020, Lebanon's outgoing Prime Minister Diab and three former ministers were charged with negligence over the Beirut port explosion. The former ministers were former finance minister Ali Hassan Khalil, Ghazi Zeiter, and Youssef Fenianos, both former ministers of public works. Zeitar was transport and public works minister in 2014, followed by Fenianos in 2016, who held the job until the beginning of 2020. Khalil was finance minister in 2014, 2016, and until 2020.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 28 January 2021, Syrian-Russian businessman George Haswani denied any links to the Beirut explosion. He told Reuters he did not know anything about a company linked to the process of buying a shipment of chemicals that exploded. In an interview with Reuters at his home in Damascus, Haswani said that he had resorted to the Cypriot company Interstatus to register his company, which is the same agent that registered the Savaro company, and that the agent company had moved the registration site of the two companies to the same address on the same day. However, Haswani said that he did not know anything about Savaro and that any links between it and his company are just a coincidence because the two companies have the same agent. As stated in previous reports, Reuters was unable to determine whether Haswani had anything to do with Savaro. Haswani said, "I don't know what other companies are registered by this Cypriot company, five or three or 70 or more... It is a fabricated media whirlwind. We don't know Savaro and we hadn't heard about them before this." Interstatus did not respond to a request for comment. Marina Psyllou, the director of the "Interstatus" company, was listed in the registration documents of the company (Savaro) as the only owner and director of the company, but she denied that she was the real manager of the company. She told Reuters in mid-January 2021 that the beneficial owner of the company was another person, whom she refused to identify. She added that Savaro was a dormant company that had never conducted business. Haswani said that he was not contacted by any investigators from Lebanon or any other country regarding the explosion and that he will soon work to file a legal case in Paris against media reports linking him to the explosion. He continued, "I am living my life normally and laughing because I am someone who knows well that I have nothing to do with this matter at all. Why would I worry?"


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 15 April 2021, six detained people were released, including two officers, although they were not allowed to travel out of Lebanon.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In September 2021, OCCRP published an investigation, which linked Savaro Limited to a Ukrainian company trading chemicals, directed by Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Verbonol. The report also mentions that only 20% of the nitrate originally stored in the warehouse was actually left when it exploded, raising questions about what happened with the rest.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 14 October 2021, six people were killed and at least 30 injured in a gunfire exchange in Beirut during protests by members of the Shia Amal and Hezbollah outside the Justice Palace, which demanded an end to the investigations led by Judge Tarek Bitar, for they deemed him as too much centered on their political allies.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 21 November 2021, the BBC reported that legal groups representing victims of the blast had sent letters on three occasions to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres requesting more information from UNIFIL, but had received no acknowledgment from the UN.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 22 November 2021, the Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bouhabib announced that Lebanon received satellite images from Russia of the port from the day of the blast in 2020. These were the first official images made available from any foreign government.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Throughout 2022, the investigation has stalled. As of 8 June 2022, parliamentary immunity, as well as outstanding complaints and other procedural roadblocks initiated by two members of Parliament and former ministers (namely, Ali Hassan Khalil and Ghazi Zaiter), continued to prevent significant progress in the case.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The Lebanese Red Cross said every available ambulance from North Lebanon, Bekaa, and South Lebanon was being dispatched to Beirut to help patients. According to the agency, a total of 75 ambulances and 375 medics were activated in response to the explosions. Lebanese President Michel Aoun said the government would make up to 100billion pounds (US$66million) in aid available to support recovery operations. The ride-sharing app Careem offered free rides to and from hospitals and blood donation centers to anyone willing to donate blood. Volunteers removed debris while local business owners offered to repair damaged buildings for free in the absence of a state-sponsored cleanup operation. A temporary hospital was established in the city by the Iranian Red Crescent Society.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Health Minister Hamad Hasan requested that international aid be sent to Lebanon; a number of countries sent in food, medical supplies, field hospitals, medical workers, and rescue teams. On 9 August, a multinational summit hosted by France raised 253 million euros in aid. The money pledged was not to be given to the Lebanese government, but rather to the people of Lebanon through the United Nations, other international organizations, and non-governmental organizations. On 14 August, a $565 million appeal for Lebanon was launched by the United Nations, including initial recovery efforts, as well as immediate humanitarian aid.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In the first week after the explosion, civilians gathered in hundreds to volunteer to clean up the debris on the streets and inside homes and businesses in Gemmayze, Achrafieh, and Karantina neighborhoods. Many civil society organizations offered equipment and food to the volunteers, while many residents and businesses opened their homes and hotels for free to those who lost their homes in the blast.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: UNESCO played a leading role in the rescue and reconstruction of historic buildings, with Blue Shield International assessing the damage to houses, museums and libraries, and the International Council of Museums providing expertise. Blue Shield International, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces put together a project to secure and protect cultural assets. According to Karl von Habsburg, founding president of Blue Shield International, the protection of cultural property in Beirut was not only about securing buildings, but also about preventing looting and water damage, taking dangerous chemical substances into account. The efforts also included the restoration of schools.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 6 August 2020, the Lebanese Forces Party's executive chairman Samir Geagea was the first politician to visit Beirut and launched from there a relief committee, Ground-0, under the leadership of the former minister Dr. May Chidiac to support in rebuilding Beirut. In December 2020, the committee achieved repairing 709 houses, assisted 5300 individuals and 2300 families, distributed 14000 food rations, made 2540 medical consultations, and provided 2030 individuals with medicine. In addition, the committee distributed more than 150 scholarships for Beirut schools' students.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced that 5 August, the day after the explosion, would be a national day of mourning. The Lebanese government declared a two-week state of emergency. President Aoun said the government would provide support to displaced people, and the Ministry of Health would meet the expense of treatment for the wounded. Marwan Abboud, the governor of Beirut, said he arrived at the scene to search for firefighters who were on the site attempting to control the fire that was raging before the second explosion. He broke down in tears on television, calling the event "a national catastrophe". "It resembles to what happened in Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's what [it] reminds me of. In my life, I haven't seen destruction on this scale," he said. Lebanese civilians from every region in Lebanon came to help by offering food, cleaning the streets, and helping NGOs.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Multiple members of the Lebanese parliament resigned in protest, including Marwan Hamadeh, Paula Yacoubian, all three Kataeb Party MPs, Neemat Frem, Michel Moawad, Dima Jamali, and Henri Helou. The Lebanese ambassador to Jordan, Tracy Chamoun, also resigned on live television. On the night of 6 August, the protests against the government that had been ongoing since the previous October resumed, with dozens of protestors near the parliament building calling for the resignation of Lebanese government officials. On 8August, Diab called for early elections, saying it would be the only way for the country to exit the crisis.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: On 9 August, the information minister of Lebanon, Manal Abdel Samad and then environment minister, Damianos Kattar resigned, the first government resignations since the explosion. On 10 August, the justice minister, Marie-Claude Najm, also resigned, followed by the resignation of the entire Lebanese cabinet. Shortly after the resignation of the cabinet, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab stepped down from office. President Michel Aoun accepted the resignation of the government and the Prime Minister, and asked the government to stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new cabinet is formed.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Ground-0 Relief Committee, an initiative by the Lebanese Forces Party, launched a petition for an international investigation. The petition was signed by the relatives of the victims and the missing, by the injured as well as by those whose homes, businesses or establishments have been damaged. The document was sent to the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, through his special coordinator for Lebanon, Ján Kubiš, in order to take the necessary steps to appoint an international commission of inquiry.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The Lebanese Forces Party MPs called for an international investigation into the causes of the double explosion at the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. They asked the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, on 22 February 2021 for the creation of an international commission to be established under the United Nations, which would be responsible for carrying out the investigations. The Members of Parliament Georges Okais, Imad Wakim, Eddy Abillammaaa and Fadi Saad, presented a petition to this effect to the United Nations Special Coordinator in Lebanon, Najat Rochdi.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Representatives of multiple countries, as well as the United Nations (UN), offered condolences. In addition to those countries which provided aid, others offered to do so. Notably, Israel offered aid via UN channels, as Israel and Lebanon have no diplomatic ties and are technically at war; the offer was refused by the Lebanese government. Former Israeli Member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin hailed the tragedy as a gift from God, celebrating the incident and describing it as a "spectacular firework show." Despite years of conflict, including the 2006 Lebanon War, both Israel and senior Hezbollah officials ruled out Israeli involvement in the explosion, despite claims and allegations spread via social media.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was activated on 5August, thus providing for widespread usage of various corporate, national, and international satellite assets on a humanitarian basis. Several countries expressed solidarity by lighting up landmarks and monuments in the colors of the Lebanese flag, including the Tel Aviv City Hall, whereas the Eiffel Tower in Paris went dark at midnight, and the Arab League flew its flag at its headquarters in Cairo at half-mast. Some figures from the right-wing criticized the display of the flag of Lebanon, an "enemy state", in Tel Aviv. There was also backlash inside Lebanon against the Israeli gesture.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Following the explosion, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the United Kingdom sent search and rescue teams. Egypt sent several planes with tons of medical aid and food to Lebanon. The Egyptian embassy also established a field hospital. On 5 August 2020, Qatar started providing urgent medical aid. The Qatari Emiri Air Force delivered field hospitals, respirators, and generators to Beirut. In addition, Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani donated US$50 million to Lebanon. On 6 August 2020, Kuwait provided 36 tonnes of urgent humanitarian and medical aid to Lebanon including wheelchairs, blood bags and 10 ambulances.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: As a result of the explosion, concerns were raised about the storage of ammonium nitrate in other ports across the world. Large quantities of the chemical compound were removed from storage in Egypt, India, Romania, and Senegal.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In August 2021, a memorial event marking the one-year-anniversary of the explosion was held in tribute to the victims at the Port of Beirut, joined by UN officials and International Labour Organization Regional Director Ruba Jaradat.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: In December 2021, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, United Nations Environment Programme, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Labour Organization, and International Maritime Organization held a seminar in follow-up to the explosion. National governments of Lebanon, Estonia, France, South Africa, and others shared lessons learned from the explosion. The seminar called for action to better manage the risks of chemicals in ports.


