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a6431e7b463ccded1cc001433e3c5773 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathy-Acker | Kathy Acker | Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker, (born April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S.—died Nov. 30, 1997, Tijuana, Mex.), American novelist whose writing style and subject matter reflect the so-called punk sensibility that emerged in the 1970s.
Acker studied classics at Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego. Her early employment ranged from clerical work to performing in pornographic films. In 1972 she began publishing willfully crude, disjointed prose that drew heavily from her personal experience and constituted a literary analog to contemporary developments in music, fashion, and the visual arts. From the outset, Acker blatantly lifted material from other writers, manipulating it for her own often unsettling purposes. In the early novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973), this process of appropriation is central to the narrator’s quest for identity. The book’s themes of alienation and objectified sexuality recur in such later novels as Great Expectations (1982), Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Don Quixote (1986), and Empire of the Senseless (1988). In 1991 a collection of some of Acker’s early works were published under the title Hannibal Lecter, My Father. This was followed by My Mother: Demonology (1993), which consists of seven love stories. Her 1996 novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was adapted for the stage by the seminal punk band the Mekons. The band and Acker released a CD under the same title.
Her works elicited frequent comparison with those of William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet, and Acker herself cited the influence of the French nouveau roman, or antinovel.
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cc8fc4ec00ae6d3887bc5fcd5e8a93ef | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathy-Griffin | Kathy Griffin | Kathy Griffin
Kathy Griffin, in full Kathleen Mary Griffin, (born November 4, 1960, Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.), American comedian and actress known for her lacerating observations about celebrity culture.
Griffin was the youngest of five children born to a stereo store manager and a hospital administrator. Growing up in Chicago’s suburbs, she evidenced an early desire for the spotlight, appearing in school productions and, eventually, a commercial. At age 18 she moved with her retired parents to Los Angeles, hoping to launch a show business career. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and took classes with the Groundlings, an improvisational sketch comedy troupe. She became part of the Groundlings’ regular cast in 1985. Friends soon coaxed her into trying stand-up comedy.
After struggling with the structured punch-line format of stand-up at the time, Griffin emerged as one of the most prominent voices in a nascent alternative comedy scene that eschewed traditional one-liners in favour of a free-form confessional style. In the early 1990s she began appearing in UnCabaret, a comedy show created to highlight humour that did not traffic in misogyny, homophobia, and racism. In 1992 Griffin established Hot Cup O’ Talk with friends Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo. The weekly comedy night at the Groundlings’ theatre featured a rotating cast who shared amusing experiences and traded entertainment-industry war stories. Griffin also guest starred on television shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and ER before landing the role of Vicki, the sardonic sidekick to Brooke Shields’s ingenue on the comedy series Suddenly Susan (1996–2000). Her profile was further raised with an appearance on the HBO Comedy Half-Hour in 1996 and, two years later, in a stand-alone comedy special on HBO, Hot Cup of Talk.
Griffin made several forays into reality television, notably Kathy’s So-Called Reality (2001), an MTV series in which she commented on reality television moments. Her provocative remarks led to frequent talk-show appearances and television hosting duties as well. Some, however, found her unfiltered style offensive. In 2005 Griffin was fired from her position as a red-carpet commentator by the E! Entertainment Television channel after jokingly telling performers arriving at the Golden Globe Award ceremony that a prominent child star had entered drug rehabilitation. That year Griffin debuted My Life on the D-List, a tongue-in-cheek reality series that documented her life at the fringes of Hollywood. The series, which aired until 2010, earned two Emmy Awards (2007, 2008) for outstanding reality program. My Life on the D-List was hosted on the Bravo network, which also aired many of Griffin’s profanity-laden stand-up specials.
Her blistering critiques of celebrity behaviour and her wryly confiding anecdotes about her ascent to fame earned her a dedicated following among women and gay men. Her recorded specials included Kathy Griffin…Is Not Nicole Kidman (2005), Kathy Griffin: Everybody Can Suck It (2007), Kathy Griffin: She’ll Cut a Bitch (2009), Kathy Griffin: Gurrl Down (2011), Kathy Griffin: Calm Down Gurrl (2013)—the recording of which earned a 2014 Grammy Award for best comedy album—and Kathy Griffin: Record Breaker (2013). In 2013 she attained the Guinness World Records title for most televised stand-up specials with the premiere of her 20th show.
In 2007 Griffin began hosting the New Year’s Eve broadcast on CNN with journalist Anderson Cooper. She later hosted the panel chat show Kathy (2012–13), and in 2015 she replaced Joan Rivers—her friend and mentor—on Fashion Police following Rivers’s death the previous year. Griffin left the show after only seven episodes, however, claiming that it was not a good fit for her improvisational style. Griffin’s career suffered a setback in 2017 when she was photographed holding a bloodied mask of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. Amid the resulting backlash, she lost comedy gigs and was fired from CNN’s New Year’s Eve special. In addition, she was reportedly questioned by the U.S. Secret Service. Although Griffin initially apologized, she later stated that she was “no longer sorry” and that “the whole thing got so blown out of proportion.” In October 2017 she launched the Laugh Your Head Off World Tour, and the following year she earned praise for her portrayal of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on the comedy series The President Show.
Griffin was a vocal supporter of gay rights, women’s rights, and the military. Her autobiography, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin, was published in 2009.
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85f337a9a1f64a676043ee52a36fe984 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katrina-Kaif | Katrina Kaif | Katrina Kaif
…of the Anglo-Indian movie star Katrina Kaif were lured into accessing a Web site that was supposed to have a revealing photograph of the actress. Once in the site, visitors were automatically forwarded to a well-known social-networking site and asked to enter their login and password. With this information revealed…
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a509fc9f32e1025b226a78a0a1b10875 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kawamoto-Nobuhiko | Kawamoto Nobuhiko | Kawamoto Nobuhiko
Kawamoto Nobuhiko, (born March 3, 1936, Tokyo, Japan), Japanese business executive who, as president of Honda Motor Company, Ltd. (1990–98), oversaw that company’s spectacular growth during the 1990s.
Kawamoto developed a passion for cars early in life, and as an engineering student at Tōhoku University in Sendai he organized a club that fixed up automobiles left behind by U.S. occupation forces. Kawamoto idolized legendary industrialist Honda Soichiro for his maverick spirit and interest in racing cars, and he went to work for the research-and-development wing of the Honda Motor Company, Ltd., after earning a master’s degree in 1963. He quickly gained a reputation as a talented engineer, excelling as a designer of Honda’s racing-car engines. Kawamoto became a director of Honda in 1981, a senior managing director in 1989, and president in 1990.
As president, Kawamoto eschewed traditional consensus-style management and held himself accountable for the decisions he made. Though he often came across as abrasive and admittedly preferred tinkering with car engines to thinking about running a company, he showed an undoubtedly keen sense for business. After the burst of Japan’s vulnerable asset-inflated “bubble” economy in the early 1990s, Kawamoto decided to place more emphasis on marketing.
When Kawamoto visited Honda Soichiro a few months before Honda’s death in 1991, the elder man gave Kawamoto his blessing to restructure the company in response to the changing times. Kawamoto took this to heart and immediately set about not only reviving a slumping corporate giant but radically transforming its management structure. With a hands-on, dictatorial style that differed sharply from that of his predecessors, Kawamoto forced engineers to heed marketing studies and cut new-car development costs. He also frequently bypassed top executives to communicate directly with employees at all levels of the company.
The results were spectacular. Net profit for 1996 zoomed to a record $1.78 billion. In 1997 Honda passed Mitsubishi Motors Corp. to become the third-leading automaker in Japan, and the following year the company’s sales in the United States, buoyed by sporty new models, topped one million units for the first time. Nevertheless, Kawamoto was pushed out of Honda’s leadership position and into retirement in 1998. Later that year he was named a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
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5c9b2d7b09c101bdb4aaaf21683e56d2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kay-Francis | Kay Francis | Kay Francis
…in a plane crash, and Kay Francis played the socialite who helps him face up to his trauma.
… in the title role and Kay Francis as his love interest, a Russian spy.
… was a romantic comedy with Kay Francis as an unhappily married woman who falls in love with her male assistant; Jewel Robbery paired Francis to good effect with the suave William Powell; and The Crash saw an accountant (played by George Brent) ruined by his high-living wife (Ruth Chatterton). Six…
… and Broadway Musketeers—along with the Kay Francis tearjerker My Bill.
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2ef0ffe6623545573dba8e3888543975 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kazimierz-Brandys | Kazimierz Brandys | Kazimierz Brandys
Kazimierz Brandys, (born October 27, 1916, Łódz, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died March 11, 2000, Paris, France), Polish novelist and essayist remembered both for his early espousal of Socialist Realism and his later rejection of communist ideology.
Brandys was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in law from the University of Warsaw in 1939. After having survived the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, he joined the editorial board of the Marxist weekly Kuźnica (“The Forge”) in 1945. The following year Brandys made his literary debut with the novel Drewniany koń (“The Wooden Horse”), in which he related the ordeal of the Polish intelligentsia under the Nazi terror. In a more ambitious, four-volume epic novel, Między wojnami (1948–53; “Between the Wars”), he described from a communist viewpoint the moral and ideological experiences of a generation of Polish intellectuals before, during, and after World War II. These early works established Brandys as a leading exponent of Socialist Realism.
In the early 1950s, however, Brandys began to voice disillusionment with communism. After a partial relaxation of government controls over Poland’s cultural life in 1956, he mildly criticized the ideology in the novellas Obrona Grenady (1956; “Defense of Grenada”) and Matka Królów (1957; “Mother Królów”; Eng. trans. Sons and Comrades). In his Listy do Pani Z., 3 vol. (1957–61; Letters to Mrs. Z.), as well as in a volume of short stories, Romantyczność (1960; “Romanticism”), he analyzed the moral and psychological transformations of contemporary Poland, and after the release of Nierzeczywistość (1977; A Question of Reality), a work openly critical of communism, Brandys was banned from publishing in Poland.
In 1977 Brandys was associated with Zapis, a literary journal of dissident writers, in which he published essays on life in Warsaw, eventually incorporating these into his multivolume series of memoirs Miesiące (1980; “Months”). Volume one was translated into English as A Warsaw Diary 1978–1981 (1983), and an abridged version of volume three appeared as Paris, New York: 1982–1984 (1988). Brandys was an active supporter of Solidarity, and he settled in Paris after the trade union was outlawed by the Polish government in 1981.
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e2e51e71a62779020e441f1e94d008db | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kazys-Grinius | Kazys Grinius | Kazys Grinius
Kazys Grinius, (born Dec. 17, 1866, Salema, near Marijampole, Lithuania, Russian Empire—died June 4, 1950, Chicago), Lithuanian patriot and statesman who was active in the struggle for independence from Russia and served as prime minister (1920–23) and president (1926) of the republic during the period of liberal democracy.
Grinius studied medicine in Moscow and from 1894 practiced in several Lithuanian towns. He contributed articles to the clandestine patriotic and liberal publication Varpas (1889–1905; “The Bell”) and was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Democrat (Liberal) Party in 1902. Before World War I his house at Marijampole was a gathering place for Lithuanian democrats, and he was persecuted by the tsarist Russian government.
After World War I, as a leader of the Lithuanian Peasant Populist Party, Grinius was a member of the Lithuanian constituent assembly. On June 8, 1920, he formed a Cabinet that on June 12 signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. He resigned as prime minister on Feb. 1, 1922. On June 7, 1926, he was elected president of Lithuania and served until the military coup d’etat in favour of a Nationalist government on December 17. He then resumed his medical practice in Kaunas.
When the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941 he refused an invitation to take part in a German-controlled government, courageously condemning Nazi persecution of Lithuanian Jews. He escaped the Soviet occupation in 1944 by fleeing to Germany and went to the United States in 1947.
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8c63443c63a9cace77982bc9de3f44dc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kees-Boeke | Kees Boeke | Kees Boeke
Kees Boeke, in full Cornelis Kees Boeke, (born Sept. 25, 1884, Alkmaar, Neth.—died July 3, 1966, Abcoude), Dutch educator, Quaker, and pacifist, who was the author of the children’s book Cosmic View (1957).
Boeke grew up in Alkmaar, Neth., where his father was director of the local secondary school. While a student in civil engineering at the Delft University of Technology, he became a progressive Quaker and also became interested in missionary activities. During an interview to become head of a Quaker school in Syria, he met his future wife, Betty, the niece of George Cadbury, one of the founders of the Cadbury Brothers chocolate company. After their marriage, the two traveled to Syria together as missionaries before returning to England in 1914.
With the outbreak of World War I, Boeke and his wife became active pacifists. His termination from a position as a secondary school teacher provided the impetus for the family to travel and expound their ideas in Germany, Wales, and The Netherlands. They also began giving shares of Betty’s Cadbury fortune to workers at the company’s factory in Bournville, Eng. They believed that capitalism was the cause of modern war. They also believed that education in pacifism should begin at an early age, and in 1926 Boeke founded a school in Bilthoven, Neth., called De Werkplaats (“The Working Place”). The school, still operating at the beginning of the 21st century, emphasized Quaker ideals, respect for others, and principles of sociocracy—the theory that all individuals should have a role in decision making. In the late 1930s, with the advent of World War II, the school became a hiding place for Jewish refugees from Poland attempting to escape the Holocaust.
In the mid-1950s Boeke retired from his school in Bilthoven in order to write full-time. Of his many books, mostly on the subject of education, his most famous was Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (1957). Through a series of 40 illustrations of a little girl, the photographs first zoom out from the girl to show the large scale of the country, the Earth, and the universe and then zoom in to show the microscopic world of tiny insects, viruses, and atoms within her body. In his foreword to the book, Boeke explains to his readers,
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f2b5421f5e753116ebc9ae9993bad185 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Keith-Olbermann | Keith Olbermann | Keith Olbermann
Keith Olbermann, (born January 27, 1959, New York City, New York, U.S.), American television journalist, liberal political commentator, and sportscaster perhaps best known as the host of the nightly news and analysis program Countdown with Keith Olbermann (2003–11) on the cable news network MSNBC.
Olbermann grew up in Westchester county, New York, and attended Cornell University in Ithaca, where he graduated in 1979 with a B.S. in communications. At Cornell he was the sports director for Ithaca’s student-run commercial radio station, WVBR. He worked briefly as a newswire sports reporter, eventually joining the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1981. After a short stint in 1984 as a sports anchor for the Boston television station WCVB, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he spent the next five years working as a radio sports broadcaster, garnering 11 Golden Mike Awards and being named Best Sportscaster of the Year three times. Olbermann’s audience widened in 1992 when he became a cohost of ESPN’s SportsCenter, a position he held until 1997, when he became the host of his own newscast, The Big Show with Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC. He left the network in frustration after his show was renamed White House in Crisis and dedicated to covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 1998 he joined Fox Sports Net as anchor of the weekly sportscast The Keith Olbermann Show, but in 2001 he was fired after he reported that Rupert Murdoch—head of the Fox Broadcasting Company—was seeking to sell the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. Olbermann spent the next two years working as a sportscaster for the ABC (American Broadcasting Company) radio network.
In 2003 Olbermann returned to MSNBC to host Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which summarized the five biggest news stories of the day as Olbermann provided commentary and conducted interviews. Four years later he became a cohost of the weekly Football Night in America on NBC (National Broadcasting Company); he left after the 2009–10 season. In November 2010 he was suspended for several days from MSNBC after it was revealed that he had made political donations without securing approval to do so. Olbermann stepped down as host of Countdown in January 2011. Shortly thereafter it was announced that he would host a news and commentary program on Current TV, a cable channel cofounded by Al Gore; the new show debuted in June 2011. In March 2012, however, Current TV terminated Olbermann’s contract. In August 2013 he began hosting Olbermann on ESPN2. The late-night talk show, which aired during the week, was regularly preempted by live sporting events, and it was ultimately moved to an earlier time slot, where it failed to attract a wide audience. The program ended in 2015.
Olbermann subsequently moved to the magazine GQ, where he began hosting the Web series The Closer with Keith Olbermann, which focused on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After Donald Trump won, the show was retitled The Resistance. It continued until November 2017, when Olbermann announced that he was retiring from political commentary. The following year he returned to ESPN and was given a variety of roles, including guest hosting SportsCenter. However, he left ESPN in 2020 to host a YouTube series about that year’s election. Olbermann wrote several books, notably The Worst Person in the World (2006) and Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration’s War on American Values (2007). Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (This Is Not a Joke) was published in 2017.
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13882f81c38b9225dec75206b400d251 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Keith-Relf | Keith Relf | Keith Relf
The original members were singer Keith Relf (b. March 22, 1943, Richmond, Surrey, England—d. May 14, 1976, London), guitarist Eric Clapton (original name Eric Patrick Clapp; b. March 30, 1945, Ripley, Surrey), bassist Chris Dreja (b. November 11, 1946, London), drummer Jim McCarty (b. July 25, 1943, Liverpool, Merseyside), bassist…
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3a238f8be125811128a1eaa091e17002 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Keith-Richards | Keith Richards | Keith Richards
…performance, which was modeled on Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, earned Depp his first Academy Award nomination. He was nominated again the following year for his portrayal of Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie in Finding Neverland (2004). Depp reprised the role of Sparrow in later installments of the…
…concert and guest appearances by Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen.
…26, 1943, Dartford, Kent, England), Keith Richards (b. December 18, 1943, Dartford), Brian Jones (b. February 28, 1942, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England—d. July 3, 1969, Hartfield, Sussex, England), Bill Wyman (b. October 24, 1936, London, England), and Charlie Watts (b. June 2, 1941, London). Later members were Mick Taylor (b. January…
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6319142d0eb044adceebe77adbed7f37 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Keith-Roberts-Porter | Keith Roberts Porter | Keith Roberts Porter
Keith Roberts Porter, (born June 11, 1912, Yarmouth, N.S., Can.—died May 2, 1997, Bryn Mawr, Pa., U.S.), Canadian-born American cell biologist who pioneered techniques for electron microscope studies of the internal structure and organization of cells and tissues.
Porter studied biology at Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) and Harvard University, from which he obtained a Ph.D. in 1938. From 1939 to 1961 he was a member of the Rockefeller Institute (later Rockefeller University) in New York City. During that period he devised methods for using the electron microscope to obtain high-resolution images of individual cells. These procedures enabled Porter and his colleagues to examine the internal organization and fine structures of cells in detail for the first time. He studied the intracellular transport system known as the endoplasmic reticulum and helped discover the convoluted arrays of skeleton-like elements called microtubules, which play a vital role in organizing the contents of the cell.
Porter was a member of the biology department at Harvard from 1961 to 1970, serving as its chairman (1965–67). He also chaired (1968–75) the newly formed department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and served for several years as part-time director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The author of more than 200 scientific papers, he wrote, with Mary Bonneville, An Introduction to the Fine Structure of Cells and Tissues (1963; 4th ed., Fine Structure of Cells and Tissues, 1973). Porter was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1964 and was the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Science (1976).
