Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King, Jr was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was an excellent student and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, when he was only 15 years old. He become a national icon in the history of modern American liberalism.
As a civil rights activist, he was, very much like Mahathma Ghandhi, an advocate of  nonviolent methods to fight for the advancement of civil rights in the USA.
A Baptist minister, Martin Luther King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott as direct consequent of  Rosa Parks refusal to leave her seat for a white passenger.
King's efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he expanded American values to include the vision of a color blind society, and established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.
King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means.
King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

I have a dream

Mini Biography of Rosa Parks

Video Biography of Rosa Parks

This a video biography of Rosa Parks, the emblematic figure of Civil Rights Movement in the USA

Who is Rosa Parks

Biography of Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama.  She was an African-American civil rights activist. The U.S. Congress called Rosa Parks "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement"

Act of defiance

When her parents divorced, she moved to Montgomery where she had to deal with segregation and laws she did not agree with. She married a barber, Raymond Parks and was very active in the NAACP and the Montgomery Voters League.  On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.
This act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement.
Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Later, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography, and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia.

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART(1756 - 1791) was an Austrian prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Composer

• Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood started to learn the piano when he was 3. 
• Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. 
• At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. 
• While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. 
• During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of Mozart's death.
• He composed The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (born February 24, 1955)

Steven (Steve) Paul Jobs is an American business magnate and inventor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. His biological parents are Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian Muslim and Joanne Simpson woho later married and gave birt to Steve's biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.

Career

Steve Jobs is co-founder, chairman, and former chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.
In the late 1970s, Jobs, with other Apple co-founders designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical user interface which led to the creation of the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1984, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its CEO from 1997 until 2011. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1% until its acquisition by The Walt Disney company in 2006. Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7% and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.
Innovative productsJobs emphasized the importance of design and understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following. In recent years, the company has branched out, introducing and improving upon innovative digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. In 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene.

Resignation

On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO for health reasons. he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. In his letter of resignation, Jobs strongly recommended that the Apple executive succession plan be followed and Tim Cook be named as his successor. Per his request, Jobs was appointed chairman of Apple's board of directors

More on Steve Jobs on Wikipedia

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK)

DSK (25 April 1949)

Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, often referred to in the media as DSK, is a French economist, lawyer, and politician, and a member of the French Socialist Party (PS). Strauss-Kahn has been married for the third time to the French journalist Anne Sinclair since 1991. He has four daughters, one of whom is by his second wife, Brigitte Guillemette, whom he married in 1984.

Career

Strauss-Kahn became the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on 28 September 2007, with the backing of his country's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and served in that role until his resignation on 18 May 2011.

He is a professor of economics at the Paris Institute for Political Studies. Strauss-Kahn was Minister of Economy and Finance from 1997 to 1999 as part of Lionel Jospin's "Plural Left" government. He belongs to the right wing of the PS and sought the nomination in the primaries to the Socialist presidential candidacy for the 2007 election, but he was defeated by Ségolène Royal in November 2006.

Allegations of sexual assault

In May 2011, Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York City and charged with the sexual assault of a housekeeper who entered his Sofitel hotel suite, but all charges were later dismissed at the request of the prosecution. Strauss-Kahn entered a plea of not guilty, and denied all charges. The New York District Attorney moved to withdraw the charges on 22 August 2011, due to the unreliability of the complainant and inconclusive physical evidence, and the court agreed.

Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He was born on August 24, 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer to which his family was opposed. At 17, Coelho's introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20.

Songwriter

At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and becoming immersed in the drug culture of the 1960s. Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter which made him earn a living. In 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.
In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated

"[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in "The Alchemist", I was working, I had a person who I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer."

Succes as a writer

After making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist which has gone on to sell more than 65 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books in history, and has been translated into more than 70 languages.
After this success Paulo Coelho is a strong advocate of spreading his books through peer-to-peer file sharing networks and pirating websites. He even provides free translations of many of his books.