title: 2020 Beirut explosion

text: Numerous conspiracy theories emerged on social media in the days following the explosion. The main themes were that there was a significant weapons cache belonging to Hezbollah stored at the Port of Beirut, and that Israel wished to destroy those weapons. The theories said that Israel launched an attack and the level of destruction took them by surprise. Israel, Lebanon and Hezbollah all denied this theory, and blame the ammonium nitrate stored in the port.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Christopher Alvin Stapleton (born April 15, 1978) is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Staffordsville, Kentucky. In 2001, Stapleton moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University but dropped out to pursue his career in music. Subsequently, Stapleton signed a contract with Sea Gayle Music to write and publish his music.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: As of 2018, Stapleton has amassed credits writing and co-writing over 170 songs. He has co-written six number-one country songs, including Kenny Chesney's five-week number-one "Never Wanted Nothing More", Josh Turner's "Your Man", George Strait's "Love's Gonna Make It Alright", and Luke Bryan's "Drink a Beer". His songs have appeared on many artists' albums including Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, and Taylor Swift. He has co-written with several artists as well including Vince Gill, Peter Frampton, Sheryl Crow, and Ed Sheeran.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: As a vocalist, Stapleton sang lead in two bands before he started recording as a solo artist including a bluegrass ensemble from 2008 to 2010 called the SteelDrivers and the Jompson Brothers. After that, he released his solo debut: the critically acclaimed studio album titled "Traveller" (2015), which reached number one on the US "Billboard" 200 and was certified four-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). His version of "Tennessee Whiskey" was certified Diamond by the RIAA. His second studio album "" was released in May 2017, and earned him a second CMA Award for Album of the Year and also a Grammy Award for Best Country Album. "" was released in December 2017. Stapleton released his fourth studio album "Starting Over" in 2020, for which he won his third Grammy for Best Country Album. The title track was issued as its lead single.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton has been recognized with several awards including eight Grammy Awards, 10 Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards, and 14 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards. He was named the ACM's Artist-Songwriter of the Decade.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton was born in Lexington, Kentucky. His mother, Carol J. (Mace) Stapleton, worked at the local health department and his father, Herbert Joseph Stapleton, Jr. (1946–2013), was an engineer in the coal mines. He comes from a family of coal miners. He has an older brother, Herbert Joseph III and younger sister, Melanie Brooke.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton grew up in the small town of Staffordsville, Kentucky, which is located just outside of Paintsville, located between the city and the Paintsville Lake. He graduated from Johnson Central High School where he played football and was his class Valedictorian. He then attended Vanderbilt University, where he studied engineering, but dropped out after a year.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2001, Stapleton moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music career. As a songwriter, he signed with the publishing house Sea Gayle Music, a deal he got shortly after moving to Nashville.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2007, he became the frontman for the bluegrass group the SteelDrivers. They had two hit records; each peaked at number 2 on the bluegrass chart before Stapleton left in 2010.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2010, Stapleton founded a Southern rock band called the Jompson Brothers. The band was made up of Stapleton on vocals, Greg McKee on guitar, J.T. Cure on bass, and Bard McNamee on drums. They toured regionally until 2013 and at one point, opened for the Zac Brown Band. The band independently released a self-titled album in November 2010.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2013, Stapleton signed to Mercury Nashville, a division of Universal Music Group Nashville, as a solo artist. His first single, "What Are You Listening To?", was released in October 2013, but did not perform as expected. The single was part of a record that was recorded but never released. Stapleton also cowrote the theme—"All-Nighter Comin'"—to the WSM-AM show, "The WSM All Nighter with Marcia Campbell", an American radio show with a large trucker following. He cowrote the song with Vince Gill and Al Anderson, with Gill featured on vocals on the track. Songs written by Stapleton have been included on to the soundtracks of several feature films, including "Valentine's Day", "", and "Hell or High Water".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2013, Stapleton and his wife Morgane sang the Waylon Jennings song, "Amanda", live at the Grand Ole Opry. They also did an NPR Tiny Desk Concert in November 2015.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: At the 2014 CMT Artist of the Year event, Stapleton performed with Lady A, who played Stapleton's song, "Drink a Beer", which Luke Bryan had recorded, in honor of Bryan, who was unable to attend the ceremony due to a death in his family. Stapleton had previously sung it during Bryan's 2013 CMA Awards performance of the same song.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton's debut solo album, "Traveller", was released on May 5, 2015. Recorded in Nashville's RCA Studio A, Stapleton co-produced the album with producer Dave Cobb. On the album he plays guitar and sings with a live band that is made up of bass player J.T. Cure (from the Jompson Brothers), pedal steel player Robby Turner, drummer Derek Mixon, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and wife Morgane Stapleton singing harmonies. Stapleton emphasized the importance of the band lineup that came together during the making and promotion of the record, saying the familiarity he had with Cure and Mixon (he has known and played with Cure for over 20 years), plus Cobb's producing which included contributing acoustic guitar in the recording process, added to the richness of making the record.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton said he composed the title track, "Traveller" as he and his wife were driving through New Mexico on their way back to Nashville in a 1979 Jeep that she bought for him after his father died in 2013, which they had flown to Phoenix, Arizona to take possession of. His wife helped him to sift through 15 years worth of songs to pick 9 songs to start recording with.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton won three awards at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards: Album of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, and New Artist of the Year. At the CMA Awards, Stapleton performed with Justin Timberlake his version of the song popularized as a David Allen Coe live-show staple, "Tennessee Whiskey" and Timberlake's "Drink You Away". Considered a career-defining moment by music publications, the performance along with his wins that night lifted him to national prominence. In December 2015, Stapleton received the 2015 CMT Artists of the Year Breakout award during a live performance at the annual CMT Artists of the Year show. "Traveller" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and won the categories Best Country Album and Best Country Solo Performance. It also won the Academy of Country Music Award for Album of the Year. The top selling country album of 2016, it has sold a total of 2 million copies domestically .