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8a08189e4ed6744dcccaf222728e9f6e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ken-Griffey-Jr | Ken Griffey, Jr. | Ken Griffey, Jr.
Ken Griffey, Jr., in full George Kenneth Griffey, Jr., (born November 21, 1969, Donora, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American professional baseball player who was one of the iconic athletes of the 1990s and ranked among the best power hitters and defensive outfielders of all time.
In 1987 Griffey was the first player selected by the Major League Baseball draft and was signed by the American League Seattle Mariners. He made his major league debut in 1989. His father, outfielder Ken Griffey, Sr., was playing for the Cincinnati Reds in that year, and the Griffeys thus became the first father and son ever to play in the major leagues at the same time. Griffey, Sr., arranged to be traded to the Mariners late in the 1989 season, and the two formed a sentimental duo in the lineup until his retirement in 1991.
Griffey, Jr., soon began to prove his worth as both a centre fielder and a hitter. He was injured in his rookie season, but in 1990 he won his first Gold Glove Award, had a batting average of .300, and played in the All-Star Game. He went on to win the American League Gold Glove Award for the years 1991–99 with his spectacular fielding. In 1997, when Griffey hit 56 home runs and batted in 147 runs, he was a unanimous selection for the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.
At the close of the 1999 season, Griffey—who had come to dislike playing in the Mariners’ new pitcher-friendly stadium and wanted to work closer to his family’s home in Orlando, Florida—requested a trade from Seattle. In February 2000 he was traded to Cincinnati, which he considered his hometown and where his father worked as a coach. Griffey struggled with a series of injuries in Cincinnati. When he was on the field, he remained a dangerous left-handed hitter. In 2004 he became the 20th major league player to hit 500 home runs, and he was named to the National League All-Star team in 2000, 2004, and 2007. In 2008, after hitting his 600th career home run, Griffey joined Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Sammy Sosa as the only players in major league history to accomplish that feat. Griffey was traded to the Chicago White Sox in July 2008.
He became a free agent for the first time in his career at the end of the 2008 season, and he signed with the Mariners again in February 2009. Griffey’s return to Seattle was a boon for the Mariners’ attendance figures, but his deteriorating on-field play and subsequent lack of playing time led him to abruptly retire from baseball in June 2010. He finished his career with a .284 batting average, 630 home runs, and 1,836 runs batted in. In 2016 he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, having received 437 of the 440 votes cast (99.32 percent) to set the record for the highest percentage of votes in the history of the Hall of Fame (which was broken in 2019 when Mariano Rivera was elected unanimously).
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aac31241cacd6ed92d8a21cd3f8cd6ad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ken-Livingstone | Ken Livingstone | Ken Livingstone
Ken Livingstone, in full Kenneth Robert Livingstone, (born June 17, 1945, Lambeth, London, England), British politician, who made constitutional history on May 4, 2000, when he was elected mayor of London—the first time that British voters had directly elected a candidate to an executive office at any level of government. He served as mayor until May 2008.
Livingstone was born in Lambeth, an inner London borough. He left school at age 17 and started work as a laboratory technician. By his early 20s he was an active Labour Party member. He was elected to the Lambeth Borough Council in 1971 and to the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. Between 1977 and 1981, when the GLC was run by members of the Conservative Party, Livingstone led a left-wing faction within Labour’s group in the GLC. In the GLC elections of May 1981, Labour won a majority. Livingstone immediately challenged the party’s moderate GLC leader, Andrew McIntosh, who had led the party to victory. Backed by a majority of Labour GLC councillors, Livingstone took over the running of the council.
Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s Conservative prime minister, was appalled by the left-wing domination of a number of cities, including London. She took action when Livingstone, popularly dubbed “Red Ken,” sought to intervene in national controversies (for example, by inviting to London leading members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing). Thatcher abolished the big metropolitan councils, including the GLC. She achieved her goal in 1986 but at the price of turning Livingstone into a political martyr.
Livingstone entered the House of Commons in 1987 as the Labour MP for the northwest London seat of Brent East, but he was shunned by successive Labour leaders because of his left-wing views. His chance to reclaim real power came after 1997, when the incoming Labour government redeemed its pledge to restore a citywide authority to London. This time the government decided to establish a directly elected mayor. Although Livingstone was the preferred choice of 60 percent of Labour Party members in London, he lost the mayoral primary contest to Frank Dobson, who enjoyed the backing of most London Labour MPs and trade union officials who, together, commanded two-thirds of the party’s electoral college. Condemning the result as a fix, Livingstone left the party, stood as an independent, and won a convincing victory. He gained support from voters across the political spectrum by describing himself as a “London nationalist,” rather than a left-wing socialist, and by promising to work closely with his political rivals and with London’s business community.
The highlight of Livingstone’s first term was a controversial fee-based traffic management plan that was designed to reduce congestion in central London. While critics decried the scheme as simply another tax, an increase in commercial traffic and a booming city economy earned Livingstone praise from business groups. He was readmitted to the Labour Party in 2004 and was reelected mayor later that year. Even his detractors applauded his leadership in both the successful campaign to secure the 2012 Olympic Games for London and his response to the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on the city’s transit system. In 2006 Livingstone was suspended for a month after comparing a reporter to a concentration camp guard; he later successfully appealed the decision to the High Court. In the 2008 elections he was defeated in his bid for a third term as mayor by Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party. Livingstone challenged Johnson again in the 2012 mayoral election, but he came up short after an acrimonious campaign between the two “big personalities” that the British media dubbed “The Boris and Ken Show.”
Livingstone was back in the headlines in April 2016 when he was suspended from the Labour Party for “bringing the party into disrepute” with remarks he made in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Livingstone’s comments were in response to the earlier suspension of another party member for having posted a message on social media that seemed to support a plan to transport Israelis to the United States. Livingstone was taken to task for claiming that he had never heard any Labour Party member make any anti-Semitic remarks and for his statement that Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler had initially proposed that Jews be sent to Israel, which prompted prominent Labour MP John Mann to brand Livingstone a Nazi apologist. Livingstone’s suspension was extended for an additional 12 months in April 2017, and an intraparty review of the case was scheduled to be concluded by July 2018. Although he was a longtime friend and ally of Livingstone, by spring 2018 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was under increasing pressure from within the party to expel the former London mayor. In May 2018, while continuing to deny that he had exhibited anti-Semitism or brought disrepute to the party, Livingstone announced his resignation from the Labour Party.
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718c437b39104f937410faf3e82e6139 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ken-Loach | Ken Loach | Ken Loach
Ken Loach, in full Kenneth Loach, (born June 17, 1936, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England), British director whose works are considered landmarks of social realism.
Loach studied law at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, but while there he became interested in acting. After graduating in 1957, he spent two years in the Royal Air Force and then began a career in the dramatic arts. He worked first as an actor in regional theatre companies and then as a director for BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) television.
In the 1960s Loach directed several docudramas for a television series called The Wednesday Play. One of the productions, Cathy Come Home (1966), explored the disintegration of a working-class family and examined the intertwined issues of unemployment and homelessness. In doing so, it helped bring the discussion of homelessness into the British mainstream. In 2000 Cathy Come Home was ranked second by the British Film Institute on a list of the all-time top 100 British television programs.
Loach continued to address social issues on television and later in theatrical releases as well. His first feature film, Poor Cow (1967), focuses on the life of a working-class woman whose husband is in jail. It was followed by the poignant Kes (1970), about a boy, abused at home and school, who befriends a fledgling kestrel. That film received much acclaim, including a nomination for best picture at the British Academy Film Awards. Loach investigated similar themes of class and society in such films as Which Side Are You On? (1984), a television movie that provoked controversy for its sympathetic look at striking coal miners. He gained further attention with Hidden Agenda (1990), a political thriller set in Northern Ireland, which shared the jury prize at the Cannes film festival. Loach’s next two films were relatively lighthearted, even comic, affairs, though they remained grounded in the everyday realities of the British working class: Riff-Raff (1991) depicts the travails of a London construction crew, and Raining Stones (1993) follows a man searching for money to buy a dress for his daughter. The latter took the jury prize at Cannes. Loach also received praise for Ladybird Ladybird (1994), a downbeat portrayal of a single mother struggling to hold her family together in the face of bureaucratic obstacles.
Loach’s subsequent films included Bread and Roses (2000), starring Adrien Brody, which tells a story of janitors in Los Angeles in pursuit of better working conditions, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), an affecting portrait of Irish Republicans in 1920 during their fight against British rule. The latter won the Cannes film festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Route Irish (2010) depicts the quest of a security contractor in Iraq to determine the true cause of his friend’s death, and The Angels’ Share (2012) tells the comedic tale of a young Glaswegian hooligan whose nose for Scotch whisky inspires him to steal from an expensive cask. The latter movie earned another jury prize at Cannes. Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake (2016), about a man who survives a heart attack only to deal with government and medical bureaucracies, also won the Palme d’Or. In Sorry We Missed You (2019), a family’s attempt to use the gig economy to get ahead leaves them increasingly far behind.
Loach continued to make documentaries, including The Spirit of ’45 (2013), about post-World War II England, and In Conversation with Jeremy Corbyn (2016), which focuses on the eponymous Labour Party politician. McLibel, which he directed with Franny Armstrong, follows McDonald’s Corporation’s libel lawsuit against two environmental activists; it was originally released as a TV documentary (1997) before being expanded for theatrical release in 2005. Loach received various honours, including the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film (2003).
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e0d3d0fb20b78a6efae734c2a1faa9b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenelm-Digby | Sir Kenelm Digby | Sir Kenelm Digby
Sir Kenelm Digby, (born July 11, 1603, Gayhurst, Buckinghamshire, England—died June 11, 1665, London), English courtier, philosopher, diplomat, and scientist of the reign of Charles I.
Digby was the son of Sir Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot (a conspiracy of a few Roman Catholics to destroy James I and the members of Parliament), and was brought up by his mother as a Roman Catholic. He left the University of Oxford in 1620 without taking a degree and was induced to go abroad by his mother, who opposed his love for Venetia, daughter of Sir Edward Stanley; she had been a childhood playmate and had become a woman of renowned beauty and intellectual attainment. In 1623 in Madrid, Digby was appointed to the household of Prince Charles, who had just arrived there. Returning to England the same year, he was knighted by James I and appointed gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles. In 1625 he married Venetia Stanley.
In an attempt to win favour at court by some large action, Digby embarked as a privateer in December 1627 to attack for booty French ships that were anchored in the Venetian harbour of Scanderoon (now Iskenderun, Turkey). He returned to England in February 1628, in triumph, though the government felt called upon to disavow his actions because of threats of reprisals against English merchants. Lady Digby died in 1633, perhaps as a sad consequence of his amateur pharmacology, and he retired to Gresham College, where he occupied himself with chemical experiments for two years.
After 1635 Digby associated himself with the entourage of Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s Catholic queen, and supported Charles’s expedition against the Presbyterian Scots in 1639–40; for this, Digby was summoned by Parliament as a Catholic recusant and appeared before the bar of the House of Commons in 1641. He then went to France, where in a duel he killed a French lord for insulting Charles I. Returning to England, he was imprisoned by the Commons (1642–43). On his release he went to Paris, where he published his chief philosophical works, Of the Nature of Bodies and Of the Nature of Mans Soule (both 1644).
Digby again returned to England, and Henrietta Maria appointed him her chancellor; he was sent on two abortive missions to Pope Innocent X in Rome for aid in the Royalist cause in the English Civil Wars. Digby promised the conversion of King Charles and his chief aides. After banishment from England by a suspicious Parliament in 1649, he was allowed to return in 1654 and tried to obtain full toleration for Catholics from Oliver Cromwell. At the restoration of the monarchy, on May 8, 1660, he was confirmed as Henrietta’s chancellor and was on the council of the Royal Society when its charter was granted in 1663. In January 1664 he was banished from court on grounds that he had interfered on behalf of a nobleman who had fallen into royal disfavour. Digby spent the remainder of his life in literary and scientific pursuits.
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d191109b9312e57ccc133bef619a4aa0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-Anger | Kenneth Anger | Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger, original name Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, sometimes spelled Anglemeyer, (born February 3, 1927, Santa Monica, California, U.S.), American independent filmmaker who was known for pioneering the use of jump cuts and popular music soundtracks in his movies, which centred on transgressive homoerotic and occult subjects.
Anglemyer became interested in film at an early age. He claimed that his grandmother was a costume designer for silent films and that he had a small role in Max Reinhardt’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). His grandmother, however, was an interior designer, and some questioned whether he appeared in Reinhardt’s film. He was known later in life as an avid self-mythologizer.
After graduating from Beverly Hills High School, he directed and starred in his first successful film, Fireworks (1947), shot at his parents’ home while they were away. The brief movie featured Anglemyer as a young man who fantasizes about and is then abused by a group of sailors. (Anglemyer credited himself as Anger and later as Kenneth Anger.) The overt homoerotic content of the film led to the conviction on obscenity charges of the owner of a Los Angeles theatre that showed it in 1957, though the conviction was overturned in 1959. Fireworks attracted the attention of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whom Anger introduced to the underground gay scene in Los Angeles.
In 1950 Anger moved to Paris, where he joined the circle of French writers Jean Cocteau and Anaïs Nin and worked for the Cinémathèque Française, the French film archive and screening centre. While in Europe, Anger made La Lune des lapins (filmed 1950 and released 1972; Rabbit’s Moon), which featured a Pierrot figure wandering the woods and pining for the Moon. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) was a kaleidoscopic montage of performers, including Nin, in the guise of various deities. Those themes, reflective of Anger’s adherence to the mystical teachings of British occultist Aleister Crowley, would pervade much of his later work. Anger defined himself as a pagan and devotee of Lucifer, though he rejected the notion that he was a Satanist. Because his films were so experimental—almost exclusively without dialogue and rarely more than 30 minutes in length—Anger often found it challenging to fund his projects. He was supported at various points by British American philanthropist J. Paul Getty, Jr., and French fashion designer Agnès B.
Anger returned to the United States to shoot his hallmark film, Scorpio Rising (1963), a pastiche of homoerotic images of a motorcycle gang in New York City that was set to effervescent pop tunes. It is considered likely the first film to use such music as a score. A theatre manager in Los Angeles who showed the film was convicted of obscenity; the verdict was overturned on appeal. Anger followed with Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), a three-minute movie about car culture in California; the latter two films formed an uneven diptych of fetishized American masculinity.
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) featured scenes of occult practice mixed with documentary footage and rock-and-roll performances; its synthesizer soundtrack was composed and performed by Mick Jagger. The film was created from footage not used in Anger’s next major endeavour, Lucifer Rising, which was released as a rough cut in 1972 and in its final version in 1980. Shot in Egypt, England, and Germany at sites of historical sun worship, it featured singer and actress Marianne Faithful as a demonic Lilith. Both films also included Bobby Beausoleil, a follower of Charles Manson who was convicted in 1971 of the 1969 murder of Gary Hinman. Anger continually revised his oeuvre and ultimately called the finished films up to that point The Magick Lantern Cycle. He entered a fallow period of some 20 years about 1980.
Among Anger’s later works were Don’t Smoke That Cigarette (1999), an antismoking film; Mouse Heaven (2004), which comprised shots of various Mickey Mouse figurines; My Surfing Lucifer (2009), which fetishized surfer imagery; and Foreplay (2008), which depicted soccer players warming up. Elliott’s Suicide (2007) was an elegy for singer Elliott Smith, who had committed suicide in 2003. Ich Will! (2008; “I Want!”) consisted of spliced-together Nazi propaganda footage.
Clips and stills of Anger’s work toured extensively as art installations. He received a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 in New York City in 2009. His collection of Hollywood memorabilia also toured as an exhibit. Anger wrote two books on Hollywood scandals, many of which were thought to be fabricated or, at least, heavily embroidered. The first, Hollywood Babylone (1959; Hollywood Babylon), was initially published in France because of concerns about libel lawsuits in the United States and was not widely released there until 1975. The sequel was titled Hollywood Babylon II (1984). He was the subject of the 2006 documentary Anger Me.
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2130d93bcc0f6024b5d2ef21a4f4e325 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-Eugene-Iverson | Kenneth Eugene Iverson | Kenneth Eugene Iverson
Kenneth Eugene Iverson, (born Dec. 17, 1920, Camrose, Alta., Can.—died Oct. 19, 2004, Toronto, Ont.), Canadian mathematician and computer scientist who pioneered a very compact high-level computer programming language called APL (the initials of his book A Programming Language [1962]). The language made efficient use of the slow communication speeds of the computer terminals of that time, and APL enjoyed an enthusiastic following. Iverson taught mathematics at Harvard University from 1955 to 1960 and served on the staff of the research division of IBM from 1960 to 1980.
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1fb2aad520687392ad86b021aef12621 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-H-Cooper | Kenneth H. Cooper | Kenneth H. Cooper
…the United States by physician Kenneth H. Cooper and popularized in his books Aerobics (1968) and The Aerobics Way (1977). Cooper’s system uses point charts to rate the aerobic value of various exercises for different age-groups. As individuals progressively upgrade the quantity and quality of their exercise, they can gauge…
…in the late 1960s by Kenneth Cooper, a former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who established a health and fitness complex in Dallas, Texas, reminiscent of earlier centres by Kellogg and Macfadden. His widespread teachings on the value of exercise in preventing heart disease and promoting overall health led to…
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5353eaa361adaf59e5375950e6423e8c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-MacMillan | Sir Kenneth MacMillan | Sir Kenneth MacMillan
Sir Kenneth MacMillan, (born Dec. 11, 1929, Dunfermline, Fife, Scot.—died Oct. 29, 1992, London, Eng.), British ballet choreographer who created more than 40 ballets during his career and helped revive the tradition of full-length ballets in Britain.
In 1945 MacMillan was awarded a scholarship to Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London and one year later made his debut in The Sleeping Beauty as one of the original members of Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, which replaced Sadler’s Wells Ballet and later became the Royal Ballet. He began choreographing for workshop performances in the early 1950s and created his first professional work, Danses Concertantes, in 1955.
His first full-length ballet, Romeo and Juliet (1965), made an international impact and became a mainstay of both the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre (ABT). It was danced at its premiere by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev and later by Christopher Gable and Lynn Seymour, on whom it had been choreographed. In West Germany MacMillan created Song of the Earth (1965) for the Stuttgart Ballet and became the director of the Deutsche Oper Ballet in West Berlin (1966). He returned to London to succeed Sir Frederick Ashton as a codirector, with John Field, of the Royal Ballet (1970). Three months later MacMillan became sole director, and he remained in that post until 1977, when he resigned to become the principal choreographer. He also became an artistic associate of ABT (1984) and the Houston (Texas) Ballet (1988). Among his other successes were Anastasia (1971), Manon (1974), Mayerling (1978), and Isadora (1981). He was knighted in 1983.
