Petra Karin Kelly (29 November 1947 – c. 1 October 1992) was a German Green politician and ecofeminist activist. She was a founding member of the German Green Party, the first Green party to rise to prominence both nationally in Germany and worldwide. In 1982, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights."
Charles-Valentin Alkan (French: [ʃaʁl valɑ̃tɛ̃ alkɑ̃]; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys (Op. 39). The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 4–7) and Concerto for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 8–10), which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity. Alkan emerged from self-imposed retirement in the 1870s to give a series of recitals that were attended by a new generation of French musicians.
Alkan's attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He was the first composer to incorporate Jewish melodies in art music. Fluent in Hebrew and Greek, he devoted much time to a complete new translation of the Bible into French. This work, like many of his musical compositions, is now lost. Alkan never married, but his presumed son Élie-Miriam Delaborde was, like Alkan, a virtuoso performer on both the piano and the pedal piano, and edited a number of the elder composer's works.
Following his death (which according to persistent but unfounded legend was caused by a falling bookcase), Alkan's music became neglected, supported by only a few musicians including Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri and Kaikhosru Sorabji. From the late 1960s onwards, led by Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith, many pianists have recorded his music and brought it back into the repertoire.
Edward Higgins White II (November 14, 1930 – January 27, 1967) was an American aeronautical engineer, United States Air Force officer, test pilot, and NASA astronaut. He was a member of the crews of Gemini 4 and Apollo 1.
After graduating from West Point in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree, White was sent to flight training, and assigned to the 22nd Fighter Day Squadron at Bitburg Air Base, West Germany, where he flew the F-86 Sabre and F-100 Super Sabre fighters. In 1958, he enrolled in the University of Michigan to study aeronautical engineering, receiving his Master of Science degree in 1959. White then received test pilot training at Edwards Air Force Base, California, before being assigned as a test pilot for the Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.
White was selected as one of the second group of astronauts, the so-called "Next Nine", who were chosen to take part in the Gemini and Apollo missions. He was assigned as pilot of Gemini 4 alongside command pilot James McDivitt. On June 3, 1965, White became the first American to walk in space. He was then assigned as senior pilot of the first crewed Apollo mission, Apollo 1. White died on January 27, 1967, alongside astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee in a fire during pre-launch testing for Apollo 1 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal for his flight in Gemini 4 and was then awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously.
Francis Richard Scobee (May 19, 1939 – January 28, 1986) was an American pilot, engineer, and astronaut. He was killed while commanding the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, which suffered catastrophic booster failure during launch of the STS-51-L mission.Scobee held a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering, graduating from the University of Arizona in 1965. He was a reciprocating engine mechanic for the United States Air Force and served as a combat aviator in the Vietnam War.
Selected for NASA Astronaut Corps in January 1978, Scobee completed his training in August 1979. While awaiting his first orbital spaceflight mission, Scobee served as an instructor pilot for the Shuttle's 747 carrier aircraft. In April 1984, he piloted Challenger mission STS-41-C, which successfully deployed one satellite and repaired another.
Georg Haentzschel ( 23 December 1907, Berlin – 12 April 1992, Cologne) was a German pianist, broadcaster, composer and arranger.
Haentzschel studied at the Stern Conservatoire in Berlin and made a career which eventually left him as the last remaining representative composer from what he considered the golden age of German film music. He worked equally happily as a jazz pianist, regularly collaborating with the similarly gifted Peter Igelhoff. He directed the Deutsche Tanz-und-Unterhaltungsorchester (German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra). After the war, he moved to West Germany and worked in Cologne.
Haentzschel's most famous film score, for the wartime extravaganza Münchhausen (1943) recalls his mentor Theo Mackeben. The score is flooded with romantic melody and effective scoring. Representative work may be heard in many other film scores, such as Via Mala (released 1948), Annelie (1941) and Robinson soll nicht sterben.
He was killed during the 1992 Roermond Earthquake.
Raymond Martinez Fernandez (December 17, 1914 – March 8, 1951) and Martha Jule Beck (May 6, 1920 – March 8, 1951) were an American serial killer couple. They were convicted of one murder, are known to have committed two more, and were suspected of having killed up to twenty victims during a spree between 1947 and 1949.
After their arrest and trial for serial murder in 1949, Fernandez and Beck became known as the Lonely Hearts Killers for meeting their unsuspecting victims through personal ads, posted in newspaper lonely hearts columns. A number of films and television shows are based on this case.
Carroll Edward "Eddie" Cole (May 9, 1938 – December 6, 1985) was an American serial killer who was executed in Nevada in 1985 for killing two women by strangulation. He was also convicted of murdering three other women in Texas and is believed to have murdered up to thirty other people between 1947 and 1980.
Hans Bernd von Haeften (18 December 1905 – 15 August 1944) was a German jurist during the Nazi era. A member of the German Resistance against Adolf Hitler, he was arrested and executed in the aftermath of the failed 20 July plot.
Johannes "Hans" Georg Klamroth (12 October 1898, Halberstadt – 26 August 1944) was, by his knowledge of the plans through distant relatives and his son-in-law Lieutenant-Colonel Bernhard Klamroth, involved in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.After the bombing at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia on 20 July 1944 failed to kill Hitler, Klamroth was arrested and, after a show trial at the Volksgerichtshof on 15 August, sentenced to death for keeping his knowledge of the plot to himself. He was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on 26 August. Reportedly, he was stripped nude from the waist down several hours after his hanging.The Halberstadt-born businessman was originally a follower of National Socialism and an NSDAP and SS member; he also served as a major in the reserve as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht. His daughter, television journalist Wibke Bruhns, published her father's biography in 2004, using letters between him and his father, as well as family pictures to contribute to his story. The book, Meines Vaters Land ("My Father's Land"), spawned much discussion. It was translated into English in 2007 and published in 2008 as My Father's Country.