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In 2016, Stapleton – along with his wife Morgane – contributed the track, "You Are My Sunshine", to producer Dave Cobb's compilation record project, "Southern Family". He collaborated with Jake Owen on the song "If He Ain't Gonna Love You" on Owen's album "American Love". Stapleton performed on the main stage at the 2016 in Europe along with Andrew Combs, Kacey Musgraves and headliner Eric Church. Stapleton was the musical guest on the "Saturday Night Live" episode which aired January 16, 2016, alongside host Adam Driver. He performed "Parachute" and "Nobody to Blame" from "Traveller".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: In January 2016, Stapleton performed "Either Way", a song he wrote with Kendall Marvel and Tim James, at the Country Radio Hall of Fame's Country Radio Seminar in Nashville. It was previously recorded by Lee Ann Womack for her 2008 album, "Call Me Crazy". The track would be featured on his second studio album "". Released on May 5, 2017, "Volume 1" takes its name from Nashville's RCA Studio A, where it was recorded during the winter of 2016–17. The same month he embarked on his All-American Road Show Tour. "Volume 1" was certified gold in the US the next month, eventually giving Stapleton his second CMA for Album of the Year, and became the best-selling country album of the year. His third studio album "" was released on December 1, 2017. Both albums "Volume 1" and "Volume 2" debuted at number two on the "Billboard" 200 charts.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton was the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live" for a second time on January 27, 2018, where he performed songs from "From a Room: Volume 2" with Sturgill Simpson. In March, "Broken Halos" off "From A Room: Volume 1" reached the top of the Country Airplay chart. It earned him the accolades for Song and Single of the Year at the 52nd CMAs, while he won Male Vocalist of the Year for a fourth time.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: On August 28, 2020, Stapleton released a single titled "Starting Over", a song he previously performed on tour. It is the lead single from his album of the same name and marks his first single since 2018's "Millionaire". He then released a second single, "Cold" on September 25, 2020, to further promote the project. He went on to win Male Vocalist of the Year for the fourth time at the 2021 Country Music Association Awards, and Male Artist of the Year for the third time at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards. At the latter, he performed "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" with Patty Loveless.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton co-wrote three songs for Justin Timberlake's studio album "Man of the Woods" (2018), including their collaboration "Say Something", which reached the top ten list on the US "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. In the same year, Stapleton also recorded a cover of "I Want Love" for "Restoration: Reimagining the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: On April 28, 2019, Stapleton appeared as an extra in "The Long Night", the third episode of the eighth season of the HBO series "Game of Thrones".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: On August 6, 2019, John Mayer invited Stapleton onstage at his concert to perform a song they had both written the day before, titled "I Just Remembered That I Didn't Care" that has yet to receive a studio release. He stayed onstage afterwards for a performance of Mayer's "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Over the course of 2019 and 2020, Stapleton recorded and wrote songs with Mike Campbell, formerly the guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who is now working with his solo project the Dirty Knobs. In addition to Campbell and fellow Heartbreaker Benmont Tench having played on Stapleton's album "Starting Over", Stapleton also featured on the Dirty Knobs' album, "Wreckless Abandon".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: On August 5, 2021, Stapleton was announced to appear as a featured artist on Taylor Swift's second re-recorded album, "Red (Taylor's Version)" on the track "I Bet You Think About Me". Stapleton contributed a cover of the Metallica song "Nothing Else Matters" to the charity tribute album "The Metallica Blacklist", released in September 2021. He also appears as a credit vocalist on Adele album "30", appearing on an alternate version of "Easy on Me".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton collaborate with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello in both the writing and performance of the track "The War Inside" on Morello's 2021 album, "The Atlas Underground Fire".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton's musical influences range from outlaw country and bluegrass to rock and roll and blues. Editors from NPR and "Paste" magazine described his sound as a blend of country, classic rock and Southern soul. Before going solo, Stapleton led the progressive bluegrass band the SteelDrivers and the rock and roll band the Jompson Brothers. His first solo album "Traveller" is an old-school country, Southern rock and bluegrass record, and his second "From A Room: Volume 1" focuses on country, blues and roots rock. He played the acoustic guitar and electric guitar for both albums.


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton is a soul singer with a tenor vocal range. After attending one of his concerts in 2015, "Los Angeles Times" writer Randy Lewis opined his singing recalls "the note-bending style of country that traces to Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell and the gut-wrenching expressionism of blues and R&B perfected by Ray Charles", while his guitar performances elicits "memories of Texas blues rocker Stevie Ray Vaughan". Stapleton has cited Charles, Otis Redding and Freddie King as some of his music influences, along with Kentucky-based country artists, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam and Patty Loveless: "the list goes on and on. Those names are just part of life in Kentucky. You can't help but be aware of them and be influenced by them."


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton is married to singer-songwriter Morgane Stapleton, who co-wrote Carrie Underwood's 2006 single "Don't Forget to Remember Me". She had a recording deal with Arista Nashville. The couple met when they were working at adjacent publishing houses, married in 2007, and live in Nashville. In October 2017, the couple announced they were expecting twins. On April 15, 2018, (Stapleton's 40th birthday), host Reba McEntire announced live on the 53rd Academy of Country Music Awards that twin boys had been born to the Stapletons. At his concert at Madison Square Garden on November 2, 2018, Stapleton announced that he and his wife were expecting their fifth child; he repeated the announcement at the Country Music Association awards on November 18, 2018. On May 12, 2019, Morgane and Chris welcomed their fifth child, a baby boy, into their family. The Stapletons had a dog named Maggie, for which Chris wrote a song ("Maggie's Song") on his 2020 album "Starting Over".