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faace3f0986337b8bb310ed3f9ad7ef9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-N-Waltz | Kenneth N. Waltz | Kenneth N. Waltz
Kenneth N. Waltz, in full Kenneth Neal Waltz, (born 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.—died May 12, 2013, New York, New York), American political scientist and educator best known as the originator of the neorealist (or structural realist) theory of international relations.
Waltz was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II and served again in the Korean War. After graduating from Oberlin College (1948) with a degree in economics, he obtained a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (1957). He wrote his dissertation under the direction of William T.R. Fox, an important theorist of military policy who is remembered for having coined the term superpower. Waltz taught political science at Oberlin (1950–53), Columbia (1953–57), Swarthmore College (1957–66), Brandeis University (1966–71), and the University of California, Berkeley (1971–94), where he was eventually appointed Ford Professor of Political Science (later emeritus). In 1997 Waltz returned to Columbia University as an adjunct lecturer and senior research scholar at the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Waltz’s doctoral thesis, which was published as Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (1959), was a work of political theory (see political philosophy) examining the views of the great thinkers of Western political thought on the causes of war and peace. He is better known, however, as an international relations scholar. When Waltz entered graduate school, there was no discipline of international relations as such, though there had been empirical studies of foreign affairs. Waltz played a key role in the development of the field. His most influential work, Theory of International Politics (1979), a systematic account of the international balance of power, remained a canonical text in political science well into the 21st century.
According to Waltz, international politics is best understood by examining the structure of the international system as reflected in alliances and other cooperative arrangements between states. Waltz’s neorealist approach is part of political theory’s realist tradition in that it understands politics as the competitive interplay of self-interested actors. But it departs from classical realism (exemplified in the work of Hans Morgenthau) in its effort to provide a scientific and structural account of these power-based relations. The two main features of Waltz’s theory are the anarchic state of international relations and the distribution of power among states. The condition of anarchy refers to the absence of a higher authority to adjudicate international disputes. Simply put, world politics is anarchic because there is no world government. Second, world politics is characterized by an unequal distribution of power and by the capacity of the most powerful states to impose a world order concordant with their interests. According to Waltz, the key factor in international relations is the polarity of the system—that is, whether it is dominated by one, two, or many superpowers (unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity, respectively). He considered the unipolar system that prevailed in world politics after the fall of the Soviet Union to be the most unstable and dangerous configuration, because it left one superpower (the United States) free to engage in foreign adventures.
In his later work, Waltz attempted to understand the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics. He emphasized their deterrent effect, contending that countries that have nuclear weapons coexist peacefully because of the abiding prospect of retaliation. On this basis, Waltz held that nuclear proliferation does not threaten, but on the contrary, buttresses world peace, provided that nuclear stocks are controlled by competent governments.
Although Waltz was most interested in the theoretical dimensions of international relations, he also held controversial positions on U.S. foreign policy. Because no checks and balances exist in world politics, he argued, great powers are almost certain to abuse their power, often against their own interests. Waltz noted that frequent U.S. military interventions abroad often resulted in burdensome commitments to stabilize and rebuild other countries. He opposed the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led Iraq War as misguided enterprises.
Waltz’s other scholarly works include Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience (1967), The Use of Force: International Politics and Foreign Policy (1971), The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (1995; coauthored with Scott Douglas Sagan), and Realism and International Politics (2008). He served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1987–88 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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e9dd7b43cff905180d208b6cb5023b7c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kerbogha-of-Mosul | Kerbogha of Mosul | Kerbogha of Mosul
…by a relief force under Kerbogha of Mosul. The situation seemed so hopeless that some Crusaders deserted and attempted to return home. Among these was Peter the Hermit, who was caught and returned to the host, where he was quietly forgiven. Another deserter was the French knight Stephen of Blois,…
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cb8a13daea83fd0a57135ea0b2d9a207 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kermit-Bloomgarden | Kermit Bloomgarden | Kermit Bloomgarden
Kermit Bloomgarden, (born Dec. 15, 1904, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 20, 1976, New York City), American producer of dramatic and musical plays that were commercially and critically successful.
Bloomgarden graduated in 1926 from New York University and practiced as a certified public accountant for several years before assuming a managerial position with the theatrical producer Arthur Beckhardt. His first independent production was Deep Are the Roots (by Arnaud d’Usseau and James Gow), which opened in 1945 and ran for 477 performances. There followed Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest (1946), Command Decision (1947), by William Wister Haines, and Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller, which ran for 742 performances.
Bloomgarden’s other award-winning productions included The Crucible (1953), by Arthur Miller; The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett; The Most Happy Fella (1956), a musical by Frank Loesser; Look Homeward, Angel (1957), by Ketti Frings; The Music Man (1957), a musical by Meredith Willson; Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1960); The Hot L Baltimore (1973) by Lanford Wilson; and Equus (1975) by Peter Shaffer.
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7b3689705bffd4fff40de24a33058e18 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kevin-Rudd | Kevin Rudd | Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd, in full Kevin Michael Rudd, (born September 21, 1957, Nambour, Queensland, Australia), Australian politician, who served as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP; 2006–10; 2013) and prime minister of Australia (2007–10; 2013).
Rudd grew up on a farm in Eumundi, Queensland. Politically active from his youth, he joined the ALP in 1972. He attended the Australian National University in Canberra, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies before embarking on a diplomatic career. From 1981 to 1988 he served in Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, holding embassy posts in Stockholm and Beijing. He left the department to become chief of staff for Queensland opposition leader Wayne Goss—a position he retained after Goss became premier of Queensland in 1989. Rudd served as director general of the state cabinet office from 1992 to 1995. Entering the private sector, he worked for two years as a senior consultant for the accounting firm KPMG Australia.
Rudd was first elected to the federal House of Representatives—as the member for Griffith, Queensland—in 1998 and was twice reelected (2001 and 2004). In Parliament he held a series of positions that gave him increasing responsibility within the Labor Party. After the 2001 election, in which Prime Minister John Winston Howard’s coalition secured a strong working majority, Rudd was appointed shadow minister for foreign affairs. Frequently appearing in televised interviews and on political talk shows, Rudd became known as a vocal critic of the Howard government’s handling of the Iraq War. He was given the additional shadow ministry portfolios of international security in 2003 and trade in 2005. At the ALP caucus held on December 4, 2006, he was chosen party leader, defeating former head Kim Beazley by a vote of 49–39.
In 2007 Rudd increased his calls for Howard to set a date for the next federal elections and urged the prime minister to meet him in face-to-face debates. Rudd—who was riding a wave of popular support at the same time that Howard’s voter-satisfaction ratings were dropping—promised to bring a new leadership style to Australian politics. He called for a clear-cut exit strategy for Australian forces in Iraq, and he criticized Howard for recent rises in interest rates. In addition, Rudd stressed the importance of improving health services. To that end, he announced a comprehensive public health reform plan that he vowed to set in motion early in his administration if he was elected prime minister. In the November 2007 elections, the ALP easily defeated Howard and the Liberal Party. Rudd was sworn in as prime minister on December 3, 2007. Following through on a campaign promise, he formally apologized to the Australian Aboriginal peoples in February 2008 for abuses they had suffered under earlier administrations.
Rudd made climate change a centrepiece of his administration, calling it the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” and pushing for adoption of a carbon emissions trading scheme. He negotiated a deal with Malcolm Turnbull of the opposition Liberal Party of Australia to secure passage of the bill in the Senate. However, Turnbull faced dissent within his own party that led to his ouster and replacement by Tony Abbott, an opponent of the emissions trading scheme, and the bill was defeated in the Senate in December 2009. Because of this and other policy setbacks, Rudd’s popularity declined, prompting an internal challenge by Julia Gillard, his deputy prime minister, in June 2010. Sensing his imminent defeat, Rudd chose not to contest the leadership vote, and Gillard was subsequently elected ALP leader and succeeded him as prime minister. Later that year Rudd became foreign minister, but he resigned in late February 2012 amid speculation that he was planning to challenge Gillard for leadership of the party. Within days Gillard called for a poll among the members of Parliament who belonged to the government coalition, and the vote resulted in a decisive defeat for Rudd.
ALP infighting continued, and in June 2013 Rudd’s ALP supporters began petitioning for Rudd to challenge Gillard for party leadership. Gillard responded with a call for a decisive ALP leadership vote in which the loser would retire from politics, to which Rudd agreed. On June 26, 2013, Rudd emerged as the winner, once again assuming leadership of the ALP, and he was sworn in as prime minister the next day. The change in leadership did little to reverse the party’s decline in public approval, however, and less than three months later Rudd and the ALP suffered a decisive loss to the Liberal-National coalition in the September 7 general election. Rudd retained his parliamentary seat but stepped down as party leader. Two months later he announced that he was retiring from politics, and he resigned from Parliament.
Rudd wrote the autobiographies Not for the Faint-Hearted: A Personal Reflection on Life, Politics and Purpose (2017) and The PM Years (2018).
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cd803449dbed355af29c8e06c865a1eb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khachatur-Abovean | Khachatur Abovean | Khachatur Abovean
Khachatur Abovean, the “father of modern Armenian literature,” wrote Wounds of Armenia in 1841. The most celebrated Armenian novelist was Hakob Meliq-Hakobian, or Raffi. Among eastern poets, Hovhannes Thumanian wrote lyric and narrative poems; and his masterpiece, a short epic, Anush, full of songs that…
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b77955a3972afc3bb220ea030cd820c9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khalid | Khalid of Saudi Arabia | Khalid of Saudi Arabia
Khalid of Saudi Arabia, in full Khalid ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd, (born 1913, Riyadh, Arabia [now in Saudi Arabia]—died June 13, 1982, Al-Ṭāʾif, Saudi Arabia), king of Saudi Arabia (1975–82), who succeeded his half brother Faisal as king when Faisal was assassinated in 1975. A moderate influence in Middle East politics and a relatively retiring man, he left much of the administration of the country to his half brother Prince Fahd, who became his successor.
Born in Riyadh when it was a small desert town, Khalid became the closest supporter of his brothers Saud and Faisal. When he was 14, his father Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi kingdom, sent him as his representative to the desert tribes to hear their grievances. In 1934 he took part in the Saudi expedition against Yemen led by his brother Faisal, and afterward he was regarded as a “man of the desert,” more at home with desert pursuits than with politics or diplomacy.
In 1939 he left Arabia for the first time to take part in the abortive London conference on Palestine. He hastened to return and, unlike most of his brothers, he never pursued higher-educational studies abroad. He concerned himself with the problems of the Bedouin and took a special interest in desert-reclamation projects through the use of groundwater. When in Riyadh, he devoted himself to charitable work. His modest and self-effacing personality, coupled with his reputation for calm reason, made him the chief conciliator in the disputes that arose among the large family of royal princes. Such qualities led to his appointment as crown prince, in preference to his more forceful and ambitious brothers Fahd and Sultan, when King Saud was deposed in November 1964 and was succeeded by Faisal.
From 1970, heart ailments inhibited his role in public life and cast doubt on his eventual succession to the throne. However, he did take over following Faisal’s assassination and was welcomed as a figure who enjoyed much popularity, especially with the Bedouin. He reacted moderately to Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat’s Israeli peace initiative and benefited from the success of the 1979 visit to his country of Queen Elizabeth II and his return visit to the United Kingdom in 1981. On June 13, 1982, he died of a sudden heart attack.
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b1da1c01c6718730d708c83a3d874b08 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khalid-Bakdash | Khalid Bakdash | Khalid Bakdash
Khalid Bakdash, Arabic Khālid Bakdāsh, Bakdash also spelled Bekdache, (born 1912, Damascus, Syria—died July 15, 1995, Damascus), Syrian politician who acquired control of the Syrian Communist Party in 1932 and remained its most prominent spokesman until 1958, when he went into exile.
As a young man Bakdash went to law school in Damascus but was expelled for illegal political activity. In 1930 he joined the Communist Party and began to acquire a reputation for skillful public debate, dedication to his political vision, and personal magnetism. Jailed in 1931 and 1932 by the French, he nevertheless succeeded in 1932 in ousting Fuad al-Shamali from leadership of the Syrian Communist Party. He was soon forced to go underground and then left Syria. In 1935 he led the Syrian delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, which was meeting in Moscow, and remained there for a period of training.
In 1954 Bakdash was elected to a seat in the Syrian parliament, becoming the first Communist deputy in the Arab world. He adopted alliances with the Socialist and the increasingly powerful Baʿth Party. He became Syria’s apologist for the policies of the Soviet Union, and, when in August 1957 the Soviet Union signed a wide-ranging economic and technical agreement with Syria, his influence rose considerably.
Yet his position was threatened by widespread Syrian sentiment for some kind of union with Egypt, the president of which, Gamal Abdel Nasser, would not tolerate a Communist opposition. By 1957 he found himself increasingly at odds with the Baʿth, and, hoping to take the initiative, he demanded a total merger with Egypt. He expected Nasser to refuse such a prospect, leaving Bakdash a leading exponent of Arab nationalism but free to continue his activities as Communist leader. On Feb. 1, 1958, however, union with Egypt was proclaimed; three days later Bakdash fled to eastern Europe. He returned to Syria in April 1966, where he again became leader of the Syrian Communist Party. Following Ḥafiz al-Assad’s rise to the presidency in 1971, the Syrian Communist Party was included in the National Progressive Front, a left-leaning coalition led by the Baʿth. Upon Bakdash’s death in 1995, his wife assumed control of the Syrian Communist Party.
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5a35fa5a2731ff6942033e956077ca5d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khalid-Sheikh-Mohammed | Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, (born March 1, 1964, or April 14, 1965, Kuwait), Islamist militant who, as an operational planner for al-Qaeda, masterminded some of that organization’s highest-profile terrorist operations, most notably the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
Prior to his birth, Mohammed’s parents immigrated to Kuwait from Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Mohammed was raised in Kuwait, attending public high school there, and he became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager. In 1983 he moved to the United States to attend Chowan College (now Chowan University) in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. He transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. After graduating, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan, where he is believed to have received terrorist training during the Soviet occupation of that country.
Although he later claimed responsibility for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mohammed first came to international attention for his participation in the so-called Bojinka Plot, a deadly and wildly ambitious plan concocted by Mohammed’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef. The conspirators, based in Manila, aimed to blow up 11 U.S.-bound transpacific airliners with virtually undetectable bombs. Other elements of the plot involved attacks on Pope John Paul II, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, and civilian nuclear power plants. Philippine officials discovered the plot in January 1995 when a fire started in the Manila apartment where Yousef and a confederate, Abdul Hakim Murad, were building bombs. When Murad returned to the apartment, he was arrested. Yousef fled the country but was captured in Pakistan in February 1995 and extradited to the United States.
One proposed aspect of the Bojinka Plot involved hijacking an aircraft and using it as a missile to attack the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mohammed took this plan to Osama bin Laden in 1996, with the suggestion that it be used to attack symbolic targets in the United States. It is believed that bin Laden approved the plan at some point in late 1998 or early 1999, and Mohammed began his formal affiliation with al-Qaeda. Mohammed, along with bin Laden and Muhammad Atef, began assembling the hijacker teams. In early December 1999 Mohammed held an instructional meeting with three al-Qaeda operatives who would carry out the September 11 attacks.
After those attacks, Mohammed’s cachet within al-Qaeda skyrocketed. He was involved in other plots against the United States, including the attempted “shoe-bombing” of an American Airlines jet by Richard Reid that was foiled by passengers on December 22, 2001. Mohammed also claimed to have beheaded The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, a claim that was later verified by independent sources. In early 2003 Mohammed was planning an attack on London’s Heathrow Airport, but the plot was disrupted by the United States and its allies. Soon after, on March 1, 2003, he was captured by U.S. and Pakistani officers in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
During his interrogation by the CIA, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times. After spending several years in classified CIA “black site” prisons in central Europe, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2006. On February 11, 2008, Mohammed and four others were charged under the military tribunal system with crimes related to the September 11 attacks. At a pretrial hearing, Mohammed admitted his role in dozens of different plots against the United States, and during his arraignment in June 2008, he declared that he wished to represent himself and plead guilty. In November 2009 U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Mohammed and his four coconspirators would be transferred to the United States and tried in a civilian court in New York. In January 2010 military charges against Mohammed were officially dropped by the Pentagon, clearing the way for civilian trials to proceed. In April 2011, however, Holder announced that because of restrictions imposed by Congress, Mohammed would be prosecuted in a military tribunal rather than in a civilian setting. The Department of Defense refiled charges against Mohammed, and he was arraigned for a second time in May 2012. He remained incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, pending trial.
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5f1e2c8884b1f62b4c33295d7ff61202 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khalil-Ibrahim-al-Wazir | Khalīl Ibrāhīm al-Wazīr | Khalīl Ibrāhīm al-Wazīr
Khalīl Ibrāhīm al-Wazīr, byname Abū Jihād, (born October 10, 1935, Ramla, Palestine [now in Israel]—died April 16, 1988, Tunis, Tunisia), Palestinian leader who became the military strategist and second in command of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Wazīr fled from Ramla with his family during the 1948 war that followed the creation of the State of Israel. He grew up in the Gaza Strip, where he was educated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. He met future PLO leader Yāsir ʿArafāt in 1951 while attending college in Cairo, and together they organized anti-Israel guerrilla actions and founded the militant organization Fatah (1958), which merged with smaller groups to form the PLO (1964). As ʿArafāt’s deputy and a moderate within the PLO, Wazīr often negotiated with PLO extremists, maintained diplomatic relations with other countries, and reportedly planned military strategies and arranged arms purchases for Fatah and the PLO. After the PLO was expelled from Jordan in 1971, he eventually became an advocate of rapprochement with Jordan and played a role in increasing the PLO’s emphasis on work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These efforts contributed to a general Palestinian uprising known as the intifāḍah in 1987. He was killed in his home in Tunis by Israeli commandos.
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e4a9938c6672ceb113a9662769fe14ed | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kharilaos-Trikoupis | Kharílaos Trikoúpis | Kharílaos Trikoúpis
Kharílaos Trikoúpis, (born July 23, 1832, Nauplia, Greece—died April 11, 1896, Cannes, Fr.), statesman who sought with limited success to foster broad-scale national development in Greece during the last quarter of the 19th century. Together with a rival, Theódoros Dhiliyiánnis, he dominated Greek politics during this period.
Trikoúpis studied literature and law in Athens (Modern Greek: Athína) and Paris before entering the Greek diplomatic service. In 1862 he represented the Greek community of London at the Constituent Assembly in Athens; elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1865, he was appointed foreign minister the next year.
Trikoúpis sought to develop resources and an industrial base for Greece and to create a strong army and navy. He was prime minister for short periods in 1875, 1878, and 1880, but his periods in office were too brief to implement his ideas. He became prime minister for the fourth time in March 1882 and immediately strove to strengthen Greek finances.
