Articles needing additional references from December 2008

John William Powell (July 3, 1919 – December 15, 2008) was a journalist and small business proprietor who edited the China Weekly Review, an English-language journal first published by his father, John B. Powell in Shanghai.
John W. Powell was tried for sedition in 1959 after publishing an article that reported on allegations made by Mainland Chinese officials that the United States and Japan were carrying out germ warfare in the Korean War. In 1956, the Eisenhower Administration's Department of Justice pressed sedition charges against Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julian Schuman, after federal prosecutors secured grand jury indictments against them for publishing allegations of bacteriological warfare. However, the prosecutors failed to get any convictions. The defendants invoked their Constitutional right to refuse to reveal self-incriminating evidence, and U.S. Department of Defense officials also refused to provide any incriminating archives or witnesses. This information was not revealed until decades later as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests.
All three of the defendants were acquitted of all charges over the next six years, after a Federal judge dismissed the core aspects of the case against them in 1959, due to obviously insufficient evidence against them.

José Maria Ferreira de Castro (24 May 1898 – 29 June 1974) was a Portuguese writer and journalist. Ferreira de Castro had a long career in journalism, and considered his fiction writing to be an extension of his documentary reporting; in that regard, he is considered to be one of the fathers of contemporary Portuguese social-realist (or neorealist) fiction, a forerunner of socially-committed literature about the rural and working classes later further established by Alves Redol, and more than once a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Ferreira de Castro was part of the group of noted public intellectuals that were oppositionists to the authoritarian Estado Novo regime; despite his participation in almost every pacific action directed against the regime, his national and international recognition as an acclaimed novelist meant he was never a victim of excessively violent repression, such as prison, torture or loss of political rights.

Jean Vilar (25 March 1912– 28 May 1971) was a French actor and theatre director.