title: Chris Stapleton

text: Stapleton has received numerous awards and nominations. He is the recipient of eight Grammy Awards, ten Academy of Country Music Awards, fourteen Country Music Association Awards, five Billboard Music Awards, two iHeartRadio Music Awards, among others. For his work as composer he has received nine ASCAP Country awards, including the Vanguard Award. In 2019, Stapleton was recognized by the Academy of Country Music as the inaugural ACM artist-songwriter of the decade. "Traveller" was "Billboard"s Top Country Album of the decade.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Chinatown is a 1974 American neo-noir mystery film directed by Roman Polanski from a screenplay by Robert Towne, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. The film was inspired by the California water wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley. The Robert Evans production, released by Paramount Pictures, was the director's last film in the United States and features many elements of film noir, particularly a multi-layered story that is part mystery and part psychological drama.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In 1991, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and it is frequently listed as one of the greatest films of all time. At the 47th Academy Awards, it was nominated for 11 Oscars, with Towne winning Best Original Screenplay. The Golden Globe Awards honored it for Best Drama, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. The American Film Institute placed it second among its top ten mystery films in 2008.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: A sequel, "The Two Jakes", was released in 1990, again starring Nicholson, who also directed, with Robert Towne returning to write the screenplay. The film failed to match the acclaim of its predecessor.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In 1937, a woman identifying herself as Evelyn Mulwray hires private investigator Jake Gittes to trail her husband Hollis, whom she suspects of infidelity. Hollis Mulwray is chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Gittes hears him publicly refuse to build a new dam on safety grounds. Later, Gittes photographs Mulwray in the company of a young woman, and the pictures make their way into the next day's paper.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Back at his office, Gittes is confronted by the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him. Gittes concludes that the fake Evelyn was using him to discredit Mulwray. He goes to a reservoir to search for clues but instead finds his old police associate, Lieutenant Lou Escobar. Mulwray's body had been found in the reservoir, having apparently drowned.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Now working for Evelyn, Gittes investigates Mulwray's death as a homicide. He discovers that although there is supposedly a drought, huge quantities of water are being released from the reservoir every night. Gittes is warned off by Water Department Security Chief Claude Mulvihill and a henchman who slashes Gittes's left nostril. At his office, Gittes receives a call from Ida Sessions, who identifies herself as the fake Mrs. Mulwray. She refuses to disclose the name of the man who hired her, but tells Gittes to check that day's obituaries.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Gittes learns that Mulwray was once the business partner of Evelyn's wealthy father, Noah Cross. Over lunch at Cross's club, Cross offers to double Gittes's fee if he will search for Mulwray's missing mistress. At the hall of records, Gittes discovers that much of the Northwest Valley has recently changed ownership. He visits an orange grove in the valley but is attacked by angry landowners who believe him to be an agent of the Water Department, which they claim is sabotaging the water supply to force them out.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Gittes deduces that the Water Department is drying up the land so it can be bought cheaply, and that Mulwray was murdered when he uncovered the plan. He also discovers that some of the property in the valley was seemingly purchased by a recently deceased retirement home resident. Gittes and Evelyn bluff their way into the retirement home and confirm that other real-estate deals were surreptitiously transacted in the names of unknowing residents. Their visit is interrupted by the suspicious director, who has called Mulvihill.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: After escaping Mulvihill and his thugs, Gittes and Evelyn hide at Evelyn's house and sleep together. During the night, Evelyn receives a phone call and must leave suddenly; she warns Gittes that her father is dangerous. Gittes follows Evelyn's car to a house where he sees Evelyn comforting Mulwray's mistress. He accuses Evelyn of holding the woman hostage, but she claims the woman is her sister, Katherine.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: The next day, an anonymous call draws Gittes to Ida Sessions' apartment, where he finds her body. Lieutenant Escobar, who is waiting there, says the coroner found saltwater in Mulwray's lungs, indicating that he did not drown in the freshwater reservoir. Escobar suspects Evelyn murdered him and tells Gittes to produce her quickly. At the Mulwray mansion, Gittes finds Evelyn gone and the servants packing up the house. He discovers that the garden pond is saltwater and spots a pair of eyeglasses in it. He confronts Evelyn about Katherine, whom Evelyn now claims is her daughter. Gittes slaps Evelyn repeatedly and throws her across the room until she breaks down and reveals Katherine is both her sister and her daughter. She explains that her father raped her when she was 15 years old, whereupon she ran away to Mexico. She says that the eyeglasses are not Mulwray's, as he did not wear bifocals.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Gittes arranges for the women to flee back to Mexico and instructs Evelyn to meet him at her butler's home in Chinatown. He summons Cross to the Mulwray home to settle their deal. Cross admits his intention to incorporate the Northwest Valley into the City of Los Angeles, then irrigate and develop it. Gittes confirms that the bifocals he found are Cross's and accuses Cross of murdering Mulwray. Cross has Mulvihill take the bifocals from Gittes at gunpoint. Gittes is then forced to drive them to Chinatown, where Evelyn is waiting. The police are already there and detain Gittes. Cross advances on Katherine, identifying himself as her grandfather, and attempts to take her away from Evelyn. The police do not intervene. In order to escape Cross and get Katherine to safety, Evelyn shoots him in the arm and starts to drive away with Katherine. The police open fire, killing Evelyn. Cross clutches the hysterical Katherine and pulls her away. The police do not intervene. Escobar orders Gittes to be released. One of Gittes's associates leads him away from the scene, telling him: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In 1971, producer Robert Evans offered Towne $175,000 to write a screenplay for "The Great Gatsby" (1974), but Towne felt he could not better the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Instead, Towne asked Evans for $25,000 to write his own story, "Chinatown", to which Evans agreed.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: "Chinatown" is set in 1937 and portrays the manipulation of a critical municipal resource—water—by a cadre of shadowy oligarchs. It was the first part of Towne's planned trilogy about the character J. J. Gittes, the foibles of the Los Angeles power structure, and the subjugation of public good by private greed. The second part, "The Two Jakes", has Gittes caught up in another grab for a natural resource—oil—in the 1940s. It was directed by Jack Nicholson and released in 1990, but the second film's commercial and critical failure scuttled plans to make "Gittes vs. Gittes", about the third finite resource—land—in Los Angeles, circa 1968.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: The character of Hollis Mulwray was inspired by and loosely based on Irish immigrant William Mulholland (1855–1935) according to Mulholland's granddaughter. Mulholland was the superintendent and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who oversaw the construction of the 230-mile (370-km) aqueduct that carries water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Author Vincent Brook considers real-life Mulholland to be split, in the film, into "noble Water and Power chief Hollis Mulwray" and "mobster muscle Claude Mulvihill", just as Land syndicate and Combination members, who "exploited their insider knowledge" on account of "personal greed", are "condensed into the singular, and singularly monstrous, Noah Cross".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In the film, Mulwray opposes the dam wanted by Noah Cross and the city of Los Angeles, for reasons of engineering and safety, arguing he would not repeat his previous mistake, when his dam broke resulting in hundreds of deaths. This alludes to the St. Francis Dam disaster of March 12, 1928, when the dam had been inspected by Mulholland on the day of its catastrophic failure. The dam's failure inundated the Santa Clara River Valley, including the town of Santa Paula, with flood water, causing the deaths of at least 431 people. The event effectively ended Mulholland's career.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: According to Robert Towne,both Carey McWilliams's "Southern California Country: An Island on the Land" (1946) and a "West" magazine article called "Raymond Chandler's L.A". inspired his original screenplay. In a letter to McWilliams, Towne wrote that "Southern California Country" "really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me to write about it".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Towne wrote the screenplay with Jack Nicholson in mind. He took the title (and the exchange "What did you do in Chinatown?" / "As little as possible") from a Hungarian vice cop who had worked in Los Angeles's Chinatown cnfusin of dialects and gangs. The vice cop throught that "police were better off in Chinatown doing nothing, because you could never tell what went on there" and whether what you did helping or furthered the exploitation of victims.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Polanski first learned of the script through Nicholson, as they had been searching for a suitable joint project, and the producer Robert Evans was excited as the thought that Polanski direction would create a darker, more cynical, and European vision of the United States. Polanski was initially reluctant to return to Los Angeles (it was only a few years since the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate), but was persuaded on the strength of the script.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Towne wanted Cross to die and Evelyn Mulwray to survive, but the screenwriter and director argued over it, with Polanski insisting on a tragic end: "I knew that if "Chinatown" was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die". They parted ways over this dispute and Polanski wrote the final scene a few days before it was shot.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: The original script was more than 180 pages and included a narration by Gittes; Polanski cut and reordered the story so the audience and Gittes unraveled the mysteries at the same time.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: William A. Fraker accepted the cinematographer position from Polanski when Paramount agreed. He had worked with the studio previously on Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby". Robert Evans, never consulted about the decision, insisted that the offer be rescinded since he felt pairing Polanski and Fraker again would create a team with too much control over the project and complicate the production.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Between Fraker and the eventual choice John A. Alonzo, the two compromised on Stanley Cortez, but Polanski grew frustrated with Cortez’s slow process, old fashioned compositional sensibility, and unfamiliarity with the Panavision equipment. Alonzo was chosen for his fleetness and skill with natural light a few weeks into production. Ultimately, only a handful of scenes in the finished film, including the orange grove confrontation, were shot by Cortez.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In keeping with a technique Polanski attributes to Raymond Chandler, all of the events of the film are seen subjectively through the main character's eyes; for example, when Gittes is knocked unconscious, the film fades to black and fades in when he awakens. Gittes appears in every scene of the film. This subjectivity is the same construction as Francis Coppola's "The Conversation" in which the main character, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) appears in every scene in the film. "The Conversation" began shooting eleven months prior to "Chinatown".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: His favorite illustration of this was the "parable of the hair". Robert Evans had flown in Ara Gallant from New York to streak Dunaway's coiffure for the movie, and in the course of one of Polanski's more complicated lighting setups, an errant hair escaped. During a scene set inside the Brown Derby restaurant, Polanski tried to shoot past the loose strand in what would otherwise have been a perfect 1930s marcel: tight, blonde, and lacquered against her skull à la Jean Harlow.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: It took a summit meeting in Evans's Paramount office before Dunaway would return to work. Polanski fanned the incident in the press as a perfect example of American star hysterics, while Dunaway insisted her hair was not the point: "It was not the hair. It was the incessant cruelty that I felt, the constant sarcasm, the never-ending need to humiliate me".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Jerry Goldsmith composed and recorded the film's score in ten days, after producer Robert Evans rejected Phillip Lambro's original effort at the last minute. It received an Academy Award nomination and remains widely praised, ranking ninth on the American Film Institute's list of the top 25 American film scores. Goldsmith's score, with "haunting" trumpet solos by Hollywood studio musician and MGM's first trumpet Uan Rasey, was released through ABC Records and features 12 tracks at a running time just over 30 minutes. It was later reissued on CD by the Varèse Sarabande label. Rasey related that Goldsmith "told [him] to play it sexy — but like it's not good sex!"