His party was defeated in the general election of April 1885, and Dhiliyiánnis replaced him. In May 1886 Trikoúpis was once again appointed prime minister. His development projects were generally successful, but his skill at financial management was not enough, and Greece could not pay the large debts left by the Dhiliyiánnis government. Despite these problems, Trikoúpis retained the confidence of the people and of King George. Even after his party suffered a defeat in the general election of 1890, the king reappointed him prime minister in 1892, following the dismissal of Dhiliyiánnis for alleged incompetence. Trikoúpis served from June 1892 to May 1893 and again from November 1893 to January 1895. In the 1890s he fostered a Balkan rapprochement. After defeat in the general election of 1895, he retired to private life.
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de066429ad5d9e971b55256de6ccdc02 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khariton-Laptev | Khariton Laptev | Khariton Laptev
…Siberian mainland, and the cousins Khariton and Dmitry Laptev charted the Siberian coast from the Taymyr Peninsula to the Kolyma River.
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d63924cffa1ba1023384b9909b791f60 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khorloghiyin-Choibalsan | Khorloghiyin Choibalsan | Khorloghiyin Choibalsan
revolutionaries, Damdiny Sükhbaatar and Khorloogiin Choibalsan, who had stayed in Siberia in the city of Irkutsk, made their way to the small town of Troitskosavsk on the border with Mongolia to organize the resistance. Meanwhile, tsarist cavalry units under the command of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (known as the…
Khorloogiin Choibalsan, minister of internal affairs, with the help of the Soviet NKVD (secret police), had tens of thousands of innocent victims rounded up, who were forced to admit their “guilt” and then were executed. After Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pointed out that there were…
Choibalsan, who in addition to serving as minister of internal affairs had become minister of war in 1937, was appointed the country’s prime minister in March 1939. The MPRP congress held in March 1940 declared the beginning of the socialist stage of Mongolia’s political development…
Choibalsan died in 1952 in a Moscow hospital, and Tsedenbal was appointed chairman (i.e., the equivalent of prime minister) of the Council of Ministers, (the highest organ of executive power. In 1954 MPRP General Secretary Tsedenbal was ousted by Dashiin Damba, who was designated MPRP…
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53da7eef4dde4d113af4fb6191e03c4c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Khwaja-Abd-us-Samad | Khwāja ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad | Khwāja ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad
Khwāja ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad, (born 16th century), Persian painter who, together with Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī, was one of the first members of the imperial atelier in India and is thus credited with playing a strong part in the foundation of the Mughal school of miniature painting (see Mughal painting).
ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad was born into a family of good social standing in Iran, and he had already gained a reputation as a calligrapher as well as a painter when he met the Mughal emperor Humāyūn, who was in exile in Iran. At Humāyūn’s invitation, he followed him to India in 1548, first to Kābul and later to Delhi. He instructed both Humāyūn and his young son, the future emperor Akbar, in drawing. Among his students while he was superintendent of Akbar’s atelier were Dasvant and Basāvan, Hindus who became two of the most renowned Mughal painters. ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad received many honours from Akbar. In 1576 he was appointed master of the mint, and in 1584 at the end of his career he was made dewan (revenue commissioner) of Multān.
Among ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad’s greatest achievements was the supervision, together with his fellow Persian Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī, of a large part of the illustrations of the Dāstān-e (“Stories of”) Amīr Ḥamzeh, a series that numbered about 1,400 paintings, all of unusually large size. As none of the paintings is signed, it is not certain whether he himself did any of them. Among the miniatures bearing his signature is one in the Royal Library in the Golestān Palace, Tehrān, depicting Akbar presenting a miniature to his father, Humāyūn. The work, though Persian in its treatment of many details, hints of the Indian style to come, evident in the realistic presentation of the life of the court. A more thoroughly Indianized version of ʿAbd-uṣ-Ṣamad’s painting style is found in an illustrated manuscript of the Khamseh of Neẓāmī dated 1595, now part of the collection of the British Museum.
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cd6ef0038fe8648ec3498ac1c3e47de8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kichizan | Kichizan | Kichizan
Kichizan, pseudonym of Minchō, (born 1352, Awaji-shima, Japan—died Sept. 26, 1431, Japan), the last major professional painter of Buddhist iconography in Japan.
He was a priest, associated with the Zen Buddhist Tōfuku-ji (temple) in Kyōto. Of the Buddhist paintings that he did for the temple, the best known is the portrait of Shōichi (1202–80), founder of the temple. The painting is a chinsō, an official portrait of a high-ranking ecclesiastic in which emphasis is placed upon the realistic depiction of the face and the robes. It shows to good advantage the heavy curved outlines for which his painting style is famous. He is also believed to be the artist of the oldest ink landscape painting extant in Japan: “The Hut in the Valley” (dated 1413; located in the Konchi-in monastery in Kyōto). The painting reflects the influence of Chinese landscape art and is an early Japanese example of a shi-ga-jiku, hanging scroll on which poems commenting upon the painting are inscribed.
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ef1224d6d1eae91eafb5ac3dc9fb509b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kid-Ory | Kid Ory | Kid Ory
Kid Ory, byname of Edward Ory, (born Dec. 25, 1886, Laplace, La., U.S.—died Jan. 23, 1973, Honolulu, Hawaii), American trombonist and composer who was perhaps the first musician to codify, purely by precept, the role of the trombone in classic three-part contrapuntal jazz improvisation. Ory is often remembered as a “tailgate” trombonist, one whose style of playing fills in, or supports, other band instruments and is reminiscent of the styles of prejazz ragtime bands and cakewalk bands.
Ory began to play as a child on homemade instruments. By 1911 he was leading one of the best-known bands in New Orleans. Among its members at various times were several musicians who later were highly influential in jazz development, including Sidney Bechet, Mutt Carey, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong.
In 1919 Ory moved to California, forming a new band in Los Angeles. After five years he joined King Oliver in Chicago and by the end of the 1920s had become a prolific jazz recording artist. He played with King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five (later, Hot Seven), and Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers.
In 1930 Ory retired from music to run a successful chicken farm, but on his comeback in 1939 he enjoyed even greater success. He worked with clarinetist Barney Bigard (1942) and trumpeter Bunk Johnson (1943), and his motion-picture credits include Crossfire (1947), New Orleans (1947), and The Benny Goodman Story (1956). A musician of rough, almost coarse, candour and naive sensibilities, he must be seen in the context of the early days of jazz, which he influenced heavily. His outstanding jazz composition is “Muskrat Ramble” (1926).
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f45954d099bc631912ef261aab70129d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kijai-Hadji-Ahmad-Dachlan | Kijai Hadji Ahmad Dachlan | Kijai Hadji Ahmad Dachlan
Kijai Hadji Ahmad Dachlan, (born 1868, Jogjakarta, Java—died Feb. 23, 1923), founder of Muhammadiyah, an Islāmic reform movement with great impact on the practice of Islām in Indonesia and strong influence on many nationalist leaders.
Dachlan was a wealthy merchant who made the pilgrimage to Mecca shortly after 1900. On his return, he became active in religious reform activities, first in formalistic issues of ritual and subsequently on broader substantive issues then being raised by reformers in Egypt. In essence, the reformers sought to abandon the four different schools of interpretation of Islāmic law and return to the precepts of the Qurʾān, hoping thus to generate a body of Islāmic thought suited to a modernizing society. Muhammadiyah, founded in May 1912, followed Western organizational models, and Dachlan won legal recognition for it from the government of the Dutch East Indies. Muhammadiyah’s practical program stressed education and social work, including the founding and operation of schools, hospitals, and related activities; it modelled itself on the programs of Christian missionary societies, whose influence Muhammadiyah hoped to reduce. The movement avoided political activity, but Dachlan maintained close connections between his organization and the openly political Sarekat Islām (Islāmic Association).
In 1915 Muhammadiyah’s schools were granted a government subsidy and began to attract children of ambitious Indonesians seeking to improve their children’s opportunities through education but wishing to do so in a Muslim rather than a Christian context. After 1920, Muhammadiyah spread from its Jogjakarta base to the rest of Java and the outer islands and became one of the most powerful influences on the emerging Indonesian middle class.
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0aa471f36dac4a4945020232c943429a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kikunae-Ikeda | Kikunae Ikeda | Kikunae Ikeda
…in 1908 by Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae, who found that soup stocks made from seaweed contained high levels of the substance. MSG elicits a unique taste, known as umami, that is different from the other basic tastes (bitter, salty, sour, sweet) and thus enhances the complex flavours of meat, poultry,…
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0ae5f82f1115fae7c58bd203b7de3929 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kim-Cattrall | Kim Cattrall | Kim Cattrall
…and sexually adventurous Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the cynical and headstrong Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and the idealistic and naive Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The dynamics of their relationships are revealed with wit and playful irreverence as the four friends experience love, loss, and betrayal. Carrie’s tumultuous relationship with the charismatic yet…
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10b2a687fc000c1d465fc43d4dbab128 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kim-Sisup | Kim Sisŭp | Kim Sisŭp
Kim Sisŭp, Korean author during the early Choson period (1392–1598). His five stories contained in the Kŭmo sinwha (“New Stories from Golden Turtle Mountain”) are written in Chinese in the tradition of the ch’uan-ch’i. The subject material of these stories include love affairs between mortals and ghosts and dream journeys to the Underworld or to the Dragon Palace. He promoted the unity of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism but is especially remembered for his Neo-Confucian views.
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50900c933b2bc1eda451132c65034110 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/King-Oliver | King Oliver | King Oliver
King Oliver, byname of Joseph Oliver, (born May 11, 1885, Abend, La., U.S.—died April 8, 1938, Savannah, Ga.), American cornetist who was a vital link between the semimythical prehistory of jazz and the firmly documented history of jazz proper. He is also remembered for choosing as his protégé the man generally considered to have been the greatest of all New Orleans musicians, Louis Armstrong.
Born on a plantation, Oliver went to New Orleans as a boy and began playing the cornet in 1907. By 1915 he was an established bandleader and two years later was being billed as “King.” In the following year, after the closing down of Storyville, the city’s red-light district, Oliver moved to Chicago. Four years later he sent for Armstrong to join him as second cornetist, thus indirectly ensuring the spread of jazz across the continent and eventually the world. In 1928 he went to New York City, and from this point his fortunes declined. Plagued by dental trouble and outflanked by rapidly evolving jazz styles, he died in obscurity while working as a poolroom marker.
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babf46845d08d6210ab8854cffaf75f3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kirakos-Gandzaketsi | Kirakos Gandzaketsi | Kirakos Gandzaketsi
…and central Asia, written by Kirakos Gandzaketsi, a member of his suite, gives one of the earliest and most comprehensive accounts of Mongolian geography and ethnology.
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968b02dbef96ae72151250275f743b5f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kiran-Bedi | Kiran Bedi | Kiran Bedi
Kiran Bedi, (born June 9, 1949, Amritsar, India), Indian social activist who was the first woman to join the Indian Police Service (IPS) and who was instrumental in introducing prison reform in India.
Bedi was the second of four daughters. Her education included an undergraduate degree in English (1968), a master’s degree in political science (1970), a law degree (1988), and a Ph.D. in social science (1993) with a focus on drug abuse and domestic violence. She joined the IPS in 1972 and went on to serve a variety of roles, including narcotics officer, antiterrorist specialist, and administrator.
Bedi earned recognition for the work she did as inspector general of prisons, beginning in 1994. In that capacity she reshaped one of the largest prisons in the world—the Tihar prison complex, in Delhi—by addressing the corruption and human rights abuses she found there. She targeted sanitation and nutrition problems at Tihar and also implemented new literacy and drug treatment programs there.
In 2003 Bedi became the first woman and the first Indian to be appointed United Nations civilian police adviser. She also founded two voluntary nongovernmental organizations, Navjyoti (1988) and India Vision Foundation (1994), both of which were established to operate primary education and adult literacy programs and to offer vocational training and counseling services for women, as well as to provide drug rehabilitation for prisoners. She was the recipient of numerous awards in India and abroad. She was also an accomplished tennis player and won several Asian championships.
In 2016 Bedi was appointed lieutenant governor of Puducherry union territory.
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a061080ba29c4d11f4d8dccae7e99ee7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kirsten-Gillibrand | Kirsten Gillibrand | Kirsten Gillibrand
Kirsten Gillibrand, née Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik, (born December 9, 1966, Albany, New York, U.S.), American politician who was appointed as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate from New York in 2009 and was elected to that body in 2010. She previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives (2007–09).
Rutnik earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1988. After studying law at the University of California, Los Angeles (Juris Doctor degree, 1991), she clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals before joining a law firm in New York City. While in private practice she notably defended the tobacco company Philip Morris against allegations that it had lied about the health risks of smoking. When future New York governor Andrew Cuomo served as secretary of housing and urban development in Pres. Bill Clinton’s administration, he appointed Rutnik as his special counsel. She also worked on Hillary Clinton’s successful Senate campaign in 2000. The following year Rutnik returned to private practice and married Jonathan Gillibrand; the couple later had two children.
Gillibrand entered electoral politics in 2006 when she ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. She was elected and took office the following year. In 2009 Gov. David Paterson appointed Gillibrand to take the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, who had been named secretary of state. Gillibrand then won a special election for the post in 2010.
While in the Senate, Gillibrand developed a reputation as a liberal Democrat who generally voted with party leadership, a marked change from her position in the House, where she was identified as a “Blue Dog,” or conservative Democrat. That shift was explained, in part, as a reflection of the generally conservative nature of her congressional district as against the relatively liberal views of the state at large. She worked to improve the handling of sexual assault cases within the military and to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that barred openly gay men and women from serving in the military. She also insisted on transparency in government, publishing earmark requests, tax records, meeting notes, and other materials. In addition, she introduced legislation extending funding for health care treatment and other needs of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Gillibrand won reelection in 2012, and her ensuing term was notable for her efforts to combat sexual harassment. She sponsored legislation to reform the way the U.S. military prosecuted cases of sexual assault, and in 2017, amid a growing sexual misconduct scandal in Congress, she introduced a bill to overhaul how the legislature’s Office of Compliance handled such complaints. Gillibrand was easily reelected in 2018, and the following year she announced that she was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. However, she struggled to attract support, and in August 2019 she withdrew from the race.
Gillibrand published a political memoir, Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World (written with Elizabeth Weil), in 2014.
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1bfd741dc235e1942886c89390017873 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kitahara-Hakushu | Kitahara Hakushū | Kitahara Hakushū
Kitahara Hakushū, original name Kitahara Ryūkichi, (born Jan. 25, 1885, Fukuoka, Japan—died Nov. 2, 1942, Tokyo), Japanese poet who was a major influence in modern Japanese poetry with his aesthetic and symbolic style.
In 1906 he joined the Shinshisha (New Poetry Association) and published poems in its magazine Myōjō (“Bright Star”) that brought him instant fame as a rising young poet. In 1908 he founded, with others, the Pan no Kai (“The Pan Society”) in opposition to the Naturalism that dominated literary circles at that time.
His first collection of poems, Jashūmon (1909; “Heretics”), which depicted the Christian missionaries in 16th-century Japan, won him much praise for the exotic and sensuous beauty of his writing. In 1911 the collection of his lyric poems, Omoide (“Recollections”), was published and also received great praise. Kitahara introduced a new symbolic, decadent style into the genre of the traditional 31-syllable tanka and founded an innovative tanka magazine, titled Tama.
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b69e5233592b925c8b74ab42b3b271fb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kitty-Clive | Kitty Clive | Kitty Clive
Kitty Clive, original name Catherine Raftor, (born 1711—died Dec. 6, 1785, Twickenham, near London, Eng.), one of David Garrick’s leading ladies, the outstanding comedic actress of her day in England.
About 1728 Clive began to play at Drury Lane Theatre under the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber, and she soon became a favourite. She married George Clive, a barrister, but they separated by mutual consent. Her first great success was as a comedienne and singer. Almost her whole career belonged to Drury Lane, where, in 1747, she joined Garrick. Although she was temperamental and led Garrick, who was afraid of her, a troubled life, she remained with him for 22 years, always playing comedy roles. She also sang in some of the oratorios of George Frideric Handel, whose friend she was. In 1769 she retired.
The author Horace Walpole gave her a villa near his own at Twickenham.
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1a24773d8e99d2e89ebe376d521d123b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kizza-Besigye | Kizza Besigye | Kizza Besigye
…was clouded by allegations that Kizza Besigye, the leader of the opposition group Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), was imprisoned in the months leading up to the presidential election to stop him from participating. Besigye was ultimately released in January 2006 and able to stand for election in February, and,…
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6fb0b7cb26220a5667bce6e3a162aef6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kjeld-Abell | Kjeld Abell | Kjeld Abell
Kjeld Abell, (born Aug. 25, 1901, Ribe, Den.—died March 5, 1961, Copenhagen), dramatist and social critic, best known outside Denmark for two plays, Melodien der blev væk (1935; English adaptation, The Melody That Got Lost, 1939) and Anna Sophie Hedvig (1939; Eng. trans., 1944), which defends the use of force by the oppressed against the oppressor.
Abell studied political science but afterward began a career as a stage designer in Paris. He then went on to become Denmark’s most unconventional man of the theatre, not only as an original dramatist but also as a stage designer who made full use of the technical apparatus of the theatre to achieve new and striking scenic effects, as in Daga paa en Sky (1947; “Days on a Cloud”) and Skrige (1961; “The Scream”).
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dc7468c5f23a3052d9b959bb0f0c1aa2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kjell-Eugenio-Laugerud-Garcia | Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García | Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García
Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García, (born Jan. 24, 1930, Guatemala City, Guat.—died Dec. 9, 2009, Guatemala City), president of Guatemala (1974–78), minister of defense and chief of the armed forces (1970–74).
Born to a Norwegian father and a Guatemalan mother, Laugerud attended the Escuela Politécnica, Guatemala’s military academy. He was elected president of Guatemala in March 1974 in an election accompanied by violence, political assassinations, and accusations of fraud. Inaugurated on July 1, he announced an economic austerity program but retained many of his predecessor’s cabinet ministers. He launched a colonization program to settle landless peasants in the Petén. Throughout his administration he conducted a vigorous campaign to reestablish Guatemalan sovereignty over neighbouring Belize but was hindered by international opposition. In 1977 he broke diplomatic relations with Panama over this issue. Following the disastrous earthquake of 1976, Laugerud obtained loans from the Interamerican Development Bank, the World Bank, and the International Development Association for the construction of roads, hospitals, and electric lines and the promotion of the fishing and construction industries. He managed the distribution of relief supplies and maintained order with commendable efficiency. The political unrest that accompanied his election continued to grow during the next four years. The May 1978 massacre of more than 100 indigenous peasants at Panzós in Alta Verapaz tainted Laugerud’s reputation at the end of his term. The peasants had been protesting eviction from their land, which the government wanted to claim for mining and petroleum projects. Amnesty International repeatedly condemned the actions of the White Hand, a right-wing civilian death squad with some paramilitary elements, and charged that Laugerud tacitly condoned the terrorism.
