IN: Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko (Russian: Aleksandr Val'terovich Litvinenko, IPA: [aljI'ksandr 'valtir@vjItc ljItvjI'njenk@]; 30 August 1962 (Or 4 December 1962 by father's account - 23 November 2006) was a British naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian FSB secret service who specialised in tackling organised crime. According to US diplomats, Litvinenko coined the phrase Mafia state. In November 1998, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers publicly accused their superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill. On 3 November, he was admitted to Barnet General Hospital in London. He was then moved to University College Hospital for intensive care. His illness was later attributed to poisoning with radionuclide polonium-210 after the Health Protection Agency found significant amounts of the rare and highly toxic element in his body. In interviews, Litvinenko stated that he met with two former KGB agents early on the day he fell ill - Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy. Though both denied any wrongdoing, a leaked US diplomatic cable revealed that Kovtun had left polonium traces in the house and car he had used in Hamburg. The men also introduced Litvinenko to a tall, thin man of central Asian appearance called 'Vladislav Sokolenko' who Lugovoy said was a business partner. Lugovoy is also a former bodyguard of Russian ex-Acting Prime minister Yegor Gaidar (who also suffered from a mysterious illness in November 2006). Later, Litvinenko had lunch at Itsu, a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly in London, with an Italian acquaintance and nuclear waste expert, Mario Scaramella, to whom he made the allegations regarding Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi. Scaramella, attached to the Mitrokhin Commission investigating KGB penetration of Italian politics, claimed to have information on the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, 48, a journalist who was killed at her Moscow apartment building in October 2006. Marina Litvinenko, his widow, accused Moscow of orchestrating the murder. Though she believes the order did not come from Putin himself, she does believe it was done at the behest of the authorities, and announced that she will refuse to provide evidence to any Russian investigation out of fear that it would be misused or misrepresented. On a court hearing in London in 2015, a Scotland Yard lawyer concluded that "the evidence suggests that the only credible explanation is in one way or another the Russian state is involved in Litvinenko's murder".
QUESTION: when was he poisoned?
IN: Mario Lanza (born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza; January 31, 1921 - October 7, 1959) was an American tenor of Italian ancestry, and an actor and Hollywood film star of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Lanza began studying to be a professional singer at the age of 16. After appearing at the Hollywood Bowl in 1947, Lanza signed a seven-year film contract with Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who saw his performance and was impressed by his singing.

Lanza was the first RCA Victor Red Seal artist to win a gold disc and the first artist to sell 2 1/2 million albums Lanza was referred to by some sources as the "new Caruso" after his "instant success" in Hollywood films, while MGM hoped he would become the movie studio's "singing Clark Gable" for his good looks and powerful voice. In 1994, outstanding tenor Jose Carreras paid tribute to Lanza during a worldwide concert tour, saying of him, "If I'm an opera singer, it's thanks to Mario Lanza." His equally outstanding colleague Placido Domingo echoed these comments in a 2009 CBS interview with, "Lanza's passion and the way his voice sounds are what made me sing opera. I actually owe my love for opera ... to a kid from Philadelphia." Even today "the magnitude of his contribution to popular music is still hotly debated," and because he appeared on the operatic stage only twice, many critics feel that he needed to have had more "operatic quality time" in major theaters before he could be considered a star of that art form. His films, especially The Great Caruso, influenced numerous future opera stars, including Joseph Calleja, Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. According to opera historian Clyde McCants, "Of all the Hollywood singers who performed operatic music ... the one who made the greatest impact was Mario Lanza." Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper concluded that "there had never been anyone like Mario, and I doubt whether we shall ever see his like again".
QUESTION: What have people said about him?
IN: John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney; January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

London was vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism, both because he was such a conspicuous, prolific, and successful writer and because of his methods of working. He wrote in a letter to Elwyn Hoffman, "expression, you see--with me--is far easier than invention." He purchased plots and novels from the young Sinclair Lewis and used incidents from newspaper clippings as writing material. In July 1901, two pieces of fiction appeared within the same month: London's "Moon-Face", in the San Francisco Argonaut, and Frank Norris' "The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock", in Century Magazine. Newspapers showed the similarities between the stories, which London said were "quite different in manner of treatment, [but] patently the same in foundation and motive." London explained both writers based their stories on the same newspaper account. A year later, it was discovered that Charles Forrest McLean had published a fictional story also based on the same incident. Egerton Ryerson Young claimed The Call of the Wild (1903) was taken from Young's book My Dogs in the Northland (1902). London acknowledged using it as a source and claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him. In 1906, the New York World published "deadly parallel" columns showing eighteen passages from London's short story "Love of Life" side by side with similar passages from a nonfiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, titled "Lost in the Land of the Midnight Sun". London noted the World did not accuse him of "plagiarism", but only of "identity of time and situation", to which he defiantly "pled guilty". The most serious charge of plagiarism was based on London's "The Bishop's Vision", Chapter 7 of his novel The Iron Heel (1908). The chapter is nearly identical to an ironic essay that Frank Harris published in 1901, titled "The Bishop of London and Public Morality". Harris was incensed and suggested he should receive 1/60th of the royalties from The Iron Heel, the disputed material constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. London insisted he had clipped a reprint of the article, which had appeared in an American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by the Bishop of London.
QUESTION:
What happened to McLean?