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: In his 2004 film essay and documentary "Los Angeles Plays Itself", film scholar Thom Andersen lays out the complex relationship between "Chinatown"'s script and its historical background:"Chinatown" isn't a docudrama, it's a fiction. The water project it depicts isn't the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, engineered by William Mulholland before the First World War. "Chinatown" is set in 1937, not 1905. The Mulholland-like figure—"Hollis Mulwray"—isn't the chief architect of the project, but rather its strongest opponent, who must be discredited and murdered. Mulwray is against the "Alto Vallejo Dam" because it's unsafe, not because it's stealing water from somebody else... But there are echoes of Mulholland's aqueduct project in "Chinatown"... Mulholland's project enriched its promoters through insider land deals in the San Fernando Valley, just like the dam project in "Chinatown". The disgruntled San Fernando Valley farmers of "Chinatown", forced to sell off their land at bargain prices because of an artificial drought, seem like stand-ins for the Owens Valley settlers whose homesteads turned to dust when Los Angeles took the water that irrigated them. The "Van Der Lip Dam" disaster, which Hollis Mulwray cites to explain his opposition to the proposed dam, is an obvious reference to the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam in 1928. Mulholland built this dam after completing the aqueduct and its failure was the greatest man-made disaster in the history of California. These echoes have led many viewers to regard "Chinatown", not only as docudrama, but as truth—the real secret history of how Los Angeles got its water. And it has become a ruling metaphor of the non-fictional critiques of Los Angeles development.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, "Chinatown" holds an approval rating of 99% based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 9.40/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "As bruised and cynical as the decade that produced it, this noir classic benefits from Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay, director Roman Polanski's steady hand, and wonderful performances from Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway". Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list, saying that Nicholson's performance was "key in keeping "Chinatown" from becoming just a genre crime picture", along with Towne's screenplay, concluding that the film "seems to settle easily beside the original noirs".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Although the film was widely acclaimed by prominent critics upon its release, Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" was not impressed with the screenplay as compared to the film's predecessors, saying: "Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne have attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirties-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep"", but noted Nicholson's performance, calling it the film's "major contribution to the genre".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: A sequel film, "The Two Jakes", was released in 1990, again starring Nicholson, who also directed, with Robert Towne returning to write the screenplay. It was not met with the same financial or critical success as the first film.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: A prequel television series by David Fincher and Towne for Netflix about Gittes starting his agency was reported to be in the works in November 2019.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: A film about the making of "Chinatown", based on the non-fiction book "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood", was reported in August 2020 to be in the works, with Ben Affleck as director and writer.


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: Towne's screenplay has become legendary among critics and filmmakers, often cited as one of the best examples of the craft, though Polanski decided on the fatal final scene. While it has been reported that Towne envisioned a happy ending, he has denied these claims and said simply that he initially found Polanski's ending to be excessively melodramatic. He explained in a 1997 interview: "The way I had seen it was that Evelyn would kill her father but end up in jail for it, unable to give the real reason why it happened. And the detective [Jack Nicholson] couldn't talk about it either, so it was bleak in its own way". Towne retrospectively concluded that "Roman was right", later arguing that Polanski's stark and simple ending, due to the complexity of the events preceding it, was more fitting than his own, which he described as equally bleak but "too complicated and too literary".


title: Chinatown (1974 film)

text: "Chinatown" brought more public awareness to the land dealings and disputes over water rights, which arose while drawing Los Angeles' water supply from the Owens Valley in the 1910s.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: A fifth-generation fighter is a jet fighter aircraft classification which includes major technologies developed during the first part of the 21st century. , these are the most advanced fighters in operation. The characteristics of a fifth-generation fighter are not universally agreed upon and not every fifth-generation type necessarily has them all; however, they typically include stealth, low-probability-of-intercept radar (LPIR), agile airframes with supercruise performance, advanced avionics features, and highly integrated computer systems capable of networking with other elements within the battlespace for situation awareness and C (command, control and communications) capabilities.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: , the combat-ready fifth-generation fighters are the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, which entered service with the United States Air Force (USAF) in December 2005; the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, which entered service with the USAF in July 2015; the Chengdu J-20, which entered service with the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) in September 2017; and the Sukhoi Su-57, which entered service with the Russian Air Force (VVS) on 25 December 2020. Other national and international projects are in various stages of development.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The emerging generation of advanced fighter aircraft in the first decades of the 21st century have come to be known as the fifth generation. The defining characteristics of such a fifth-generation fighter are not universally agreed and not every fifth-generation type necessarily has them all. Some generation counts include more than five leading up to the emerging new generation.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Whereas previous fourth-generation fighters emphasized maneuverability and close-range dogfighting, typical fifth generation characteristics include:


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: In order to minimize their radar cross-section (RCS), most fifth-generation fighters use chines instead of standard leading edge extensions and lack canards, though the Sukhoi T-50 has engine intake extensions that seem to function somewhat like canards and the Chengdu J-20 designers have chosen the agility enhancements of canards in spite of their poor stealth characteristics. They all have twin canted vertical tails (similar to a V-tail) also to minimize side RCS. Most fifth-generation fighters with supermaneuverability achieve it through thrust vectoring.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: They all have internal weapon bays in order to avoid high RCS weapon pylons, but they all have external hardpoints on their wings for use on non-stealthy missions, such as the external fuel tanks the F-22 carries when deploying to a new theater.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: All fifth-generation fighters have a high percentage of composite materials, in order to reduce RCS and weight.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: All revealed fifth-generation fighters use commercial off-the-shelf main processors to directly control all sensors to form a consolidated view of the battlespace with both onboard and networked sensors, while previous-generation jet fighters used federated systems where each sensor or pod would present its own readings for the pilot to combine in their own mind a view of the battlespace. The F-22A was physically delivered without synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or situation awareness infra-red search and track. It will gain SAR later through software upgrades. However, any flaw in these complex software systems can disable supposedly unrelated aircraft systems, and the complexity of a software-defined aircraft can lead to a software crisis with additional costs and delays. By the end of 2013, the biggest concern with the F-35 program was software, especially the software required for data fusion across the many sensors.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Sukhoi calls their expert system for sensor fusion the artificial intelligence of the Su-57. Flight tests of their integrated modular avionics started in 2017 on a fiber optic networked multicore processor system. The system is not without faults. In December 2020, a malfunction with the computer flight control system caused the first production Su-57 to crash.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: An automatic software response to an overheat condition apparently has contributed to a crash of an F-22. Issues with the avionics also contributed to an F-35A crash in 2020.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The F-35 uses software-defined radio systems, in which common middleware controls field-programmable gate arrays. Col. Arthur Tomassetti has said that the F-35 is a "software intensive airplane and software is easy to upgrade, as opposed to hardware."


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: In order to ease the addition of new software features, the F-35 has adopted a kernel and application separation of security responsibilities.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Steve O'Bryan of Lockheed Martin has said that the F-35 may gain the ability to operate UAVs through a future software upgrade. The USN is already planning to place its Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system under the control of a manned aircraft, to act as a flying missile magazine.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The combination of stealthy airframes, stealthy sensors, and stealthy communications is designed to allow fifth-generation fighters to engage other aircraft before those targets are aware of their presence. Lt. Col. Gene McFalls of the USAF has said that sensor fusion will feed into inventory databases to precisely identify aircraft at a distance.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Sensor fusion and automatic target tracking are projected to give the fifth-generation jet fighter pilot a view of the battlespace superior to that of legacy AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft that may be forced back from the front lines by increasing threats. Therefore, tactical control could be shifted forwards to the pilots in the fighters. Michael Wynne, former Secretary of the United States Air Force, has suggested elimination of the Boeing E-3 Sentry and Northrop Grumman E-8 Joint STARS in favor of more F-35s, simply because so much effort is being made by the Russians and Chinese to target these platforms that are built to commercial airliner standards.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: However, the more powerful sensors, such as AESA radar which is able to operate in multiple modes at the same time, may present too much information for the single pilot in the F-22, F-35 and Su-57 to adequately use. The Sukhoi/HAL FGFA offered a return to the two-seat configuration common in fourth generation strike fighters, but this was rejected over cost concerns.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: There is ongoing research to apply track-before-detect across sensor fusion in the core CPU to allow fifth-generation fighters to engage targets that no single sensor has by itself detected. Probability theory is used to determine "what data to believe, when to believe and how much to believe".


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: These sensors produce too much data for the onboard computers to fully process so sensor fusion is achieved by comparing what is observed against preloaded threat libraries that contain known enemy capabilities for a given region. Items that do not match known threats are not even displayed.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Concerns have been raised by airforce officials regarding the effectiveness of the stealth characteristics over the expected lifespan of an aircraft. All known fifth-generation designs have extensive electronic warfare systems, partly in response to an incident where the limited EW systems on an F-117 may have led to its loss in combat. Stealth is now seen as "part of the overall electronic warfare issue", in that a stealthy platform is easier to hide with the assistance of jamming.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Chinese state media has claimed that their UHF JY-26 radar has tracked an F-22 on deployment to South Korea.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Gilmary M. Hostage III has suggested that fifth-generation jet fighters will operate together in a "combat cloud" along with future unmanned combat aircraft, and Michael Manazir has suggested that this might come as quickly as loading a UCLASS with AMRAAMs to be launched at the command of an F-35.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Technology Demonstrators included the YF-22 – 1990 (2 built), YF-23 – 1990 (2 built), Boeing Bird of Prey – 1996 (1 built), X-36 – 1997 (2 scale models built), X-35 – 2000 (2 built), X-32 – 2001 (1 built).


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Previous-generation radar low observable (LO) aircraft, also referred to as stealth aircraft, such as the B-2 Spirit and F-117 Nighthawk were designed to be bombers or ground attack aircraft, lacking the active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, low probability of intercept (LPI) data networks, aerial performance, and air-to-air weapons necessary to engage other aircraft. In the early 1970s, various American design projects identified stealth, speed, and maneuverability as key characteristics of a next-generation air-to-air combat aircraft. This led to the Request for Information for the Advanced Tactical Fighter project in May 1981, which resulted in the F-22.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The USMC is leveraging the USAF's experience with "fifth-generation air warfare" in the F-22, as they develop their own tactics for the F-35.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: According to Lockheed Martin in 2004, the only fifth-generation jet fighter then in operational service was their own F-22 Raptor. Lockheed Martin uses "fifth-generation fighter" to describe the F-22 and F-35 fighters, with the definition including "advanced stealth", "extreme performance", "information fusion" and "advanced sustainment". For unknown reasons, their definition no longer includes supercruise capability, which has typically been associated with the more advanced modern fighters, but which the F-35 lacks. Lockheed Martin attempted to trademark the term "5th generation fighters" in association with jet aircraft and structural parts thereof, and has a trademark for a logo with the term.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The definition of the term "fifth-generation fighter" from Lockheed Martin has been criticized by companies whose products do not conform to these particular specifications, such as Boeing and Eurofighter, and by other commentators such as Bill Sweetman: "it is misleading to portray the F-22 and F-35 as a linear evolution in fighter design. Rather, they are a closely related pair of outliers, relying on a higher level of stealth as a key element of survivability – as the Lockheed YF-12 and Mikoyan MIG-25, in the 1960s, relied on speed and altitude."


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The United States Navy and Boeing have placed the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet in a "next generation" fighter category along with the F-22 and F-35, as the Super Hornet has a "fifth-generation" AESA radar, modest radar cross-section (RCS) reductions and sensor fusion. A senior USAF pilot has complained about fifth-generation claims for the Super Hornet: "The whole point to fifth generation is the synergy of stealth, fusion and complete situational awareness. The point about fifth-generation aircraft is that they can do their mission anywhere – even in sophisticated integrated air defense [IADS] environments. If you fly into heavy IADS with a great radar and sensor fusion, but no stealth, you will have complete situational awareness of the guy that kills you." Michael "Ponch" Garcia of Raytheon has said that the addition of their AESA radars to the Super Hornet provides "90 percent of your fifth-generation capability at half the cost." And a top Boeing official has called their newest 4.5 generation fighters "stealth killers".


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: By the late 1990s, several Chinese fifth-generation fighter programs, grouped under the program codename J-XX or XXJ, were identified by western intelligence sources. PLAAF officials have confirmed the existence of such a program, which they estimated would enter service between 2017–2019. By late 2010, two prototypes of the Chengdu J-20 had been constructed and were undergoing high-speed taxi trials. The J-20 made its first flight on 11 January 2011. On 26 December 2015, a new J-20 with serial number 2101 was seen leaving its Chengdu Aviation Corporation factory. It is believed to be the first of the low rate initial production (LRIP) aircraft. 2101 conducted its maiden flight on 18 January 2016.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The J-20 officially entered service in September 2017 and the PLAAF began inducting J-20s into combat units in February 2018.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Another stealth fighter design from SAC started to circulate on the internet in September 2011. In June 2012, photos about a possible prototype of F-60 being transferred on highway began to emerge on the internet. This aircraft was named Shenyang FC-31 later, and made its maiden flight on 31 October 2012.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Technology demonstrators included the Mikoyan Project 1.44 – 1998 (1 built) and Su-47 – 1997 (1 built).