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3fc330ca5f95447926007f5ec61a3b32 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Klaus-Barbie | Klaus Barbie | Klaus Barbie
Klaus Barbie, byname Butcher of Lyon, (born Oct. 25, 1913, Bad Godesberg, Ger.—died Sept. 25, 1991, Lyon, France), Nazi leader, head of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, who was held responsible for the death of some 4,000 persons and the deportation of some 7,500 others.
Barbie was a member of the Hitler Youth and in 1935 joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; “Security Service”), a special branch of the SS. After German forces overran western Europe in World War II, Barbie served in the Netherlands and then, in 1942, was made chief of Gestapo Department IV in Lyon. (The SD was closely related to the Gestapo, and personnel were frequently transferred from one to the other.) In this position he became especially active against French partisans, promoting the torture and execution of thousands of prisoners. He personally tortured prisoners whom he interrogated. Among the more specific charges against him were that he ordered the death of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin and the deportation of 44 Jewish children (aged 3–13) and their five teachers, all of whom later were delivered to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
After the war Barbie was seized by American authorities, who recruited him (1947–51) for counterintelligence work and then spirited him and his family out of Germany to Bolivia (actions for which the U.S. government later officially apologized to France). Beginning in 1951, he lived as a businessman under the name Klaus Altmann in Bolivia, where Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld tracked him down in 1972. After long negotiations, the Bolivian government extradited him to France in February 1983 to stand trial. (He had twice been sentenced in absentia to death by a postwar French military tribunal.) In 1987 Barbie, who remained unrepentant and proud of his wartime service, went on trial in Lyon and was convicted of “crimes against humanity,” for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, he died in prison.
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af285ef668703a05780af021429b4e6a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Klein-Naomi | Naomi Klein | Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein, (born May 8, 1970, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Canadian author and activist whose debut book, No Logo (2000), made her one of the most prominent voices in the antiglobalization movement.
Klein was born to a politically active family. Her grandfather, an animator for Disney, was fired and blacklisted for attempting to organize a labour union. Her parents moved to Canada from the United States to protest the Vietnam War, and her mother, Bonnie, directed the feminist antipornography documentary Not a Love Story (1981). Klein studied philosophy and literature at the University of Toronto but left before completing her degree and took a job at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail.
In 2000 Klein published No Logo, an analysis of the marketing and branding practices of global corporations. It examined the ways in which contemporary capitalism sought to reframe individuals’ consciousnesses along branded lines. No Logo was translated into dozens of languages, and it made Klein into an international media star. She followed with Fences and Windows (2002), a volume of essays on antiglobalization topics that ranged from World Trade Organization protests to a study of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.
With her husband, director Avi Lewis, Klein wrote and coproduced The Take (2004), a documentary about the occupation of a closed auto-parts plant by Argentine workers. Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) was a scathing critique of neoliberalism—particularly of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago school” of economics. The book examined what Klein termed “disaster capitalism,” a form of extreme capitalism that advocated privatization and deregulation in the wake of war or natural catastrophe. The Shock Doctrine was adapted as a feature-length documentary film by director Michael Winterbottom in 2009.
In This Changes Everything (2014), Klein iterated the inherent conflicts between unchecked capitalist enterprise and the mitigation of global warming; a documentary based on the book and directed by Lewis was released in 2015. No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017) was written in response to the administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. Klein’s later books included The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (2018), which focused on the struggle over the island’s recovery following Hurricane Maria. In the essay collection On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), she continued to address the climate crisis.
Klein’s work appeared in publications such as The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and The Nation.
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bc219a893653ac22ab887a140c781771 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Knud-Rasmussen | Knud Rasmussen | Knud Rasmussen
Knud Rasmussen, in full Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen, (born June 7, 1879, Jakobshavn, Greenland—died December 21, 1933, Gentofte, Denmark), Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnologist who, in the course of completing the longest dog-sledge journey to that time, across the American Arctic, made a scientific study of virtually every tribe in that vast region.
Partly of Inuit descent himself and equipped with a thorough mastery of the language, Rasmussen wintered among the most northerly tribe in the world, the Polar Inuit of northwestern Greenland (1902–04). He studied the possibility of introducing reindeer husbandry to western Greenland (1905), spent the next two years again among the Polar Inuit, and founded a permanent station at Thule, Greenland, in 1910. Its purpose was to provide a trading centre for the population and a base for expeditions. With three companions, he crossed the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1912 from Thule to the northeast coast. His expedition of 1916–18 surveyed the north coast of Greenland. In 1919 he went to Angmagssalik in eastern Greenland to collect Inuit tales.
On September 7, 1921, at Upernavik, he began the great expedition during which he planned to visit every tribe from Greenland to the Bering Strait. After investigations in northeastern Canada, on March 4, 1923, he set off on his trek across the continent and reached Point Barrow, Alaska, on May 23, 1924. Along the way he traced migration routes and observed the basic unity of Arctic cultures. He described this expedition in Across Arctic America (1927).
On subsequent expeditions from Thule, Rasmussen made cartographic, archaeological, and ethnographical studies in southeastern Greenland. His rich literary production includes travel descriptions and translations of Inuit mythology and songs as well as scientific works, such as Grønland, Langs Polhavet (1919; Greenland by the Polar Sea).
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e6c2bb5ae4ba32ad6200ada7a60c7830 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ko-Un | Ko Un | Ko Un
Ko Un, (born August 1, 1933, Kunsan, North Cholla province, Japanese-occupied Korea [now in South Korea]), prolific Korean poet who gained an international readership with verse informed by both his political activism in Korea and a broader concern for humanity.
Ko was born in a farming village, and his schooling took place under Japanese authorities who were intent on suppressing Korean language and culture, especially during World War II. He began writing poetry in 1945. Physically slight and emotionally sensitive, Ko as a young adult endured the deadly struggle between the communists and nationalists and the viciousness of the ensuing Korean War (1950–53). He was traumatized by the all-pervasiveness of death and the loss of friends and family in the turmoil of the period, and he lost hearing in one ear as a result of a suicide attempt. In 1952 he sought solace by becoming a Son (Zen) Buddhist monk. He continued to write and published his first book of poetry, Pian-gamseong (“Transcendental Sensibility”), in 1960.
Ko’s anomie became more pronounced after militarists under Gen. Park Chung-Hee seized power in South Korea in 1961. Ko left the monastic life in 1962, and in 1970 he attempted suicide a second time. Ko embraced Korean nationalism in the 1970s and became actively involved in social and political causes. His activism led to two arrests and short prison terms in the following six years. In 1980 he was given a 20-year sentence for antigovernment activities and was jailed in a military prison, where one of his fellow prisoners was opposition leader Kim Dae-Jung, later president of South Korea and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Often kept in total darkness in his cell, Ko later related that he began to envision personalities he had known in his life, from the time when he was a boy in the countryside to his days as a political activist in the capital, as well as figures from national history. He decided then to write a poem about every person he had known. The first three volumes of his Man’inbo (“Ten Thousand Lives”) project were published in 1986 in Korean.
Ko was pardoned and released from prison in 1982, and in 1985 he married and moved to a village, Anseong, south of Seoul. In the much more liberal South Korean political climate that followed the democratic constitution of 1987, Ko flourished as a widely admired poet and leader in the Korean cultural scene. He was elected chairman of the Association of Korean Arts for 1989–90 and served as president of the Association of Writers for National Literature (1992–94). He accepted a resident professorship in the graduate school of Kyonggi University in Seoul. In 1998 and 1999 Ko was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University’s Harvard-Yenching Institute. A proponent of Korean reunification, Ko in 1998 led the first South Korean delegation to North Korea and recorded his observations in a book of poems, Nam kwa puk (2000; “South and North”).
Ko’s first volume of poetry in English translation, The Sound of My Waves, was published in 1992. His later books in English translation included Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems (1997); Ten Thousand Lives (2005), excerpts from the first 10 volumes of the Ten Thousand Lives project; The Tree Way Tavern (2006); and First Person Sorrowful (2012). Ko’s work drew the attention of prominent American poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hass, and Gary Snyder, all of whom contributed forewords to these books. Ko also published novels, drama, and literary criticism.
Despite Ko’s career in political activism, his poetry is not didactic or shrill; rather, it reflects his study of the Chinese and Zen traditions and a concern with humanity that ran even deeper than his political beliefs. He began writing in a Modernist vein, but he soon turned out more lively, passionate, and down-to-earth verses that were rooted in Korea’s Chinese and Japanese legacies but that above all rejoiced in their Koreanness. His poetry is demotic and often brash, written to be read aloud, and its subjects are usually everyday people and commonplace occurrences. Ko’s poems run the gamut from multivolume epics and the mammoth Ten Thousand Lives project to Zen-infused, seemingly simple images.
In 2018 Ko became the centre of a sexual harassment scandal as various women publicly accused him of misconduct over the years. In the ensuing backlash, it was announced that his poems would be removed from textbooks, and the Seoul Metropolitan Library closed a section dedicated to his works. Ko denied any wrongdoing.
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e2e0e8dbb6aa682a0bd285cc2dd73edf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kobe-Bryant | Kobe Bryant | Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant, in full Kobe Bean Bryant, (born August 23, 1978, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died January 26, 2020, Calabasas, California), American professional basketball player, who helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) to five championships (2000–02 and 2009–10).
Bryant’s father, Joe (“Jelly Bean”) Bryant, was a professional basketball player who spent eight seasons in the NBA and eight more playing in Italy, where Bryant went to school. When his family returned to the United States, Bryant played basketball at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where he received several national Player of the Year awards and broke the southeastern Pennsylvania scoring record set by Wilt Chamberlain with 2,883 points. Bryant opted to forgo college and declared himself eligible for the NBA draft when he graduated from high school. The Charlotte Hornets chose him with the 13th pick of the 1996 draft. He was traded to the Lakers shortly thereafter and became the second youngest NBA player in history when the 1996–97 season opened. He quickly proved his merit with the Lakers and was selected for the NBA All-Star Game in just his second season, becoming the youngest All-Star.
Bryant was forced to share the role of the Lakers’ star player with his popular and talented teammate Shaquille O’Neal. The two had an uneasy relationship, but they found success under the leadership of Phil Jackson, who became coach of the Lakers in 1999. Bryant, a shooting guard, and O’Neal, a centre, meshed into a remarkably effective combination, and, by the time Bryant was 23, the Lakers had won three consecutive NBA championships.
After winning their third title in 2002, Bryant and the Lakers encountered difficulties. In the 2003 playoffs the Lakers were defeated in the second round. Several months later Bryant was accused of raping a young woman in Colorado. He maintained his innocence, and all charges were eventually dropped when the woman refused to testify after a monthslong campaign of harassment by fans of Bryant and some members of the media. (Bryant later apologized, admitting that he realized his accuser did not believe their sexual encounter was consensual, and a civil suit was settled in 2005.) The incident greatly tarnished his image. Led by Bryant, the Lakers returned to the finals in 2004, but they were upset by the Detroit Pistons. O’Neal subsequently was traded, and Bryant emerged as the team’s sole leader.
Bryant led the league in scoring during the 2005–06 and 2006–07 seasons, and in 2008 he was named the league’s MVP for the first time in his career. Bryant won his fourth NBA title in 2009, and he was named the finals MVP after averaging a stellar 32.4 points per game in the series. He led the Lakers to their third straight Western Conference championship in 2009–10, and he was once more named NBA finals MVP after the Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in a seven-game series. The Lakers won division titles in each of the following seasons but were eliminated in the second round of each postseason. Entering the 2012–13 season, the Lakers added superstars Steve Nash and Dwight Howard to their lineup and were considered one of the preseason title favourites, but the disappointing team was barely on pace to qualify for the final Western Conference playoff spot when Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon in April 2013, causing him to miss the rest of the season. (The Lakers were ultimately the eighth and final playoff seed that season and were swept in their first series.) He returned to the court in December 2013 but played in just six games before fracturing his kneecap and missing the remainder of that season as well. Bryant returned for the beginning of the 2014–15 season before he was again injured, tearing his rotator cuff in January 2015. He played almost all of the following season but again struggled, with a career-low .358 shooting percentage while averaging 17.6 points per game, and he retired following the last regular-season game of the 2015–16 season.
In addition to his professional accomplishments, he was a member of the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s basketball teams at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2012 London Olympic Games. In 2015 Bryant wrote the poem “Dear Basketball,” and two years later it served as the basis for a short film of the same name, which he also narrated. The work won an Academy Award for best animated short film. In 2018 Bryant published the book The Mamba Mentality: How I Play, in which he described his approach to basketball; the title reflected a nickname he bestowed upon himself during his playing days, “The Black Mamba.” On January 26, 2020, Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter were among a group traveling to a girls basketball game in a helicopter when it crashed, killing all nine people aboard.
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0c6ccd0938063f6fb0ca355f99ef653b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kodaira-Kunihiko | Kodaira Kunihiko | Kodaira Kunihiko
Kodaira Kunihiko, (born March 16, 1915, Tokyo, Japan—died July 26, 1997, Kōfu), Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954 for his work in algebraic geometry and complex analysis.
Kodaira attended the University of Tokyo (Ph.D., 1949). His dissertation attracted the attention of Hermann Weyl, who invited Kodaira to join him at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S., where he remained until 1961. After appointments at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland), and Stanford University (California), he returned to the University of Tokyo in 1967. He retired in 1985.
Kodaira was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam in 1954. Influenced by Weyl’s book on Riemann surfaces, Kodaira conducted research on Riemannian manifolds and Kählerian manifolds. It was in this latter area and in a special subset of these, the Hodge manifolds, that he achieved some of his most important results. In collaboration for many years with the American mathematician D.C. Spencer, he created a theory of the deformation of complex manifolds. Kodaira was principally an algebraic geometer, and his work in this field culminated in his remarkable proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem for functions of any number of variables. In later years he developed an interest in the teaching of mathematics and produced, in collaboration with others, a series of mathematics textbooks for elementary and secondary schools.
Kodaira’s publications include, with Georges de Rham, Harmonic Integrals (1950); with D.C. Spencer, On Deformations of Complex Analytic Structures (1957); with James Morrow, Complex Manifolds (1971); and Complex Manifolds and Deformation of Complex Structures (1986). His Collected Works was published in 1975.
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d4e215aaf51f67cb9bcd51253eb10831 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kodandera-Madappa-Cariappa | Kodandera Madappa Cariappa | Kodandera Madappa Cariappa
Kodandera Madappa Cariappa, byname Kipper, (born January 28, 1899, Shanivarsanthe, Coorg district, Mysore [now Kodagu district, Karnataka state], India—died May 15, 1993, Bangalore), Indian military officer and the first chief of staff of the Indian army after India became independent of Great Britain.
Cariappa was born and raised in a hilly region of what is now southwestern Karnataka state and was one of six children of an official in the British colonial administration of India. He was educated in Indian schools and at the Presidency College in Madras (now Chennai) and was described as being an active student who was interested in tennis and field hockey. Cariappa received military training during World War I (1914–18) but did not serve any active duty. After the end of the war, Indian politicians began demanding that the British start incorporating Indian officers into the British military in India. In 1919 Cariappa was in the first group of Indian candidates to be selected, and he was sent to Indore for training. From there he was commissioned into the Carnatic Infantry at Bombay (now Mumbai).
Cariappa was promoted to lieutenant in 1923, captain in 1927, major in 1938, lieutenant colonel by 1942, and then brigadier in 1946. Under the British, he served in a variety of posts, including the Middle East (1941–42) and Burma (now Myanmar; 1943–44). In 1942 he became the first Indian officer to be given command of a unit. Near the end of World War II, in recognition of his service there, he was inducted into the Order of the British Empire. During partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, just prior to independence, Cariappa oversaw the difficult task of dividing the Indian military establishment between Pakistan and India.
After India’s independence, Cariappa was appointed the deputy chief of general staff with the rank of major general. On promotion to the rank of lieutenant general, he became commander of the Eastern Army in November 1947. The following January he was named the army commander of the Delhi and East Punjab Command (now the Western Command).
In January 1949 Cariappa was named the first Indian commander in chief of the Indian army, replacing the British commanding general, Sir Roy Bucher. As army chief, Cariappa had a mandate to transform the army left by the British into a national military force. In the process of accomplishing that task, he established two new units—the Guards Brigade (1949; since 1958 Brigade of the Guards) and the Parachute Regiment (1952)—which were notable for being the first to recruit members from all castes and classes. In 1949 the U.S. military award of Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit was given to him by Pres. Harry S. Truman.
Cariappa retired from active military service in 1953, after which he served until 1956 as India’s high commissioner to Australia and New Zealand. He continued to be involved in the affairs of the Indian military, making visits to forces to boost morale during the wars India fought with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. He was a strong advocate of building up India’s industrial capacity in order to support the country’s military. He also emphasized the need for the military to remain apolitical and subservient to the civilian government. In 1986 the Indian government promoted Cariappa to the honorary rank of field marshal in recognition of his exemplary services to the country.
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6b0ac69900017aca6195a9463f1df6a0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Koiso-Kuniaki | Koiso Kuniaki | Koiso Kuniaki
Koiso Kuniaki, (born April 1, 1880, Utsunomiya, Japan—died Nov. 3, 1950, Tokyo), Japanese army general and prime minister during the final phase of World War II.
Koiso graduated from the Army Academy in 1900 at the top of his class, attended the Army War College, and served on active duty during the Russo-Japanese War. In 1930 he became chief of the Bureau of Military Affairs and in 1932 was appointed vice-minister of war. He later became commander of the 5th division and chief of staff of the Kantōgun, the military operation in China. From 1935 to 1938, Koiso, as commander in chief, directed military operations in Korea. During the Hiranuma (1939) and Yonai (1940) cabinets, he served as minister of overseas affairs.
At the onset of World War II Koiso returned to Korea as governor-general. After the fall of the Tōjō cabinet in 1944, he was appointed prime minister to carry on the war effort. He resigned in April 1945 as U.S. troops landed in Okinawa. He was convicted of war crimes and died while serving a life sentence.
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1c7870cdbd81ca9667cd73afca4bfdb4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Koizumi-Junichiro | Koizumi Junichiro | Koizumi Junichiro
Koizumi Junichiro, (born January 8, 1942, Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan), third-generation Japanese politician, who was prime minister of Japan from 2001 to 2006.
