Latest news with #Who'sWho
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Sir Bill O'Brien, miner and Labour MP who twice took on Arthur Scargill and won
Sir Bill O'Brien, who has died aged 96, was a Yorkshire miner who became a Labour MP and front-bench spokesman after twice getting the better of Arthur Scargill. A face worker at Glasshoughton Colliery, branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and a political moderate, O'Brien first fell foul of the Yorkshire miners' Marxist leader in 1976 when he co-operated with the Sheffield Star in a libel case brought against it by Scargill over alleged favouritism in his deployment of pickets during a strike two years before. The NUM's Scargill-dominated Yorkshire executive accused O'Brien and Tom Roebuck, former branch secretary at Manvers Main Colliery, of letting the paper's solicitors see confidential correspondence between Scargill and their branches, and suspended them from office for two years. O'Brien and Roebuck took the NUM to court. Representing them, Derry Irvine, the future Labour Lord Chancellor, argued that Scargill had been out for 'a conviction at all costs' to punish them for their 'temerity'. He had compiled a report on their actions five days after winning his case – and £3,000 in damages – then chaired the disciplinary hearings himself. Judge Rubin ruled that the suspensions were a contempt of court, and granted injunctions lifting them. The executive retaliated by ignoring an order to pay the men's costs. O'Brien took on Scargill again in the run-up to the 1983 election, when the veteran Labour MP for Normanton, Albert Roberts, retired. The hard Left in the NUM saw a chance to boost its influence at Westminster by replacing Roberts, who had supported the Spanish dictator General Franco, with one of their own. But O'Brien, who listed one of his recreations in Who's Who as 'organising', rounded up delegates to defeat Scargill's nominee, Henry Daley, and instal O'Brien himself as candidate instead; he was duly elected. Despite his antipathy to Scargill, O'Brien steadfastly supported the miners during the painful and divisive strike of 1984-85. He condemned pit closures as stemming from lack of investment in 99 per cent of cases, and pressed for arbitration to bring the dispute to an end. O'Brien had nine years on the Labour front bench, as a spokesman first on the environment and then Northern Ireland. A solid performer – though some said bumbling – he staunchly opposed abortion, and voted against televising the Commons. He was also one of the MPs who in 1988 could not help overhearing the 'high old time' enjoyed by their colleague 'Afghan' Ron Brown and his female researcher in a male-only Commons shower cubicle. William O'Brien was born in Castleford on January 25 1929 and brought up in the town, attending St Joseph's Roman Catholic school (he would later gain an education degree from Leeds University). He went down the pit at 16, joining the Labour Party as well as the NUM. He first took on the Left in the union in 1973, when he stood for Yorkshire secretary against Owen Briscoe, a Scargill ally. He lost, but his challenge was not forgotten. O'Brien was elected to Wakefield council the same year, chairing its finance committee and becoming its deputy leader. He was also a Wakefield JP. He became MP for the heavily redrawn Normanton constituency in 1983, when Labour's majority of 4,143 was its lowest for half a century; the outcome was never that close again. His first action at Westminster was to nominate Roy Hattersley as leader against Neil Kinnock. In 1987 he was one of 16 defiantly working-class MPs to join the 'Rambo tendency' semi-humorously founded by Joe Ashton to offset the number of academics and the like on the Labour benches. He had put in sound work on the Public Accounts Committee and the Energy Select Committee, and that summer Kinnock made him an environment spokesman. O'Brien led the charge against a Bill restricting the rights of council employees to take part in party politics, a measure he said infringed civil liberties. In November 1990, between Sir Geoffrey Howe's dramatic resignation speech and Michael Heseltine's challenge that toppled Margaret Thatcher, O'Brien urged Michael Portillo, the local government minister, to 'line up with Heseltine and say let's scrap the poll tax altogether'. Around this time, he helped win £14,000 compensation from the Home Office for a woman constituent with psychiatric problems who had been detained for 16 months for a murder she did not commit. She had been remanded on charges of killing her father, and was only transferred from prison to a secure mental unit after protests from O'Brien. After her conviction was quashed she was moved to a hospital. Replacing Kinnock after the 1992 election, John Smith moved O'Brien to Labour's Northern Ireland team. By the time Tony Blair returned him to the back benches in 1996, government contacts with Sinn Fein – supported by Labour once they became public – had made peace in the province a real possibility. Pit closures continued throughout O'Brien's 22 years in the Commons. In 1993 he took up complaints from householders near Sharlston Colliery about subsidence caused by work on the final seam before it was to close. From 1997 to 2005, he served on the Environment, Transport and Regions Select Committee. He gave up his seat aged 76 at the 2005 election, with Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's right-hand man, taking his place. He was knighted in 2010, in Brown's resignation Honours. Bill O'Brien married Jean; they had three daughters. Bill O'Brien, born January 25 1929, died May 18 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Tory MP claims £1,100 for purchase of freely available Who's Who books