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union outlined the need for a next-generation aircraft to replace its fourth-generation jet fighters, the Mikoyan MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27, in front line service. To meet the characteristics for the next-generation aircraft, work was underway on two aircraft projects: the twin-engined delta canard Sukhoi Su-47 with forward-swept wings and the Mikoyan Project 1.44. However, due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and lack of funds, both remained only as technology demonstrators.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: After 2000, the Russian Defence Ministry initiated a new fighter competition known as "PAK FA" (, ) to develop a next-generation fighter for the Russian Air Force, with Sukhoi and MiG as the main competitors. Sukhoi came up with its heavier, two-engine T-50 proposal (now Sukhoi Su-57) while Mikoyan proposed a light, single-engine Mikoyan LMFS design, based on the former MiG-1.44 project. Sukhoi won the competition and in 2002, it was selected to lead the development of Russia's next-generation fighter based on the T-50 design. Later development of the multirole Mikoyan LMFS were continued from MiG funding. However Mikoyan LMFS program was also cancelled and replaced by similar Sukhoi Checkmate program.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Russia's first fifth-generation aircraft, the Sukhoi Su-57, will replace its aging MiG-29s and Su-27s. The Su-57 first flew on 29 January 2010. The first production Su-57 was delivered to the Russian Air Force on 25 December 2020.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: The project began in 2010, and "According to Russian news reports, the MiG-41 will be equipped with stealth technology, reach a speed of Mach 4–4.3, carry anti-satellite missiles, and be able to perform tasks in Arctic and near-space environments."


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Russia unveiled a prototype for the single-engine Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate Light Tactical Aircraft in July 2021 at the biennial MAKS (air show), with maiden flight expected in 2023. The fighter is mainly designed for export and is expected to be less costly than 2-engine competitors.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: India is independently developing a twin-engine fifth-generation supermaneuverable stealth multirole fighter, called the HAL Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA). It is being developed and designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency and will be manufactured by a SPV with initial prototypes produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. As of 2022, the AMCA prototype is under construction, with a first flight of the prototype expected by 2025.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: In early 2018, India pulled out of the parallel project called FGFA, a fifth-generation derivative of the Sukhoi Su-57, which it alleged did not meet requirements for stealth, combat avionics, radars and sensors by that time. The completed FGFA was to include 43 improvements over the Su-57, including stealth, supercruise, advanced sensors, networking and combat avionics.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: TAI TF-X is a Turkish fifth-generation fighter program. In 2011 Türk Havacılık ve Uzay Sanayii AŞ (Turkish Aerospace Industries or TAI) initiated a $20 million concept design phase for a fifth-generation fighter, TAI TF-X. During a State visit of the President of Turkey to Sweden on 13 March 2013, TAI signed an agreement with Sweden's Saab AB to provide design support services to Turkey for the TAI TFX program. TAI has stated that the program will cost $120 billion (with engine development).


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: On 8 January 2015, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu announced that the TFX program will be an entirely indigenous platform with no international support shelving any cooperation with South Korea, Sweden, Brazil or Indonesia. On 13 March 2015 the Turkish Undersecretariat for Defence Industries (SSM) officially issued a Request for Information from Turkish companies which had the capacity "to perform the indigenous design, development and production activities of the first Turkish Fighter Aircraft to meet Turkish Armed Forces' next generation fighter requirements", signaling the official start of the program.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: TAI CEO Temel Kotil stated that the TF-X will be unveilied by March 23, 2023 and make its first flight by 2025. The fighter jet is expected to enter service in 2029.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Japan developed a prototype of a stealth jet fighter called the Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin, previously referred to as the ATD-X. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan, seeking to replace its aging fleet of fighter aircraft, began making overtures to the United States on the topic of purchasing F-22 fighters for their own forces. However the U.S. Congress had banned the exporting of the aircraft in order to safeguard secrets of the aircraft's technology such as its extensive use of stealth; this rejection necessitated Japan's development of its own modern fighter, to be equipped with stealth features and other advanced systems.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: A mock-up of the X-2 Shinshin was constructed and used to study the radar cross section in France in 2009. The first prototype rolled out in July 2014 and the aircraft made its first flight on 22 April 2016. By July 2018, Japan had gleaned sufficient information, and decided that it would need to bring on international partners to complete this project. Several companies have responded.


title: Fifth-generation fighter

text: Japan has signed a contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to develop a sixth-generation fighter called Mitsubishi F-X.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong (born 25 December 1971), known professionally as Dido ( ), is an English singer and songwriter. She attained international success with her debut album "No Angel" (1999). Hit singles from the album include "Here with Me" and "Thank You". It sold over 21 million copies worldwide, and won her several awards, including two Brit Awards; for Best British Album and Best British Female, as well as the MTV Europe Music Award for Best New Act. The first verse of "Thank You" is sampled in "Stan", a collaboration with American rapper Eminem. Her next album, "Life for Rent" (2003), continued her success with the hit singles "White Flag" and "Life for Rent". In 2004, Dido performed with other British and Irish artists in the Band Aid 20 version of the charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?".


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido's first two albums are among the best-selling albums in UK chart history, and both are in the top 10 best-selling albums of the 2000s in the UK. Her third studio album, "Safe Trip Home" (2008), received critical acclaim but failed to duplicate the commercial success of her previous efforts. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for "If I Rise". Dido was ranked No. 98 on the "Billboard" chart of the top "Billboard" 200 artists of the 2000s (2000–2009) based on the success of her albums in the first decade of the 21st century.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido made a comeback in 2013, releasing her fourth studio album, "Girl Who Got Away", which reached the top 5 in the UK. Having taken time out of the music industry to raise her son, she reappeared on stage at the 2013 Reading and Leeds festival where she reunited with Eminem. Dido released her fifth studio album, "Still on My Mind," on 8 March 2019 and embarked on her first tour in 15 years in support of the new album.


title: Dido (singer)

text: In May 2019, Dido received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido was born Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, at St. Mary Abbot's Hospital in Kensington, on Christmas Day in 1971. As she was born on Christmas Day, she also celebrates an "official birthday" on 25 June, following the example of Paddington Bear. Her mother, Clare (née Collins), is a poet of French ancestry, and her father, William O'Malley Armstrong (1938–2006), was an Irish publisher and former managing director of Sidgwick & Jackson. Her elder brother, Rowland Constantine O'Malley Armstrong, is better known as record producer Rollo, part of the British electronica trio Faithless.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Despite their birth names, the pair were known from childhood by the names Dido and Rollo. Dido considers this as her real name, not simply a stage name or nickname. As a child, she had to deal with her birth name's ambiguous and unusual nature, which led to her being bullied and even to her pretending to have an ordinary name. In a 2001 interview, she said "To be called one thing and christened another is actually very confusing and annoying. It's one of the most irritating things that my parents did to me. ... Florian is a German man's name. That's just mean. To give your child a whole lot of odd names. They were all so embarrassing. ... I thought it was cruel to call me Dido and then expect me to just deal with it." The name "Dido" derives from the legendary Queen of Carthage.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido was educated at Thornhill Primary School in Islington, Dallington School, City of London Girls' and Westminster School, where she was taught by the contemporary musician and Head of Academic Music, Sinan Savaskan. After she stole a recorder from school at the age of five, her parents enrolled her at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. By the time she reached her teens, she had learned to play the piano, recorder, and the violin. She later studied law at Birkbeck, University of London, while working as a literary agent. She never completed the degree, deciding instead to take up music full-time.