Both Koizumi’s father and grandfather served in the Diet (parliament). He graduated with a degree in economics from Keio University, Tokyo, in 1967 and then attended the London School of Economics. Upon his father’s death in 1969, he ran unsuccessfully for the seat, and in 1972 he ran again and was elected. In 1992–93 he was minister of posts and telecommunications and in 1988–89 and 1996–98 minister of health and welfare. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of the dominant Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) in 1995 and 1998; upon the resignation of Mori Yoshiro in April 2001, Koizumi ran for the post once more and won, and he was soon confirmed as prime minister. It was the first election of an LDP head in which party rank and file at the prefectural level as well as Diet members could vote, and he won by a decisive margin.
With a reputation as an unconventional advocate of reform both within the party and in the government, Koizumi enjoyed widespread popular appeal. He appointed a cabinet that slighted traditional party factions and included a record five women, among them Tanaka Makiko (daughter of former prime minister Tanaka Kakuei) as foreign minister. His stated economic goals—which included privatizing the country’s postal system, reducing government spending, and ending the practice of supporting failing businesses—met opposition in the Diet. He was conservative diplomatically, strongly supporting the United States following the September 11 attacks in 2001 and making annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine (where Japan’s war dead, notably those of World War II, are enshrined) that evoked protests by China and the two Koreas. Even though his policies were thought likely in the short term to deepen the country’s recession, the public remained supportive. In January 2002, however, his popular image as a reformer suffered when he dismissed from the cabinet the outspoken Tanaka, who had been openly critical of him. Nevertheless, his personal popularity remained high, and, in the national election of November 2003, he led the LDP to victory in parliamentary elections and was confirmed for another term as prime minister.
As Koizumi moved forward on his plans to privatize the country’s postal system (which included a savings bank and insurance business), he faced growing resistance due to fears of job losses and reduction in services. In 2005 the House of Councillors (upper house) defeated his postal-privatization plan, prompting Koizumi to call for new elections in the House of Representatives (lower house). He also purged the LDP of those opposed to his plan. Held in September, the election marked a decisive victory for the LDP, which won a majority of the seats. Due to LDP term limits, Koizumi left office in September 2006 and was succeeded by Abe Shinzo. In 2008 Koizumi announced that he would retire from politics when his term in the House of Representatives ended the following year; his son Shinjiro was elected to succeed him. The senior Koizumi initially maintained a low public profile, but, after the Fukushima accident in 2011, he became an outspoken critic of nuclear energy.
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336d06fd39593d0973d535cd189e6f86 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Komparu-Zempo | Komparu Zempō | Komparu Zempō
Komparu Zempō, also called Hachiro Motoyasu, (born 1454, Japan—died c. 1520, Japan), nō dramatist and actor, grandson of nō actor and dramatist Komparu Zenchiku.
Zempō was one of the last dramatists of nō’s classic period. He wrote one play, Hatsuyuki (“First Snow”), in the restrained and poetic manner of his grandfather. Most of his work, however, such as Arashiyama, was written to appeal to a wide popular audience through the use of novelty, action-filled plots, and innovative schemes. While Zempō was head teacher of the Komparu school, which under his father had favoured a conservative style of performance called shimogakari and had waned in popularity, it revived and once again presented performances at the court in Kyōto.
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7a2b0f23a1b9f28e18c611db98b5fe74 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konin-emperor-of-Japan | Kōnin | Kōnin
…the throne a new emperor, Kōnin, who was less enthralled with Buddhism. Kōnin’s son, the emperor Kammu, who was of a similar mind, shifted the capital first to Nagaoka and in 794 to Heian (or Heian-kyō; present Kyōto) to sever connections with the temples of Nara and reestablished government in…
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9dba291bb08550ba835e05d15ea7deaf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-Ernst-Ackermann | Konrad Ernst Ackermann | Konrad Ernst Ackermann
Konrad Ernst Ackermann, (baptized Feb. 4, 1712, Schwerin, Mecklenburg [Germany]—died Nov. 13, 1771, Hamburg), actor-manager who was a leading figure in the development of German theatre.
Conflicting accounts exist of Ackermann’s early adult years. He was probably not a trained scientist and surgeon, as has been widely reported, but was instead a soldier—and later an officer—in the Russian army until 1738. He was attracted to the theatre by reading the French playwright Molière and the Scandinavian writer Ludvig Holberg. During the years 1740–41 Ackermann received formal acting training in the Lüneburg company of Johann Friedrich Schönemann, who specialized in German adaptations of the French plays of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, and Voltaire.
In 1749 Ackermann married Sophie Charlotte Schröder, the leading lady of Schönemann’s company, and with her and a skilled troupe toured Russia, the Baltic states, and East Prussia for many years. It was also during this period that Ackermann was authorized to build an 800-seat theatre in Königsberg; it opened in 1755 and was the first privately owned playhouse in Germany. Soon afterward, however, the Seven Years’ War forced Ackermann to move to Switzerland and resume touring.
Gradually Ackermann developed a taste for domestic drama and a technique for acting parts in which he could mingle the comic and the sentimental. In 1765, with the actor and director Konrad Ekhof in his company, he built a modest playhouse in Hamburg. By opening night he was heavily in debt and dissension gripped his company. For the next year he had to lease his theatre, and he did not regain control over it until two years later. Shortly before his death he turned the management over to his stepson, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, who was to bring Shakespeare to the German stage.
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5e06bdde9dd720790944272609e2376e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-I | Konrad I | Konrad I
…was opening: a Polish duke, Conrad of Mazovia, with lands on the lower reaches of the Vistula River, needed help against the pagan Prussians.
In 1226 Conrad of Mazovia called in the German crusading order, generally known as the Teutonic Order, provided them with a territorial base, and assumed that after a joint conquest of the Prussian lands (later known as East Prussia) they would become his vassals. The Teutonic Knights,…
…lands by the Polish duke Conrad of Mazovia for help against Prussian incursions. The Prussian countryside was subdued, castles were built for German nobility, and many German peasants were settled there to farm the land. By the middle of the 14th century, the majority of the inhabitants of Prussia were…
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88e19b5f4e3883f0b4e92704ecddf35b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-von-Wurzburg | Konrad von Würzburg | Konrad von Würzburg
Konrad von Würzburg, (born c. 1225, Würzburg, Würzburg—died Aug. 31, 1287, Basel, Switz.), Middle High German poet who, during the decline of chivalry, sought to preserve the ideals of courtly life.
Of humble origin, he served a succession of patrons as a professional poet and eventually settled in Basel. His works range from love lyrics and short didactic poems (Sprüche) to full-scale epics, such as Partonopier und Meliur, on the fairy-lover theme, and Der Trojanerkrieg (The Trojan War), an account of the Trojan War. He is at his best in his shorter narrative poems, the secular romances Engelhart, Dasz Herzmaere (The Heart’s Tidings), and Keiser Otte mit dem Barte (Kaiser Otte with the Beard) and the religious legends Silvester, Alexius, and Pantaleon.
Konrad’s originality is one of form rather than content. Taking Gottfried von Strassburg, one of the masters of the epic of courtly life, as his model, he developed Gottfried’s stylized techniques often to the point of exaggeration. In one of his poems every syllable rhymes. The complexity and the explicitly didactic character of his poetry earned for him the esteem of his contemporaries. A century later the rising generation of artisan-poets known as Meistersingers named him as one of the “12 old masters” of medieval poetry from whom they claimed descent.
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a916667fa72f06b844be74bd1c489aec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-Witz | Konrad Witz | Konrad Witz
Konrad Witz, (born c. 1400, Rottweil [now in Germany]—died c. 1445, Basel or Geneva, Swiss Confederation [now Switzerland]), late Gothic Swiss painter who was one of the first European artists to incorporate realistic landscapes into religious paintings.
Little is known about Witz’s life or training, but in 1434 he entered the painters’ guild in Basel, where he worked most of his life. The Heilsspiegel altarpiece (c. 1435; now dispersed), generally agreed to be his earliest surviving work, displays numerous monumental, sculpturelike figures in small, bare rooms. In this altarpiece, such figures as the personification of “The Synagogue” are placed diagonally to the picture-plane in a simple, graceful pose, revealing Witz’s youthful ability to manipulate space, despite the panel’s inaccurate perspective.
Three panels from about 1440–43 are probably from a dispersed altarpiece. The “SS. Catherine and Mary Magdalene,” the “Meeting of Joachim and Anna,” and the “Annunciation” display a highly original handling of linear perspective, a sculptural sense of form, and a great sensitivity to the play of light upon the various textures of cloth, stone, and wood. The significance of these scenes is conveyed not through the use of the mystic symbolism prevalent in the art of northern Europe but through the faithful rendering of natural phenomena, making the scenes immediate and convincing. That aspect of Witz’s art is best exemplified by his masterpiece, “The Miraculous Draft of Fishes” (1444). In this work, Witz’s realism is so precise that he carefully distinguishes between the light reflected off the water’s surface and the light reflected off the stones beneath the shallow water. He convincingly renders the reflections of the disciples, the boat, and the buildings on the shore, as well as accurately recording in the background the landscape around Geneva.
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46e4db0b3fc1aec49196e653a3d90d47 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-Zuse | Konrad Zuse | Konrad Zuse
…’40s by the German engineer Konrad Zuse. He had been thinking about designing a better calculating machine, but he was advised by a calculator manufacturer in 1937 that the field was a dead end and that every computing problem had already been solved. Zuse had something else in mind, though.
Konrad Zuse had looked upon this possibility as “making a contract with the Devil” because of the potential for abuse, and he had chosen not to implement it in his machines. But self-modification was essential for achieving a true general-purpose machine.
Konrad Zuse developed the first real programming language, Plankalkül (“Plan Calculus”), in 1944–45. Zuse’s language allowed for the creation of procedures (also called routines or subroutines; stored chunks of code that could be invoked repeatedly to perform routine operations such as taking a square root)…
Konrad Zuse, a German engineer acting in virtual isolation from developments elsewhere, completed construction in 1941 of the first operational program-controlled calculating machine (Z3). In 1944 Howard Aiken and a group of engineers at International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation completed work on the
Meanwhile, in Germany, engineer Konrad Zuse had been thinking about calculating machines. He was advised by a calculator manufacturer in 1937 that the field was a dead end and that every computing problem had already been solved. Zuse had something else in mind,…
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57972a8931157da00dd696f116b43165 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Balmont | Konstantin Balmont | Konstantin Balmont
included the poets Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, and Zinaida Gippius. The second, more mystically and apocalyptically oriented generation included Aleksandr Blok (perhaps the most talented lyric poet Russia ever produced), the poet and theoretician Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the poet and prose writer
…first wave of Symbolists included Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), who translated a number of English poets and wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), a poet and translator of French Symbolist verse and of Virgil’s Aeneid, who for years was the leader…
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fe380950fc993a65ee2825980d1d470f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Chernenko | Konstantin Chernenko | Konstantin Chernenko
Konstantin Chernenko, in full Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, (born September 11 [September 24, New Style], 1911, Bolshaya Tes, Yeniseysk, Russian Empire [now in Krasnoyarsk kray, Russia]—died March 10, 1985, Moscow), chief political leader of the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death in 1985.
Born to a Russian peasant family in the Yeniseysk region of Siberia, Chernenko joined the Communist Party in 1931. Trained as a party propagandist, he held several administrative posts before becoming head of agitation and propaganda (agitprop) in Moldavia (1948–56), where he was first noticed by Leonid Brezhnev and brought to Moscow to head a similar department for the party’s Central Committee (1956–60). When Brezhnev took over the party in 1964, he made Chernenko his chief of staff. Chernenko was a full member of the Central Committee from 1971 and of the Politburo from 1977.
An old-line conservative, Chernenko traveled extensively with Brezhnev and was considered his aide, confidant, and, by some observers, his heir apparent. After Brezhnev’s death, however, he was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy to be head of the party and lost out to Yury V. Andropov, the former KGB chief, who became general secretary on November 12, 1982. However, Andropov had become mortally ill by the following August, and after his death six months later, Chernenko succeeded him as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 13, 1984. On April 12 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Like his predecessor, Chernenko began showing signs of deteriorating health shortly after taking office. His frequent absences from official functions because of illness left little doubt that his election had been an interim measure, and upon his death he was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
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00d27f6395c18e792c8992ecb556a8c1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Freiherr-von-Neurath | Konstantin, baron von Neurath | Konstantin, baron von Neurath
Konstantin, baron von Neurath, (born Feb. 2, 1873, Klein-Glattbach, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, Enzweihingen, W.Ger.), German diplomat who was Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister from 1933 to 1938.
After studying law at the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, Neurath entered the German foreign service in 1903. After World War I he served as minister to Denmark (from 1919), ambassador to Italy (from 1922), and ambassador to Great Britain (from 1930). From June 1932 he was foreign minister in the Papen and Schleicher cabinets and retained his post after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. In this post Neurath lent a veneer of conservative respectability to Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy. In February 1938 he was ousted by Hitler in favour of Joachim von Ribbentrop, and in March 1939 he was appointed Reichsprotektor for Bohemia and Moravia. During his tenure of office there, he abolished the Czech political parties and trade unions, instituted the Nürnberg racial laws in the protectorate, and made Czechoslovakian industry work for the German war effort. Nevertheless, in September 1941 Neurath was told by Hitler that his rule was “too lenient” and was dismissed.
He was captured by French troops in the closing days of World War II in Europe and was brought to trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg, found guilty, and sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment. He was released from Spandau prison in November 1954 after serving eight years and one month.
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6a42131e50b137eaf378b17090872b8e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Nikolayevich-Leontyev | Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev | Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev, Leontyev also spelled Leontiev, (born Jan. 25 [Jan. 13, old style], 1831, Kudinovo, near Kaluga, Russia—died Nov. 24 [Nov. 12, O.S.], 1891, near Moscow), Russian essayist who questioned the benefits derived by Russia from following contemporary industrial and egalitarian developments in Europe.
A military surgeon in the Crimean War, Leontyev later entered the Russian consular service, where he held posts in Crete, Edirne, and Salonika. In 1879 he became assistant editor of the newspaper Varshavsky dnevnik (“Warsaw Diary”), and a year later he joined the staff of the Moscow censorship department. In 1887 he settled in a small house near the Optina monastery, where he secretly took monastic vows but never lived under strict monastic discipline.
Leontyev wrote with a clarity and a persistent personal conviction rare among Russian political thinkers. He tried to find in the Russian empire an alternative which could civilize an Eastern world that already recoiled from the commercial-minded, democratic West. He elaborated his thoughts on this subject in a number of remarkable essays, many of which were collected in the volume Vostok, Rossiya i slavyanstvo (1885–86; “The East, Russia and Slavdom”). Leontyev also wrote novels and short stories and a revealing autobiography, Moya literaturnaya sudba (1875; “My Literary Destiny”). He has been called the Russian Nietzsche.
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5682d0db70d98f39ef0de5f377e37820 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Pats | Konstantin Päts | Konstantin Päts
Konstantin Päts, (born Feb. 11 [Feb. 23, New Style], 1874, Pärnu district, Estonia, Russian Empire—died Jan. 18, 1956, Kalinin [now Tver] oblast, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Estonian statesman who served as the last president of Estonia (1938–40) before its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940.
Of peasant stock, Päts was educated in the law but began a career in journalism in 1901, when he founded the Estonian-language newspaper Teataja (“Announcer”), which reflected Päts’s socialistic leanings. In 1904 Päts became deputy mayor of Tallinn. During an Estonian rising in connection with the 1905 Russian Revolution, Päts, although he had called for restraint, was sentenced to death and had to flee Estonia. He was not able to return until 1910, at which time he served a brief prison term.
Active in the movement for Estonian independence after 1917, Päts became head of a provisional government when independence was declared in February 1918. Almost immediately, Päts was arrested by Estonia’s German occupiers, but he resumed his post after the November 1918 armistice.
In 1921–22, 1923, and 1932–33 Päts served as riigivanem (equivalent to president and prime minister) of Estonia. After a new constitution providing for a stronger executive was approved in a 1933 referendum, Päts learned of a planned coup d’état by the fascist “Vap” movement, which had sponsored the constitution. He arrested the leaders of the movement and assumed dictatorial powers. Päts’s authoritarian regime lasted until the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in June 1940. He was deported to the U.S.S.R. at the start of the occupation and died there.
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bdf94db6029efdd0502cadfaed3e1c66 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Stepanovich-Melnikov | Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov | Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov, (born July 22 [Aug. 3, New Style], 1890, Moscow, Russian Empire—died Nov. 28, 1974, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Russian architect who is usually associated with Constructivism (an art movement that combined an appreciation of technology and the machine with the use of modern industrial materials), though his unique vision had its foundations in classical forms and embraced the best of several contemporary movements.
Melnikov was born into a peasant family and at age 13 started working as an office boy in an engineering firm. Recognized for his talent by his employer, Melnikov entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture at 15, first working in the art department (1905–11) and then in the architecture department (1912–17). His diploma project, a plan for a trade school, was designed in a classic style, and it secured him a place in the studio of the Neoclassical architect Ivan Zholtovsky.
During the early 1920s Melnikov began to search for a new language of architecture that would suit the philosophy of the Revolutionary era. In 1923, at the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Exposition in Moscow, Melnikov built the expressive and dynamic Makhorka (Tobacco) Pavilion, which became the exhibition’s main attraction. This work resulted in many commissions, one of the foremost of which was for Vladimir Lenin’s sarcophagus in the Lenin Mausoleum. Melnikov’s design was in the form of a glass crystal pyramid (1924).
In 1924 Melnikov won a contest to design the Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. His pavilion, built of wood and glass, was hailed by the French press as one of the most innovative architectural works of the 20th century.
In the mid-1920s the Soviet government was busy designing a communist, ostensibly modern, urbanized way of life. During this period the government undertook the building of a number of workers’ clubs. Melnikov took an active part in this construction, particularly in the workers’ clubs of the Rusakov, Frunze, and Kauchuk factories, as well as the Dulyovo porcelain factory in Moscow (1927–30).
One of Melnikov’s most original and avant-garde works was his own house in Moscow (1927–30), which was made up of two interlocking three-story cylinders. Sixty-two hexagonal corbeled windows were cut into the walls so that a maximum amount of sunlight could reach the interior throughout the day. Each floor in each cylinder was reserved for a special function: bedrooms, living rooms, office, kitchen, cloakroom.
Melnikov’s active building period stopped at the end of the 1920s. With the introduction of the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan, new communist requirements were placed on art. Architecture was to submit to a pseudoclassical canon that became known as “Stalinist Empire Style.” Melnikov’s bold Constructivist solutions were no longer in step with the official system. Although he continued directing architectural studios and created grandiose town-planning projects, these remained on the drawing board, and Melnikov’s name sank into oblivion.
It was well into the “Khrushchev thaw” that Melnikov’s 75th birthday was observed, and in 1967 he was awarded an honorary doctorate. Despite a resurgence of interest in his work, he did not return to work in his former profession. In the final years of his life Melnikov worked on his book Arkhitektura moey zhizni: tvorcheskaya kontseptsiya, tvorcheskaya praktika (1985; “My Life’s Architecture: Creative Conception, Creative Practice”).
