Question: Thomas was born in the rural community of Cayce, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper. He moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee, around 1920. His mother was a "church woman". Thomas made his debut as a performer at the age of six, playing a frog in a school theatrical production.

Thomas continued to record and toured internationally, billing himself as "The World's Oldest Teenager" and describing himself as "the funkiest man alive". He "drew upon his vaudeville background to put [his songs] over on stage with fancy footwork that displayed remarkable agility for a man well into his fifties", and usually performed "while clothed in a wardrobe of hot pants, boots and capes, all in wild colors." He continued as a DJ at WDIA until 1974, and worked for a period at WLOK before returning to WDIA in the mid 1980s to co-host a blues show. He appeared regularly on television and recorded albums for various labels. Thomas performed regularly at the Porretta Soul Festival in Italy; the outdoor amphitheater in which he performed was later renamed Rufus Thomas Park. He played an important part in the Stax reunion of 1988, and appeared in Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train, Robert Altman's 1999 film Cookie's Fortune, and D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Only the Strong Survive. Thomas released an album of straight-ahead blues, That Woman is Poison!, with Alligator Records in 1990, featuring saxophonist Noble "Thin Man" Watts. In 1996, he and William Bell headlined at the Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1997, he released an album, Rufus Live!, on Ecko Records. In 1998, he hosted two New Year's Eve shows on Beale Street. In 1997, to commemorate his 80th birthday, the City of Memphis renamed a road off Beale Street, close to the old Palace Theater, as Rufus Thomas Boulevard. He received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1992, and a lifetime achievement award from ASCAP in 1997. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: Is he still alive
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Answer:

Question: John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary film maker mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. Pilger has been a strong critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over fifty documentaries since then.

William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
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Answer: William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy:

Question: Curly Howard was born Jerome Lester Horwitz in the Bensonhurst section of the Brooklyn borough of New York City, on October 22, 1903. Of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, he was the youngest of the five sons of Jennie (Gorovitz) and Solomon Horwitz. Because he was the youngest, his brothers called him "Babe" to tease him. The name "Babe" stuck with him all his life, although when his elder brother Shemp Howard married Gertrude Frank, who was also nicknamed "Babe", the brothers called him "Curly" to avoid confusion.

By 1944, Howard's energy began to wane. Films like Idle Roomers (1944) and Booby Dupes (1945) present a Curly whose voice was deeper and his actions slower. It is believed that he suffered the first of many strokes between the filming of Idiots Deluxe (October 1944) and If a Body Meets a Body (March 1945). After the filming of the feature length Rockin' in the Rockies (December 1944), he finally checked himself (at Moe Howard's insistence) into Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California, on January 23, 1945, and was diagnosed with extreme hypertension, a retinal hemorrhage, and obesity. His ill health forced him to rest, leading to only five shorts being released in 1945 (the normal output was six to eight per year). The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons by Michael Fleming, states that Moe Howard pleaded with Harry Cohn to allow his younger brother some time off upon discharge to regain his strength, but Cohn would not halt the production of his profitable Stooge shorts and flatly refused his request. Other sources state the Stooges had five months off between August 1945 and January 1946. They used that time to book themselves a feature film at Monogram, and then leave on a 2-month live performance commitment in New York City working shows 7 days per week. During that NYC appearance, Howard met and married his 3rd wife Marion Buxbaum, a bad relationship that further deteriorated his health and morale. Returning to L.A. in late November 1945, Howard was a shell of his former self. With two months rest, the team's 1946 schedule at Columbia commenced in late January, but involved only 24 days work during February - early May. In spite of 8 weeks' time off in that same period, Howard's condition continued to deteriorate. By early 1946, Howard's voice had become even more coarse than before, and it was increasingly difficult for him to remember even the simplest dialogue. He had lost a considerable amount of weight, and lines had creased his face.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: When did he have to stop acting?
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Answer:
By early 1946, Howard's voice had become even more coarse than before, and it was increasingly difficult for him to remember even the simplest dialogue.