August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each work in the series is set in a different decade, depicts comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick August Kittel Sr. was a Sudeten German immigrant, a baker/pastry cook. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American woman from North Carolina who cleaned homes for a living. Wilson's anecdotal history reports that his maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue. Wilson wrote under his mother's surname; the economically depressed neighborhood where he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans and Jewish and Italian immigrants.

Wilson's mother divorced his father and married David Bedford in the 1950s, the family moved from the Hill District to the predominantly white working-class neighborhood of Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility. They were soon forced out on to their next home. In 1959, Wilson was one of 14 African-American students at Central Catholic High School, from which he dropped out after one year, he attended Connelley Vocational High School, but found the curriculum unchallenging. He dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade in 1960 after his teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France. Wilson hid his decision from his mother. At the age of 16 he began working menial jobs, where he met a wide variety of people on whom some of his characters were based, such as Sam in The Janitor Wilson's extensive use of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh resulted in its "awarding" him an honorary high school diploma. Wilson, who said he had learned to read at the age of four, began reading black writers at the library when he was 12 and spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself through the books of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, others.

Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but left after one year and went back to working various odd jobs as a porter, short-order cook and dishwasher. Frederick August Kittel Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. That same year, he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith, he bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he pawned when money was tight. At 20, he submitted work to such magazines as Harper's, he began to write in bars, the local cigar store, cafes—longhand on table napkins and on yellow notepads, absorbing the voices and characters around him. He liked to write on cafe napkins because, he said, it freed him up and made him less self-conscious as a writer, he would gather the notes and type them up at home. Gifted with a talent for catching dialect and accents, Wilson had an "astonishing memory", which he put to full use during his career.

He learned not to censor the language he heard when incorporating it into his work. Malcolm X's voice influenced Wilson's work. Both the Nation of Islam and the Black Power spoke to him regarding self-sufficiency, self-defense, self-determination, he appreciated the origin myths that Elijah Muhammad supported. In 1969 Wilson married Brenda Burton, a Muslim, converted to Islam, he and Brenda had one daughter, Sakina Ansari-Wilson, divorced in 1972. In 1968, he co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with his friend Rob Penny. Wilson's first play, was performed for audiences in small theaters and public housing community centers for 50 cents a ticket. Among these early efforts was Jitney, which he revised more than two decades as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th-century Pittsburgh, he had no directing experience. He recalled: "Someone had looked around and said,'Who's going to be the director?' I said,'I will.' I said. So I went to look for a book on. I found one called The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out."In 1976 Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson's The Homecoming.

That same year Wilson saw Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, his first professional play. Wilson and poet Maisha Baton started the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production. Both organizations are still active. In 1978 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the suggestion of his friend, director Claude Purdy, who helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. In 1980 he received a fellowship for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, he continued writing plays. For three years, he was a part-time cook for the Little Brothers of the Poor. Wilson had a long association with the Penumbra Theatre Company of St. Paul, which premiered some of his plays, he wrote Full

Rotoroa Island is an island to the east of Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand. It covers 82 hectares; the Salvation Army purchased it for £400 in 1908 from the Ruthe family to expand their alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility at nearby Pakatoa Island. Men were treated at Home Bay at Rotoroa; this treatment facility was closed in 2005. The island was leased from the Salvation Army in February 2008 by Neal and Annette Plowman, who formed a trust to create a conservation park on the island, they have begun a revegetation project which will include 400,000 native plants. The chapel and jail are being restored and a visitor centre will be built, they gave the island to Auckland in February 2010 and it was opened on 26 February 2011. The Plowmans funded the nationwide Next Foundation; the island is accessible through various air service companies. List of islands of New Zealand

Fawaz Mohammed Damrah was the imam of the Islamic Center of Parma, the largest mosque in the Cleveland area and taught at Cleveland State University and the local community college. Damra was born in the West Bank city of Nablus in 1961, he studied law in Jordan. He arrived in the United States in the mid-1980s and was an active religious figure in the Muslim American community. In January 2004 Damra was arrested by federal officials on an immigration violation and he was denaturalized and deported back to the West Bank, he has three daughters. Before moving to Ohio, Damra had served as an imam at the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, New York between 1986 and 1990. During the 1990s he was praised for outreach efforts in Christian communities, he continued these interfaith efforts after the September 11 attacks. In late September 2001, after the attacks, a Cleveland TV station showed a video of a speech Damra had made in 1991 where he recommended stabbing Jews in Israel. Before the video aired he was well-regarded as a moderate Muslim.

Damra has said that at the time of the speech Palestinian Islamic Jihad was not a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and explained that his rhetoric was influenced by his experiences growing up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He apologized publicly for the remarks, he said that his outreach efforts with Jewish and Christian communities over the years had helped shape his views about peace and tolerance, saying "As all of us go through evolution in our life and spiritual, so did I". He was indicted in 2004, prosecutors argued that Damra had lied on his U. S. citizenship application. They accused him of fundraising to support international terrorism and affiliation with groups that persecuted Jews. Damra told PBS that he "never raised money to any organization, listed in the United States as organizations that support terrorism", he was convicted of concealing ties to three groups. A video made by Steven Emerson was aired on PBS. Due to the statements made on the video, all groups the United States government classifies as terrorist organizations, of lying on his citizenship application.

His United States citizenship was revoked and he was deported to the Palestinian West Bank in January 2007. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that Damrah was delivered to Israeli security agents at a West Bank crossing controlled by Israel. On January 26, 2007, The Plain Dealer reported that Damrah had been released from an Israeli prison after three weeks in custody and returned to the West Bank where he was staying with family