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27de270694426a4193d0b70da9f24153 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantin-Stoilov | Konstantin Stoilov | Konstantin Stoilov
Konstantin Stoilov, (born Sept. 23, 1853, Plovdiv [now in Bulgaria]—died March 23, 1901, Sofia, Bulg.), Bulgarian statesman, founder and leader of the conservative People’s Party, and prime minister of Bulgaria (1887, 1894–99) who played an important role in establishing the country’s democratic institutions and in fostering Bulgaria’s increased involvement with western Europe.
Stoilov graduated from the American-sponsored Robert College in Istanbul and was awarded a doctoral degree in law from Heidelberg University in Germany. He was one of the authors of the draft version of the Tŭrnovo constitution, which reestablished the Bulgarian state in 1879, following nearly five centuries of rule by the Ottoman Empire. He served as chief of staff for Alexander I and was one of the prince’s chief advisers until 1881, when the constitution was suspended.
After Alexander’s abdication in 1886, Stoilov headed the government under a regency made up of Stefan Stambolov, Petko Karavelov, and Sava Mutkurov, but he resigned as soon as the new prince (later king), Ferdinand, was elected by the National Assembly (1887). In the process, Stoilov gave way to his ardent intellectual opponent Stambolov, who became prime minister. After the fall of Stambolov’s government, Stoilov again became prime minister. During his five years of rule, he contributed greatly to Bulgaria’s modernization and, through skillful diplomacy, increased the country’s ties with western Europe while normalizing relations with Russia.
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fb5b4e7a6fe3abd6a3abdf563846b1eb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantine-Gamsakhurdia | Konstantine Gamsakhurdia | Konstantine Gamsakhurdia
…of the 20th century was Konstantine Gamsakhurdia; like Robakidze, he was influenced by German culture (especially the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), and in his work he combined the ethos of the Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke with Caucasian folk myth. Befriended by Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria—then Stalin’s satrap in the Caucasus, later…
…Tabidze were well-known poets, and Konstantin Gamsakhurdia was celebrated for his historical novels.
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9dfd1f730fa92ba13725cb1e5ad90eb9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Koprulu-Fazil-Mustafa-Pasa | Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Paşa | Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Paşa
Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Paşa, (born 1637, Vezirköprü, Anatolia, Ottoman Empire [now in Turkey]—died Aug. 19, 1691, Slankamen, Serbia), Ottoman vizier and then grand vizier (1689–91) who helped overthrow the sultan Mehmed IV but was himself killed in the disastrous Battle of Slankamen (1691).
Fazıl Mustafa Paşa was the second son of the grand vizier Köprülü Mehmed Paşa. He received a theological education, but he spent most of his early years on military service with his brother Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, the next grand vizier. After his brother’s death (1676) the grand vizierate went to a brother-in-law, Kara Mustafa, whose failure to take Vienna (1683) in the great siege caused the collapse of the whole imperial edifice that the first two Köprülüs had erected. Fazıl Mustafa Paşa, who had been vizier since 1680, had to resign. Later, however, when another brother-in-law, Siyâvuş, became grand vizier, Fazıl Mustafa Paşa was made second vizier (Oct. 2, 1687), and they both played a major role in deposing Mehmed IV. But soon rebels turned against them, and Fazıl Mustafa Paşa saved his life only with the protection of the new sultan, Süleyman II.
In 1689, when the Austrian army advanced in the Balkans, Fazıl Mustafa Paşa was called to the grand vizierate. In the campaign of 1690 he liberated Nish and Belgrade from occupation; he was killed fighting an imperial army under Louis of Baden at Slankamen; Fazıl Mustafa Paşa was mortally shot while rushing to support his right wing. It fell to Mehmed Paşa’s nephew Amca-zâde Hüseyin Paşa, grand vizier between Sept. 13, 1697, and Sept. 29, 1702, to conclude the peace treaty with the allies at Carlowitz (Jan. 26, 1699).
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a2450371d6341d418d2fad1f6afe0908 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kosho | Kōshō | Kōshō
The sculpture by Unkei’s son Kōshō (died 1237) of Kūya, the rugged old mendicant who advocated the unceasing repetition of the nembutsu prayer, is depicted realistically as determined and gnarly but with the fantastic grace note of a string of small Amida figures emerging from his mouth—a literal representation of…
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baf245eba3c7c046bb59bc55b78fe6c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kostas-Kariotakis | Kóstas Kariotákis | Kóstas Kariotákis
Kóstas Kariotákis, Kariotákis also spelled Karyotákis, (born 1896, Trípolis, Greece—died July 20, 1928, Préveza), Greek poet influenced by the 19th-century French Symbolist poets.
Kariotákis spent much of his lonely childhood in Crete. He read law at Athens and won a prize for poetry in 1920. After obtaining his degree he worked as a government clerk in Athens, where he developed a friendship with the young poet Maria Polidoúri. Later he was transferred to Pátrai and thence to Préveza, where he shot himself.
Kariotákis’ three volumes of poetry show the influence of the New School of Poetry of Athens, founded in about 1880 by Kostís Palamás, which revolted against Katharevusa, the stilted and archaic official language of Greece, and against the emotionalism of the Romantics. His poetry also reveals the Symbolist influence in addition to the loneliness and despair of his childhood.
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148a81290da42523796121c12638dd29 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Krishna-Prasad-Bhattarai | Krishna Prasad Bhattarai | Krishna Prasad Bhattarai
…the president of the NC, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, but also including the moderate faction of the communist movement, the United Leftist Front.
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11629ab41b67fabf1bc10873b014d091 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kumarapala | Kumārapāla | Kumārapāla
Kumarapala (reigned c. 1143–72) was responsible for consolidating the kingdom. He is also believed to have become a Jain and to have encouraged Jainism in western India. Hemacandra, an outstanding Jain scholar noted for his commentaries on political treatises, was a well-known figure at the…
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3dbfbe0e84abfdb4506598f63586745d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kuribayashi-Tadamichi | Kuribayashi Tadamichi | Kuribayashi Tadamichi
Kuribayashi Tadamichi to organize the defense of Iwo Jima. Despite the apparent futility of resistance, Kuribayashi resolved to make the United States bleed for its victory. He began by ordering the construction of a tunnel network beneath the island to provide both protection and a…
…under command of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, was more than 20,000.
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32292bf366e57bd89af322185d8eb840 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurigalzu-II | Kurigalzu II | Kurigalzu II
Kurigalzu II (c. 1332–c. 1308) fought against the Assyrians but was defeated by them. His successors sought to ally themselves with the Hittites in order to stop the expansion of the Assyrians. During the reign of Kashtiliash IV (c. 1232–c. 1225), Babylonia waged war on…
…including a life-sized statue of Kurigalzu II.
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babfbab92bb677ff829959f583ad3208 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurosawa-Akira/Later-works | Later works | Later works
In 1960 Kurosawa set up Kurosawa Productions, of which he became president, and began to produce his own works. As producer, however, he was continually embarrassed by economic difficulties. Throughout the 1960s, Kurosawa made a number of entertainment films, mainly with samurai as leading characters; Yojimbo (1961; “The Bodyguard”) is a representative work. Akahige (1965; Red Beard) combines elements of entertainment with a sentimental humanism. In the 1960s, however, Japanese cinema fell into an economic depression, and Kurosawa’s plans, in most cases, were found by film companies to be too expensive. As a result, Kurosawa attempted to work with Hollywood producers, but each of the projects ended in failure. At the Kyōto studio in 1968, for 20th Century Fox, he started shooting Tora! Tora! Tora!, a war film dealing with the air attack on Pearl Harbor. The work progressed slowly, however, and the producer, fearing an excess in estimated cost, dismissed Kurosawa and replaced him with another director. After a six-year interval, Kurosawa at last managed to present another of his films, Dodesukaden (1970; Dodeskaden). His first work in colour, a comedy of poor people living in slums, it recaptured much of the poignancy of his best works but failed financially. The period of personal despondency and artistic silence that followed ended in the mid-1970s when Kurosawa filmed Dersu Uzala (1975) in Siberia at the invitation of the Soviet government. This story of a Siberian hermit won wide acclaim.
Kagemusha (“The Shadow Warrior”), released in 1980, was the director’s first samurai film in 14 years. It concerns a petty thief who is chosen to impersonate a powerful feudal lord killed in battle. This film was notable for its powerful battle scenes. Kurosawa’s next film, Ran (1985; “Chaos”), was an even more successful samurai epic. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in 16th-century Japan, the film uses sons instead of daughters as the aging monarch’s ungrateful children. Ran was acclaimed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films in the grandeur of its imagery, the intellectual depth of its screen adaptation, and the intensity of its dramatic performances. His last three films—Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1990), and Madadayo (1993)—were not as well received.
Although other Japanese filmmakers acquired substantial international followings after the pioneering success of Rashomon, Kurosawa’s films continue to command great interest in the West. They represent a unique combination of elements of Japanese art—in the subtlety of their feeling and philosophy, the brilliance of their visual composition, and their treatment of samurai and other historic Japanese themes—with a distinctly Western feeling for action and drama and a frequent use of stories from Western sources, both literary classics and popular thrillers. Kurosawa was a recipient of numerous film and career honours, including a Golden Lion for Career Achievement at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, an Academy Award for lifetime achievement (1989), the Directors Guild of America’s lifetime achievement award (1992), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film (1992).
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43204d5d9054668f3d840dabe3b9f002 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Adler | Kurt Adler | Kurt Adler
Kurt Adler, (born March 1, 1907, Neuhaus, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died September 21, 1977, Butler, New Jersey, U.S.), Austrian American chorus master and opera conductor who was known for his three-decade-long tenure (1943–73) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. In addition to conducting more than 20 different operas and preparing the Met’s chorus for 30 years, Adler edited many volumes of music and published the authoritative book The Art of Accompanying and Coaching (1965, corrected edition issued 1971, reprinted 1980).
Adler began studying music at age six in Neuhaus and gave his first performance as a pianist at age 14. He continued his studies in music and trained to be a conductor in Vienna in the 1920s with several Austrian instructors, including musicologist Guido Adler, composer Karl Weigl, and conductor Erich Kleiber. Adler was first an assistant conductor in Berlin, and then he found positions in Prague and Kiev.
In October 1938 Adler, a Jew, fled Nazi persecution. Adler’s parents, however, along with the rest of the Jewish community in his hometown in Austria, were deported by the Gestapo in 1942. His parents were sent to Belzec, an extermination camp in eastern Poland. When Adler arrived in the United States in 1938, he settled in New York City and proceeded to tour the continent as a pianist. The next year Adler became the music director of Friendship House, a new immigrants’ community centre.
In 1943 Adler became the assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, five days before his March 26 debut on the Met stage, for which he conducted music from Act II of Léo Delibes’s Lakmé. He was appointed chorus master in 1945 and then, in 1951, debuted as the Met’s lead conductor. Fluent in several languages, he trained the chorus in both Germanic and Romance languages, tasks which often required two chorus masters. His last appearance took place not in the opera house but in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, on July 9, 1972, as part of a free Public Parks series. For that event, Adler led the orchestra and cast in a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.
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f30f6a087bfee1aafb27cb89cee38320 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Alder | Kurt Alder | Kurt Alder
Kurt Alder, (born July 10, 1902, Königshütte, Prussia [now Chorzów, Pol.]—died June 20, 1958, Cologne, W.Ger.), German chemist who was the corecipient, with the German organic chemist Otto Diels, of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their development of the Diels-Alder reaction, or diene synthesis, a widely used method of synthesizing cyclic organic compounds.
Alder studied chemistry at the University of Berlin and then at the University of Kiel in Germany, where he received his doctorate in 1926. In 1928 Alder and Diels discovered, and published a paper on, the reaction of dienes with quinones. The Diels-Alder reaction consists essentially of the linking of a diene, which is a substance containing two alternate double molecular bonds, to a dienophile, which is a compound containing a pair of doubly or triply bonded carbon atoms. The diene and dienophile readily react to form a six-membered ring compound. Similar reactions had been recorded by others, but Alder and Diels provided the first experimental proof of the nature of the reaction and demonstrated its application to the synthesis of a wide range of ring compounds. Diene synthesis can be effected without the use of powerful chemical reagents. It has been used to synthesize such complex molecules as morphine, reserpine, cortisone, and other steroids, the insecticides dieldrin and aldrin, and other alkaloids and polymers.
Alder was a professor of chemistry at the University of Kiel from 1934 to 1936. He applied his fundamental research to the development of plastics while working as a research director for IG Farben (1936), then the world’s largest chemical concern. In 1940 he became professor of chemistry and director of the chemical institute at the University of Cologne. In 1943 he discovered the ene reaction, which is similar to the diene synthesis, and which also found widespread use in chemical synthesis.
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e482f5be9a210e4962dac2c9d747270a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Baier | Kurt Baier | Kurt Baier
…Toulmin (1922–2009), the contemporary philosopher Kurt Baier, and others, which examined the contexts of various moral situations and explored the kinds of justification appropriate for each.
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c59cebd28e51948a328b28ecce37c283 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Meyer | Kurt Meyer | Kurt Meyer
…1926 Mark was invited by Kurt Meyer, the director of IG Farben’s polymer research laboratory, to be his assistant director. Mark worked on electron diffraction, a monograph (1928) with Meyer on cellulose that demolished the classic micellar theory of polymer formation, an equation relating the viscosity of a polymer solution…
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e7a27a33cbcfcaa4f59a396210298d9f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Tank | Kurt Tank | Kurt Tank
Kurt Tank, (born February 24, 1898, Bromberg-Schwedenhöhe, Germany—died June 5, 1983, Munich), leading aircraft designer and test pilot of the mid-20th century.
After service in World War I, Tank studied electrical engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology. In 1924, after earning his pilot’s license, he began work at the Rohrbach aircraft factory. There he established the design and testing department.
Tank left Rohrbach in 1930 to work for the Messerschmitt aircraft company (see Willy Messerschmitt), only to leave in 1931 to become the design director and head of flight testing for Focke-Wulf in Bremen. It was there that he developed world-famous aircraft such as the Fw 190 and the Fw 200 Condor. The former was one of Germany’s most important fighter aircraft in World War II, with some 20,000 examples produced in its different variants. The latter began as a long-range passenger airliner and was later used by the Luftwaffe for troop transport, collection of intelligence, and bombing missions. As the war progressed, Tank began plans for a new fighter jet, known as the Ta 183 (some German planes had begun to be prefaced with some form of their designer’s initials rather than those of the manufacturer).
After the war Tank immigrated to Argentina, where he continued work on the Ta 183. He created a variant of it in the I.Ae. 27 Púlqui I, also called the Arrow I, South America’s first jet-powered swept-wing airplane. He continued to refine the design on the Púlqui II, which, like its predecessor, was not successful as a production model. In the mid-1950s Tank moved to India, where he helped develop the country’s very successful HF 24 interceptor. In the late 1960s he returned to Germany to become a consultant for MBB (Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm).
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cd9ed778d296c6e6f461ad59f64e3f2a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Waldheim | Kurt Waldheim | Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Waldheim, (born Dec. 21, 1918, Sankt Andrä-Wördern, Austria—died June 14, 2007, Vienna), Austrian diplomat and statesman who served two terms as the fourth secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), from 1972 to 1981. He was the elected president of Austria from 1986 to 1992.
Waldheim’s father, a Czech by ethnic origin, changed his name from Waclawik to Waldheim. Kurt Waldheim served in the Austrian army as a volunteer (1936–37) before he began to study for a diplomatic career. He was soon conscripted into the German army, however, and served on the Russian front until 1941, when he was wounded. Waldheim’s later claims that he spent the rest of World War II studying law at the University of Vienna were contradicted by the rediscovery in 1986 of documents suggesting that he had been a German army staff officer stationed in the Balkans from 1942 to 1945.
Waldheim entered the diplomatic service in 1945. He served in Paris (1948–51) and was head of the personnel department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna from 1951 to 1955. He led Austria’s first delegation to the UN (1955) and subsequently represented the country in Canada (1956–60), first as minister plenipotentiary and then as ambassador. After a period as director general for political affairs in the Austrian Foreign Ministry, he became his country’s ambassador to the UN (1964–68, 1970–71). During 1968–70 he served as Austrian foreign minister. After the electoral defeat of the Austrian People’s Party, Waldheim was elected chairman of the Safeguards Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1971 he ran for president on the People’s Party ticket but lost.
Waldheim’s UN secretaryship beginning in 1972 was characterized as efficient and ministerial. He oversaw effective and sometimes massive relief efforts in Bangladesh, Nicaragua, the Sudan-Sahel area of Africa, and Guatemala, as well as peacekeeping operations in Cyprus, the two Yemens, Angola, Guinea, and, especially, the Middle East. Waldheim also took a special interest in the future of Namibia and South Africa. He was reelected in 1976 despite some opposition from less-developed countries, but a third term was vetoed by the Chinese government in 1981.
In 1986 Waldheim ran once again as the People’s Party candidate for president of Austria. His candidacy became controversial, however, with the dissemination of wartime and postwar documents that pointed to his having been an interpreter and intelligence officer for a German army unit that engaged in brutal reprisals against Yugoslav Partisans and civilians and deported most of the Jewish population of Salonika (Thessaloníki), Greece, to Nazi death camps in 1943. Waldheim admitted that he had not been candid about his past but disclaimed all knowledge of or participation in wartime atrocities. He won election to the Austrian presidency in June 1986 for a six-year term. An international investigation by a committee of historians cleared Waldheim of complicity in war crimes, but as president he was a rather isolated figure on the international scene. Consequently, he chose not to run for a second term in 1992. The “Waldheim affair” triggered a fundamental debate in Austria about the country’s past during World War II.
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1ae3f7c92721e902da6e7bcc770ca312 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kutir-Nahhunte-I | Kutir-Nahhunte I | Kutir-Nahhunte I
The Elamite kings Shutruk-Nahhunte and Kutir-Nahhunte invaded Mesopotamia and succeeded in securing a large number of ancient monuments (such as the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin and the stele bearing the law code of Hammurabi). Shilkhak-In-Shushinak campaigned vigorously, and for at least a short period his domain included most of Mesopotamia…
Kutir-Nahhunte I attacked Samsuiluna (c. 1749–c. 1712 bc), Hammurabi’s son, and dealt so serious a defeat to the Babylonians that the event was remembered more than 1,000 years later in an inscription of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. It may be assumed that with this stroke…
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9a98e353c789cb572f98c529e93117c7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kyle-Abraham | Kyle Abraham | Kyle Abraham
Kyle Abraham, (born August 14, 1977, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American contemporary dancer and choreographer who founded (2006) the company Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion (A/I/M; later A.I.M.). He was a master at mixing hip-hop, street, and modern dance styles.