title: Dido (singer)

text: In 1995, Dido began recording 10 demo tracks which were put together on a collection entitled "Odds & Ends" and sent out by Nettwerk management. Nettwerk had signed her after she was brought to their attention by her collaborations with Faithless, the UK dance act spearheaded by her brother, Rollo Armstrong (Dido co-wrote and provided vocals for album tracks, such as "Flowerstand Man" and "Hem of His Garment"). The collection was released by Nettwerk on CD-R acetate in 1995 and featured a mixture of finished productions and demo versions which she later considered for release on her 1999 debut album, "No Angel". "Odds & Ends" brought her to the attention of A&R Peter Edge at Arista Records, who signed her in the US in late 1996, and negotiated a co-sign deal with her brother's independent record label, Cheeky Records. Of the tracks included on "Odds & Ends", "Take My Hand" was included on all editions of "No Angel" as a bonus track; "Sweet Eyed Baby" was remixed and renamed to "Don't Think of Me", while "Worthless" and "Me" were released exclusively on the Japanese edition. Peter Leak became Dido's manager during the recording of "No Angel" after Edge played some of the in-progress recordings and been "blown away" by them.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Cheeky Records, to which Dido was signed, was sold to BMG records in 1999. This delayed the release of the album "No Angel" in the United Kingdom, but also allowed her to concentrate on promoting "No Angel" in the United States, including a slot on Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair tour. Through touring, both before and after the album was available, Dido's music began to receive more exposure. The first official single chosen by Dido and her label, "Here with Me", initially struggled to make an impact on radio, but while the label were considering switching to an alternative track, the song made a breakthrough as a result of its use in television programme "Roswell". The song was used as the theme music of the show, but it was actually when it was played in its entirety during the season finale that it really made an impact with audiences.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Manager Peter Leak told HitQuarters that sales jumped from 2,000 to 9,000 units during the week of the show's transmission. Arguably it was this, as well as the airplay on MTV throughout Europe of the single's video, which brought her mass attention. Subsequently, the song was used in the British romantic comedy "Love Actually". In 1998, the music producer for the film "Sliding Doors" picked her track "Thank You" for the soundtrack. "No Angel" was released in 1999, and Dido toured extensively to promote the record.


title: Dido (singer)

text: American rapper Eminem helped introduce Dido to a US audience in 2000 when he received permission from Dido herself to sample the first verse of "Thank You" in his hit single "Stan". Dido also appeared in the music video as Stan's pregnant girlfriend. She did not want to do the video at first, as she was uncomfortable with the scene in the video where she had to be tied up and have her mouth covered with duct tape, but later agreed to it and got along well with Eminem and the crew on set. In North America, the video usually aired with the trunk scene censored. Interest soared in her debut album, leading it to hit charts in Europe on import sales alone, charting in the top five on the UK Albums Chart before its official UK re-release.


title: Dido (singer)

text: "No Angel" went on to become the top-selling album of 2001 worldwide, debuting at, and returning to, number one in the official UK Albums Chart many times throughout the year. It spawned two top ten hit singles, "Here with Me" and "Thank You", a further top twenty hit, "Hunter" and a fourth and final single release "All You Want" which reached the top 25. It was certified platinum in over thirty-five countries, and is estimated to have sold over 21 million copies worldwide.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido's widely emulated hairstyle at this time became known as the "Dido flip". Her sold-out worldwide tour featured hip-hop artist Pete Miser as her live band's DJ. "No Angel" claimed No. 97 according to the Decade-end Album Chart by "Billboard".


title: Dido (singer)

text: "Life for Rent" was released in 2003. Preceded by the hit single "White Flag", the album sold over 152,000 copies in the first day alone in the UK, and went on to sell over 400,000 in the first week. Three further singles—"Life for Rent", "Don't Leave Home" and "Sand in My Shoes"—were lifted from the album, with Dido embarking on a worldwide tour in support of the album (a DVD of footage from the tour was released in 2005 entitled "Live at Brixton Academy").


title: Dido (singer)

text: Following her sold-out world tour of 2004, Dido was asked to perform at three of the Live 8 concerts on 2 July 2005—performing in London, then at the Eden Project in Cornwall, before flying over to Paris, performing both solo ("White Flag") and duetting with Youssou N'Dour ("Thank You" and "Seven Seconds").


title: Dido (singer)

text: Also in 2005, Dido provided vocals for her brother's side project Dusted on the album "Safe from Harm". She sings on the tracks: "Time Takes Time", "Hurt U" and "Winter" and she co-wrote three tracks on the album: "Always Remember to Respect & Honour Your Mother, Part 1", "The Biggest Fool in the World" and "Winter".


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido's third album, "Safe Trip Home", was released in November 2008. The album, which Dido began work on in October 2005, was produced by Jon Brion and Dido herself and features contributions from Brian Eno, Questlove, Mick Fleetwood, Rollo Armstrong, and Matt Chamberlain. Recording sessions were held at London's Abbey Road and at Jon Brion's home studio in Los Angeles. During production of the album, Dido attended evening classes in music and English at the University of California, Los Angeles. The first single from the album, "Don't Believe in Love", was released in October 2008, and a track titled "Look No Further" was made available to download from her official website for a limited time. The album failed to sell as well as "No Angel" or "Life for Rent", and Dido opted not to tour in support of the album due to her difficulties with performing the material that was written about the death of her father. It was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.


title: Dido (singer)

text: In December 2008, Dido's "Safe Trip Home" song "Let's Do the Things We Normally Do", was criticised by Gregory Campbell, MP for East Londonderry and Minister for Sports, Arts and Leisure for Northern Ireland, for referencing lyrics from a song, "The Men Behind the Wire", which was written in the aftermath of the introduction of detention without trial for persons accused of being members of paramilitary groups. Campbell described "The Men Behind the Wire" as "written about people who were murderers, arsonists and terrorists", and suggested "she [Dido] should clarify her position so that her fans and the wider public knows where she stands on these things". The album's artwork features a photograph of astronaut Bruce McCandless II during a spacewalk, as part of space shuttle mission STS-41-B; McCandless sued Dido, Sony Music Entertainment, and Getty Images Inc for unauthorised use of this photo in September 2010. The case was settled under undisclosed terms on 14 January 2011.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Shortly after the release of "Safe Trip Home", Dido returned to the studio to start recording new material for inclusion on her fourth studio album. In July 2009, Dido said that the album would have an electronic approach, in an attempt to take it in a totally different direction to her previous albums. In September 2010, Dido released the single "Everything to Lose" via digital download, following its appearance on the soundtrack of the film "Sex and the City 2" (released in May 2010).


title: Dido (singer)

text: In January 2011, Dido released "If I Rise", a collaboration with producer A.R. Rahman, for which an official music video was released. "If I Rise" was written for "127 Hours", a thriller film directed by Danny Boyle. The soundtrack features a mix of electric guitars with orchestral arrangements and sound loops, and "If I Rise" is featured in the climax of the film. The song was nominated for Satellite Award, Houston Film Critics Society Awards and Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award, as well as the 83rd Academy Award for Original Song. It won the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Song.


title: Dido (singer)

text: Dido's fourth album, "Girl Who Got Away", was released by Sony Music Entertainment in March 2013. "No Freedom" was released as the album's lead single in January 2013. The album was recorded in London and California and features production from Rollo Armstrong, Sister Bliss, Lester Mendez, A. R. Rahman, Rick Nowels, Greg Kurstin, Brian Eno, and Jeff Bhasker. Dido appeared on the second series of televised singing competition "The Voice UK" in May 2013, serving as an advisor to coach Danny O'Donoghue during the show's battle rounds.