The Škoda Octavia is a car produced by Škoda Auto in three generations since 1996. The first generation arrived in 1996 and launched in the UK in 1998 with a facelift in 2000. The second generation was launched in 2004 with a facelift in early 2009 but the first generation still continues until 2010. It entered its third generation in 2013 with a facelift in early 2017, it received some criticism for being a bit too big for some buyers. The fourth generation launched in June 2020.
Volkswagen Vento
Volkswagen Vento was a car made by Volkswagen from 1992 through 1998. It is the European version of the Third Generation Volkswagen Jetta.
Akmal Shaikh
Akmal Shaikh (5 April 1956 – 29 December 2009) was a British citizen, originally from Pakistan, who was executed in Urumqi, China, by lethal injection. Shaikh was the first EU national to be executed in China in 50 years. The father of five smuggled heroin to China in a suitcase on a plane. China defended its decision to put Shaikh to death and stated it had acted according to Chinese law.
John Coltrane
John William "Trane" Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Coltrane played the bebop and hard bop styles of jazz early in his career, and helped start the use of modes in jazz and later was a very important part of free jazz. He made about fifty recordings as a bandleader, and appeared on many other albums, for example with trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. As his career progressed, Coltrane's music became more spiritual. he died of liver cancer. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane, and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist.
He influenced many musicians, and is one of the most important tenor saxophonists in jazz history. He got many awards, including Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2007 (many years after his death) for his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz."
Fela Kuti
Fela Anikulapo Kuti (15 October 1938 – 2 August 1997), or just Fela, was a Nigerian musician and composer who was very important in a genre called afrobeat. He played the saxophone, guitar, drums, keyboards and trumpet, and he sang. He was also a human rights activist. The American singer James Brown said that Kuti was one of the originators (starters) of the funk genre.
Kuti died in 1997 of Kaposi's sarcoma, an illness caused by AIDS. In 2008 a musical production called "Fela!" was created, about Kuti's life and career.
Requiem for a Dream
Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 American psychological drama movie. It was directed by Darren Aronofsky. It stars Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans. The movie is about people with different drug addictions in Brooklyn, New York City.
Home Alone 3
Home Alone 3 was the third movie in the "Home Alone" movie series. It is an American criminal comedy movie. Macaulay Culkin, who was in the last two movies, as Kevin McCallister, was too old for this movie. The movie instead features a different household and villains. The director was Raja Gosnell, who was the editor of both original movies and the star actor was Alex D. Linz as Alex D. Pruitt. John Hughes returns as the producer. It was released on December 12, 1997 by 20th Century Fox. The movie grossed $79,082,515 worldwide.
In this movie, Alex is sick at home with the chickenpox. He recovers and must defend his home from four burglars.
A made-for-television sequel, "Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House", followed in 2002 and "" followed in 2012.
Stripes (movie)
Stripes is a 1981 American comedy movie starring actor Bill Murray. His character is in the military.
Justin.tv
JustinTv or JTV was a free account broadcasting website. It was founded by Justin Kan in Los Angeles, California. A spin-off based on JTV called Twitch was created in June 2011.
Harvey Milk
Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. He did not focus on homosexuality or gay activism at first, but did later on in his career. Milk moved from New York City to live in San Francisco in 1972. This was a time when lots of gay men moved to live in the Castro District of San Francisco. Milk became a city supervisor in 1977.
Milk served 11 months in office and helped gay rights in the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated (murdered) by Dan White in San Francisco. White was another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back.
Milk became an icon in San Francisco and "a martyr for gay rights", according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak.
In 2002, Milk was called "the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States". Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us." Milk was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama on August 12, 2009.
Popular quotes include "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door", "The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!".
John Blow
John Blow (born Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, baptised 23 February 1649; died Westminster, London, 1 October 1708) was an English composer and organist. He had a great deal of influence on English music. His best pupil was Henry Purcell who was the greatest English composer of his time.
Blow was born in Newark-on-Trent. As a boy he sang in the choir the Chapel Royal (the king’s church choir). He was still very young when he started composing anthems. One of these anthems, known as the “Club Anthem” was written by Blow together with three other choirboys: Pelham Humfrey, Michael Wise and William Turner, all of whom were to become well-known composers when they grew up. The diarist Samuel Pepys heard him sing once, but Blow’s voice was breaking by then, and Pepys wrote in his diary that he made an “unpleasant sound”.
In 1668 he became organist of Westminster Abbey. In 1674 he was made a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. When Pelham Humfrey died, Blow took over two of his jobs. He was in charge of a small choir at the king’s court (he was called “composer-in-ordinary”). He also became Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. He stayed in that job for the rest of his life. Many of the boy choristers he taught later became great composers. They include William Croft, Jeremiah Clark and Daniel Purcell. Henry Purcell’s voice had already broken by this time, and he became an apprentice to Blow.
In September 1673 he married Elizabeth Braddock. Ten years later she died when giving birth to a child.
In 1676 Blow became one of three organists at Westminster Abbey. In 1677 he was given the title of “Doctor of Music”. In 1680 he seems to have resigned from his job as organist at Westminster Abbey so that his young pupil Henry Purcell could take his place. By 1685 he was one of the private musicians of James II. He composed a long anthem "God spake sometime in visions" for King James’s coronation.
In 1687 he became choirmaster at St Paul's Cathedral. The choir was just being reformed after the rebuilding of the cathedral following the Great Fire of London. Michael Wise had been appointed as choirmaster, but then he died, so Blow was given the job. In 1695 he became organist of St Margaret's, Westminster, and he also took his old job at Westminster Abbey again when Henry Purcell died.