Abraham grew up in a middle-class African American neighbourhood in Pittsburgh. He began dancing when he was cast in a high-school musical. Having discovered his vocation late in life—for a dancer—Abraham decided to become a choreographer rather than a performer, although he was to excel at both professions. After earning a B.F.A. (2000) at State University of New York Purchase College, he performed briefly with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He soon resumed his studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (TSA). In 2006 he received an M.F.A. and choreographed a riveting solo, Inventing Pookie Jenkins. In that piece Abraham’s movements, alternately fierce and flowing, and ankle-length white skirt upended stereotypes about masculinity. In 2007 choreographer David Dorfman, a summer instructor at TSA, invited Abraham to join the David Dorfman Dance troupe.
During this time, Abraham established (2006) A/I/M (later rebranded as A.I.M.), for which he choreographed many acclaimed dances. The works offered ruminations on identity, history, and community. In The Radio Show (2010), Abraham wove together steps inspired by both his memories of a defunct Pittsburgh radio station and his emotions connected to an illness of his father’s. For his 2012 ensemble work Pavement, Abraham revisited urban life in 1990s Pittsburgh while also drawing inspiration from John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood and W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk. The action for Pavement takes place on an onstage basketball court and addresses the impact of domestic, police, and gang violence on black communities. The dancemaker next created When the Wolves Came In (2014), a meditation on civil rights with designs by Glenn Ligon and music by Robert Glasper. Additional pieces included Absent Matter (2015); INDY (2018), his first solo in many years; and Meditation: A Silent Prayer (2018), a collaborative piece with the artist Carrie Mae Weems that addressed police brutality.
Abraham also choreographed for other companies. His repertoire for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) and Ailey II (AAADT’s junior company) included The Corner (2010), Another Night (2012), and the last two movements of his trilogy Untitled America (2016). He also branched out by creating a duet for himself and New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan. The two premiered The Serpent and the Smoke at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2013. Five years later Abraham choreographed a piece for the New York City Ballet, his first for that company. In addition, Rag & Bone fashion designers Marcus Wainwright and David Neville launched their fall-winter 2014 collection with a video choreographed by Abraham; it featured him and Indigo Ciochetti performing in black knitwear.
Abraham’s numerous honours included a Bessie Award and a Princess Grace Award (both 2010). In 2012 he received a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, and the following year he was named a MacArthur fellow. In 2016 Abraham was a recipient of a Doris Duke Artist Award, given to those who foster continuing excellence in the performing arts.
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9ee5e8888318765891e2fb6b1b2ddc3a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kylie-Minogue | Kylie Minogue | Kylie Minogue
Kylie Minogue, in full Kylie Ann Minogue, (born May 28, 1968, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), Australian singer who in the late 1980s became a pop superstar in Australia and Europe and who continued to enjoy success into the 21st century.
Minogue, who had been acting since she was a child, first garnered fame in Australia and Great Britain for her role (1986–88) on the popular soap opera Neighbours. She subsequently left television for a singing career, making her recording debut in 1988 with the album Kylie—as part of the London hit factory Stock, Aitken & Waterman—and registering her first number one single, “I Should Be So Lucky.” Her cover of Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” introduced her to an American audience, although she would not return to the top 10 of the Billboard pop singles chart for another 14 years. With media savvy and a strong work ethic, the diminutive Minogue saw her career skyrocket in Europe. Her attractive appearance sparked further publicity, and she soon became a favourite of the tabloids.
After parting with Stock, Aitken & Waterman in the early 1990s, Minogue broadened her image, in part by cultivating an edgy look and recording with rock musicians such as Nick Cave. Such experimentation proved only sporadically successful, however, and she returned to traditional dance-pop on the album Light Years (2000), which boasted such hits as “Spinning Around.” Minogue continued in that vein the following year with Fever (2001). On the strength of its sultry single “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” which went to number one in multiple countries (and to number seven in the United States), the album became an international blockbuster. The release of Body Language (2003) extended her renewed popularity, and in 2004 she won her first Grammy Award, for best dance recording, with the single “Come into My World.”
In 2005 Minogue announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She subsequently underwent surgery, and, after a recovery period of more than a year, she began touring again in late 2006. Her subsequent albums included X (2007) and Aphrodite (2010), on which disco and electro-pop remained prominent elements of her sound. Kiss Me Once (2014) featured songs written and produced by Pharrell Williams and Sia, among others, and Golden (2018) was flavoured with country music. Minogue returned to dance-pop for DISCO (2020), and with that release she became the first female artist to reach the top position on the British album chart in each of five consecutive decades.
Periodically throughout her musical career, Minogue continued to act. Notable film credits included Street Fighter (1994), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012), and San Andreas (2015). She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008, and three years later she was inducted into the Australia Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame.
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fe0f0d8bf5ab47c946f3aa0d1286c84e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/L-M-Mladen | L. M. Mladen | L. M. Mladen
An American scholar, L.M. Mladen, remarked of this grant and others made by Charles IV at the same time:
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e026cb6579926bc9fe386a337333ed06 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/L-Ron-Hubbard | L. Ron Hubbard | L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard, in full Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, (born March 13, 1911, Tilden, Nebraska, U.S.—died January 24, 1986, San Luis Obispo, California), American novelist and founder of the Church of Scientology.
Hubbard grew up in Helena, Montana, and studied at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the 1930s and ’40s he published short stories and novels in a variety of genres, including horror and science fiction. After serving in the navy in World War II, he published Dianetics (1950), which detailed his theories of the human mind. He eventually moved away from Dianetics’ focus on the mind to a more religious approach to the human condition, which he called Scientology. After founding the Church of Scientology in 1954, Hubbard struggled to gain recognition of it as a legitimate religion and was often at odds with tax authorities and former members who accused the church of fraud and harassment. He lived many years on a yacht and remained in seclusion for his last six years.
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112d634f8395665b7ff960fd58d8f1f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/L-S-Amery | L.S. Amery | L.S. Amery
L.S. Amery, in full Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery, (born Nov. 22, 1873, Gorakhpur, India—died Sept. 16, 1955, London, Eng.), British politician who was a persistent advocate of imperial preference and tariff reform and did much for colonial territories. He is also remembered for his part in bringing about the fall of the government of Neville Chamberlain in 1940.
Amery was educated at Harrow and at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1899–1900 he was chief correspondent for The Times from the South African War and remained on the staff of that paper until 1909, editing The Times History of the South African War, 7 vol. (1900–09). He entered Parliament in 1911. He became undersecretary of state for the colonies in 1919 and was moved to a junior post at the Admiralty in 1921.
Amery was made a privy councillor in 1922; and thereafter, apart from a term as first lord of the Admiralty (1922–24), he spent the rest of his career as a minister in imperial departments. In 1925 he created the Dominions Office, which later became the Commonwealth Relations Office. He was excluded from office by the national government (1931–40) and was a sharp critic of the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In 1940 Amery’s voice was influential in breaking the Chamberlain government, to which he applied Oliver Cromwell’s injunction to the Long Parliament: “In the name of God, go!” From 1940 to 1945 he was secretary of state for India and Burma (Myanmar).
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77ca10c5523a16670942503d2d5a9210 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/L-S-Lowry | L.S. Lowry | L.S. Lowry
L.S. Lowry, in full Laurence Stephen Lowry, (born November 1, 1887, Manchester, England—died February 23, 1976, Glossop, Derbyshire), English painter noted for his industrial landscapes that express the bleakness and loneliness of modern urban life.
Lowry studied intermittently at art schools in Manchester and Salford, England, from 1905 to 1925. He painted in his free time while working at a Manchester real-estate company, where he was employed from 1910 to 1952.
In 1915 Lowry became interested in depicting the industrial landscapes of Salford, Manchester, and other locations in the East Midlands region. He developed a unique approach to cityscapes, painting industrial structures such as factories, cotton mills, and stark residential buildings, in front of which crowds of small, sticklike figures go about their everyday activities. Lowry used a drab palette—the gray buildings are often set against a hazy, white background—but he created powerful and subtle tonal relationships. The naive elements in his style are belied by strong compositions and skillful drawing.
Lowry received little public recognition until 1939, when he had his first solo show in London. In 1976, shortly after his death, the Royal Academy displayed his work in a retrospective exhibition that was extremely popular with the general public. Critical opinion remains divided over his stature, but the originality of his artistic vision and the relevance of his social commentary are generally agreed upon.
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c4464d6a56629c3a0941c7befc06c8b8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/L-S-Vygotsky | L. S. Vygotsky | L. S. Vygotsky
L. S. Vygotsky, (born Nov. 5, 1896, Orsha, Russia—died June 11, 1934, Moscow), Soviet psychologist. He studied linguistics and philosophy at the University of Moscow before becoming involved in psychological research. While working at Moscow’s Institute of Psychology (1924–34), he became a major figure in post-revolutionary Soviet psychology. He studied the role of social and cultural factors in the making of human consciousness; his theory of signs and their relationship to the development of speech influenced psychologists such as A.R. Luria and Jean Piaget. His best-known work, Thought and Language (1934), was briefly suppressed as a threat to Stalinism.
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8eb9fbea39f2df7081d83da8f6c8c636 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lachlan-Macquarie | Lachlan Macquarie | Lachlan Macquarie
Lachlan Macquarie, (born January 31, 1761, Ulva, Argyllshire, Scotland—died July 1, 1824, London, England), early governor of New South Wales, Australia (1810–21), who expanded opportunities for Emancipists (freed convicts) and established a balance of power with the Exclusionists (large landowners and sheep farmers).
Macquarie joined the British army as a boy and served in North America, Europe, and the West Indies between 1776 and 1784 and in India during 1788–1803 and 1805–07. He was appointed governor of New South Wales in 1809 and took office early the next year, replacing the New South Wales Corps that had overthrown the previous governor, William Bligh. He began a program of public works construction and town planning; by 1822 he had sponsored more than 200 works, many of them designed by the Emancipist architect Francis Greenway. Macquarie introduced the colony’s own currency in 1813 and helped establish its first bank in 1817. He encouraged expansion of settlement and exploration, most notably the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813. His policy toward the Aborigines was the most liberal since that of the colony’s first governor, Arthur Phillip.
Macquarie’s belief in development based on Emancipist agriculture angered the colony’s large landowners, headed by John Macarthur, and led to a British government investigation (1819), Macquarie’s recall in 1821, and his retirement to his estate on Mull in the Inner Hebrides.
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cb8ab8f150e895afe061ccff49876bcd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ladislas-I | Ladislas I | Ladislas I
Ladislas I, also called Saint Ladislas, Hungarian Szent László, (born June 27, 1040, Poland—died July 29, 1095, Nitra, Slovakia; canonized 1192; feast day June 27), king of Hungary who greatly expanded the boundaries of the kingdom and consolidated it internally; no other Hungarian king was so generally beloved by the people.
The son of Béla I of Hungary and the Polish princess Rycheza (Ryksa), Ladislas was born in exile. Returning to Hungary, he and his brother Géza refused to contest the throne against their cousin Salomon; however, they quarreled with him and drove him from the country (1073). Géza took the throne, and, on his death, in 1077, Ladislas succeeded him as king of Hungary.
Ladislas extended Hungary’s frontier in Transylvania and occupied Croatia (1091) to protect the rights of his sister, the widow of Zvonimir, prince of Croatia. In the investiture struggle over the nomination and installation of bishops, Ladislas sided with the pope, though he also initiated a policy of reconciliation with the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV. Ladislas rooted out heathens in his dominions with severity and introduced Roman Catholicism to Croatia, founding the bishopric of Zagreb (1091). He introduced an elaborate legal code that brought order and prosperity to his dominions.
Ladislas died suddenly while preparing for the First Crusade. The ideal Hungarian knight, he was regarded by the nation as a saint long before his canonization.
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c5dd8fe5b0e3f1df428ff33bf1fce72a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ladislas-IV | Ladislas IV | Ladislas IV
Ladislas IV, byname Ladislas The Cuman, or Kuman, Hungarian Kun László, (born 1262—died July 10, 1290, Körösszeg, Hung.), king of Hungary who, by his support of the German king Rudolf I at the Battle of Dürnkrut, helped to establish the future power of the Habsburg dynasty in Austria.
The son of Stephen V, Ladislas IV became king of Hungary on his father’s death in 1272. His minority (until 1277) was troubled by palace revolutions and civil wars. His mother was a princess of the Cumans, a Turkic people from the Black Sea area that had settled in Hungary. She was engaged in a continuous struggle with rebellious vassals who had the support of the expansion-minded Otakar II of Bohemia: Otakar had designs on Slovakia, then part of Hungary. Thus, common interests impelled Ladislas to join forces with Rudolf, who was of the house of Habsburg, in his struggle with Otakar, and 56,000 Hungarians and Cumans helped Rudolf defeat Otakar at the Battle of Dürnkrut (Marchfeld; Aug. 26, 1278).
The Bohemian danger over, Ladislas, a talented but wild and reckless man, came into conflict with his own magnates. He had married Isabella of Anjou, a daughter of Charles I of Naples and Sicily, but had neglected her for Cuman mistresses. His enemies accused him of undermining Christianity by preferring the nomadic Cumans to the Magyars. After an inquiry by a papal legate, he was forced to war against the Cumans, whom he defeated at Hódmezö (May 1282).
Ladislas soon relapsed, however. He adopted Cuman dress, passed his time exclusively with Cumans, and abused his legitimate wife. At last, Pope Nicholas IV decided that the crown of Hungary should pass to the Angevin Charles Martel, son of Ladislas’ sister Maria by her marriage to Isabella’s brother Charles II of Naples and Sicily. On Aug. 8, 1288, the pope proclaimed a crusade against Ladislas.
For the next two years, civil war convulsed Hungary. Ladislas, who fought with desperate valour, was driven from one end of the kingdom to the other. On Dec. 25, 1289, he issued a manifesto to the lesser gentry, many of whom sided with him, urging them to fight on against the magnates and their foreign supporters. In the next year, however, he was murdered in his camp by the Cumans, who never forgave him for attacking them in 1282.
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d0e8f8c6e1d9a82362cb6e2c72bdea37 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Anne-Barnard | Lady Anne Barnard | Lady Anne Barnard
Lady Anne Barnard, née Anne Lindsay, (born December 8, 1750, Balcarres House, Fifeshire, Scotland—died May 6, 1825, London), author of the popular ballad “Auld Robin Gray” (1771).
In 1763 she married Sir Andrew Barnard and accompanied him to the Cape of Good Hope when he became colonial secretary there in 1797. When the Cape was ceded to Holland (1802), they settled permanently in London. “Auld Robin Gray,” written to the music of an old song, was first published anonymously; in 1823 she confided its authorship to her friend Sir Walter Scott, who in 1825 prepared an edition of the ballad.
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4e524c58227fbb7fec6d201c50c7501a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Grizel-Baillie | Lady Grizel Baillie | Lady Grizel Baillie
Lady Grizel Baillie, (born Dec. 25, 1665, Redbraes Castle, Berwickshire, Scot.—died Dec. 6, 1746), Scottish poet remembered for her simple and sorrowful songs.
The eldest daughter of Sir Patrick Hume (Home), later earl of Marchmont, she carried letters from her father to the imprisoned Scottish conspirator Robert Baillie of Jerviswood. After Baillie’s execution (1684) the family fled to Holland, where they remained until it was safe to return to Scotland. In 1692 Lady Grizel married George Baillie, Robert Baillie’s son.
Although Lady Grizel wrote several songs, only two are extant. “The ewe-buchtin’s bonnie” may have been inspired by her father’s hiding in Polwarth church after he had spoken in Baillie’s defense; the well-known “And werena my heart licht I wad dee” first appeared in Orpheus Caledonius (1725) and was included in Allan Ramsay’s Tea Table Miscellany, 4 vol. (1724–37).
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b9076503c1212cb2ac4fa91f627a98e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Mary-Wortley-Montagu | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, née Pierrepont, (baptized May 26, 1689, London, Eng.—died Aug. 21, 1762, London), the most colourful Englishwoman of her time and a brilliant and versatile writer.
Her literary genius, like her personality, had many facets. She is principally remembered as a prolific letter writer in almost every epistolary style; she was also a distinguished minor poet, always competent, sometimes glittering and genuinely eloquent. She is further remembered as an essayist, feminist, traveler, and eccentric. Her beauty was marred by a severe attack of smallpox while she was still a young woman, and she later pioneered in England the practice of inoculation against the disease, having noticed the effectiveness of this precaution during a stay in Turkey.
The daughter of the 5th Earl of Kingston and Lady Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist Henry Fielding), she eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, rather than accept a marriage that had been arranged by her father. In 1714 the Whigs came to power, and Edward Wortley Montagu was in 1716 appointed ambassador to Turkey, taking up residence with his wife in Constantinople (now Istanbul). After his recall in 1718, they bought a house in Twickenham, west of London. For reasons not wholly clear, Lady Mary’s relationship with her husband was by this time merely formal and impersonal.
At Twickenham Lady Mary embarked upon a period of intense literary activity. She had earlier written a set of six “town eclogues” that were witty adaptations of the Roman poet Virgil. In these, she was helped by her friends John Gay and Alexander Pope (who later turned against her, satirizing her in The Dunciad and elsewhere, to which attacks Lady Mary replied with spirit, though she quickly abandoned poetic warfare). Among the works that she then composed was an anonymous and lively attack on the satirist Jonathan Swift (1734), a play, Simplicity (written c. 1735), adapted from the French of Pierre Marivaux, and a series of crisp essays dealing obliquely with politics and directly with feminism and the moral cynicism of her time.
In 1736 Lady Mary became infatuated with Francesco Algarotti, an Italian writer on the arts and sciences who had come to London to further his career, and she proposed that they live together in Italy. She set out in 1739, pretending to her husband and friends that she was traveling to the continent for reasons of health. Algarotti, however, did not join her, for he had been summoned to Berlin by Frederick II the Great, from whom he could expect greater rewards; and, when at length they met in Turin (1741), it proved a disagreeable experience. In 1742 she settled in the papal state of Avignon, France, where she lived until 1746. She then returned to Italy with the young Count Ugo Palazzi, with whom she lived for the next 10 years in the Venetian province of Brescia. Her letters from there to her daughter Mary, the Countess of Bute, contain descriptions of her essentially simple life. In 1756 she moved to Venice and, after her husband’s death in 1761, began planning her return to England. She set out in September of that year and was reunited with her daughter. Discontented in London, she would have returned to Italy; but she was seriously ill with cancer and died only seven months after her homecoming.
Lady Mary’s literary reputation chiefly rests on 52 superb Turkish embassy letters, which she wrote after her return as the ambassador’s wife in Constantinople, using her actual letters and journals as source material. The letters were published in 1763 from an unauthorized copy and were acclaimed throughout Europe. Later editions of her letters, sanctioned by her family, added selections from her personal letters together with most of her poetry. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vol. (ed. Robert Halsband, 1965–67), was the first full edition of Lady Mary’s letters.
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