A Tory MP has claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of the Who's Who reference books for his office — despite it being available for free in parliament. Mark Pritchard's claim for the index, which lists the biographies of notable people, cost the taxpayer £321.17 in January this year. He has also claimed for three previous years of editions in May 2022, and was granted expenses to cover the 2022 version for £264.54, the 2021 version for £300.82 and the 2020 version for £279.92 Versions of Who's Who tend to be largely similar but each year contains an update with biographical details about 'noteworthy and influential people who impact British life'. It is available for free in the House of Commons library. If every MP claimed for copies of the reference book in the same way, it would have cost the taxpayer more than £750,000. Pritchard is a backbench MP who once served as a trade envoy to Armenia and Georgia. He has an entry in Who's Who, which gives his history as a parliamentary researcher and founder of a communications firm, lists his roles in politics, and his recreations as 'writing comedy, trainee birdwatcher, jazz, skiing, animal welfare'. The House of Commons scheme is not fully prescriptive about what MPs can claim under their 'business costs', and allows a degree of discretion for members to say what is necessary for their parliamentary work. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa)'s Funding Handbook states 'newspapers, journals, magazines, or relevant books' are allowable business costs, providing they are not for personal use. Pritchard's expenses were approved and within the rules. Pritchard and Ipsa have been approached for comment. Several MPs have had their expenses criticised over the years. The Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi was found to be claiming £900 in 'pet rent' so her dog could live with her, while Angela Rayner claimed Apple AirPods worth £249 on expenses rather than buying a cheaper headphones model. Both claims were within the rules. MPs' expenses have been subject to greater transparency since it emerged in 2009 that some had been claiming for luxury and non-essential items, such as moat cleaning, a duck house, and heating for their stables. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Earlier this week Ipsa, which regulates expenses and prefers to call them 'business costs', launched an investigation into the Labour MP Tahir Ali. It said in a statement: 'The compliance officer for Ipsa has opened an investigation to determine whether Mr Tahir Ali MP has breached spending rules under Ipsa's Scheme of MPs' Staffing and Business Costs. The investigation relates to the MP's spending on office costs, travel and accommodation. No further information will be published until the investigation has concluded.' Ali claimed about £59,000 in expenses in the 2023-24 financial year, including £12,651.77 on accommodation, £9,850.54 on travel, £685.20 on dependents' travel, £35,691.63 on office costs and £326.33 on staff travel. He has previously said: 'I am confident that I have been compliant with Ipsa rules and will fully cooperate with the investigation.'
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Marquis Who's Who Honors Ryan A. Hatfield For Sustainable Solutions and Community Impact
UNIONDALE, NY / / April 15, 2025 / Marquis Who's Who has honored Ryan A. Hatfield for his sustainable solutions and community impact. Mr. Hatfield serves as one of the leaders of SBC Solutions Group, a commercial and industrial recycling company that has grown from a small family business to an industry leader. Building on his father's vision, Mr. Hatfield continues to drive innovation in sustainable recycling solutions. Born and Raised on a Farm Mr. Hatfield's family comes from a long line of farmers who originally purchased real estate in Ohio in 1831. He was born and raised on the family farm that has been in the Hatfield family for almost 200 years. Growing up, he learned the importance of hard work, honesty and integrity from his parents, Lynn and Betty Hatfield. "I'm not afraid to get dirty and run a machine if I need to teach a lesson or prove a point. We are farm boys, born and raised on a farm. We do what we have to do to get the job done. When you're a farmer, you start working when you're six. That's just the way it works," Mr. Hatfield explains. Though Mr. Hatfield's father, Lynn, had also been born and raised on the farm, he wanted more for his children. He encouraged them to pursue academic careers. In 1992, at the age of 50, his father left the farming business and started SBC Solutions Group in a barn in Centerburg, Ohio. The company became the new family business, with Mr. Hatfield serving as executive vice president. The entire family is involved with the business, including brothers Michael Hatfield and Randy Hatfield, and the business now has two facilities, one in Centerburg, Ohio, and one in Powder Springs, Georgia. The Evolving Recycling Business Originally, SBC Solutions Group shredded newspapers for animal bedding. Later, the decision was made to transition to commercial recycling and shift the focus of the company from recycling newspapers and other types of paper grades to plastics. In 2017, the company began offering additional services that allowed for more sustainable and environmental solutions for their customers. "There's a big push for manufacturers to use post-consumer recycled (PCR) material. There is a massive push in our industry for sustainability, circularity and closing the loop where you're recycling plastics and turning them back into plastics as opposed to using more oil and creating virgin plastics from oil," Mr. Hatfield explains. In recognition of SBC Solutions Group's success, Mr. Hatfield was invited to speak at a sustainability conference held by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio. There were three speakers invited, two of whom were executives from multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 companies. Mr. Hatfield was the only speaker who was the owner of a privately held business. This allowed him to provide a completely different perspective from the other executives on the recycling and sustainability industry. "When you are an owner in a smaller, privately held company, you definitely are looking at things through a different lens." In 2025, Mr. Hatfield was honored for his advancements in recycling protocols with inclusion in Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes. Commitment to Community Mr. Hatfield enjoys working hard, but he is also dedicated to helping his community. As he looks toward the future, he intends to continue to make a positive impact on the world. He and his wife, Emily, both participate in their local church, and they have served in their church with their children, daughter Tristen and son Garrett. He has been involved with youth ministry since 2009. He coaches youth baseball and softball and he loves to teach and give people the tools they need to succeed, both on and off the field. "What makes me tick is my volunteer work, helping other people. That's what makes our family tick because all of us do that. We love to pack backpacks for kids in need. We love to feed the homeless and we do Toys for Tots… The greatest thing for me is being able to help somebody else out. That's what I really want to focus on more," Mr. Hatfield says. Mr. Hatfield hopes that when he retires one day, people will have been impacted in a positive way. "There is nothing better than being a small part of someone else's success story." About Marquis Who's Who®:Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms. Marquis Who's WhoUniondale, NY(844) 394 - 6946info@ SOURCE: Marquis Who's Who View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
Buzz Feed
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
"A Minecraft Movie" Cast Played "Who's Who," And Hilariously Called Each Other Out
To celebrate the release of A Minecraft Movie, we had the cast — Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Sebastian Hansen — play a game of Who's Who with us, and their reactions were too funny to miss! BuzzFeed Celeb So, who's most likely to break out into song on set? Who's the best at playing Minecraft? And who's most likely to make other cast members laugh in the middle of a serious take? BuzzFeed Celeb
Telegraph
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
From poverty to bohemia – the deeply strange life of Gala Dalí
As Auden says so disparagingly in 'Who's Who', 'a shilling life will give you all the facts.' But biography, he concludes, is bound to stumble over the sacred and often secret mysteries of love: the poem's biographee 'sighed for one' who 'answered some / Of his long marvellous letters but kept none'. Michèle Gerber Klein's biography of Gala Dalí (née Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), Surreal, is priced at what the Bank of England's inflation calculator tells me is significantly more than a 1938 shilling's worth. It canters rather than stumbles – one might read it in a weekend. While it tends to render its subject's life as narrative rather than experience – we're on the outside looking in – it does fully live up to Klein's promise of extraordinariness, taking us from poverty in Kazan, where Gala was born, to a more bohemian milieu in Moscow; to life in the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde; to marriage, money, parties, hats, castles, meetings with the crowned heads of Europe, dinners in tony Manhattan restaurants and more. Klein wants to airlift Gala out of the problematic and often belittled category of 'muse'. Throughout her marriages to Paul Éluard and Salvador Dalí, not to mention a short tryst with the artist Max Ernst, whose trailblazing feats of vision and technique were matched only by his talent for serial monogamy, Gala was creatively involved – modelling for pictures, suggesting subjects and titles, doing line edits. Klein even credits her with co-authorship of Dalí's execrable toffs-in-peril novel Hidden Faces (1944), though that's not what Dalí says. (He does, however, say in his dedication of the book to her that she 'banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of my certainties', which must have helped.) She also took the business side of things in hand. Her prodigious success in running Dalí's career has closer parallels among the sacred monsters of the music business than those of the art world. Unscrupulous third parties such as Dalí's swashbuckling manager, 'Captain' John Peter Moore, are here blamed for the questionable practices of Dalí's later years, when he signed blank sheets and canvases, to be retrofitted with paintings, lithographs or even photocopies of variable quality and negligible authenticity, with wild abandon. And in any case most of the really horrible stuff, the bibelots 'inspired' by famous earlier paintings, has been licensed by the Dalí estate since his death. Klein clearly knows a great deal about fashion, so there's a lot on Dalí's Schiaparelli collabs, the couple's friendship with Coco Chanel and Gala's innate sense of style, whether she was trussed up in some wild confection for a Surrealist soirée or mooching around the Med in a stripey top, big trousers and espadrilles, 'eating sea urchins and combing olive oil through her hair'. She's good at anecdotes – the book is peppered with vivid vignettes and arresting images. (There's a neighbour accusing Gala of stealing one of her kittens to make jugged 'hare'; then Dalí giving a lecture on 'Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies' in a deep-sea diving suit, gradually running out of air until Gala shows up with the key.) Klein is, however, more interested than she might have been in the Dantean hellscape of minor celebrities and aristos that bimbled round Europe and the States in the middle third of the last century, and on whom the Gala-Dalís relied for commissions, places to stay for the weekend and so on. And she's somewhat overdependent on the stock tropes of popular biography, from portentous cliffhangers and vacuous curtain-raisers – '1914 was a watershed year' – to breathy, Judith Krantz-adjacent physical description. (Ernst, though admittedly something of a silver fox from an early age, 'exuded the sex appeal of a fallen angel'.) We get a sense of what people wanted, and intermittently got, from Gala, but not so much about what drove her so forcefully. She was often the only woman in a room full of men, and she didn't seem to mind that – and probably the men liked the fact that she didn't. She was evidently not just amenable to but actively drawn towards 'triangular' relationships – Éluard and Ernst; Éluard and Dalí; Dalí and Jeff Fenholt, another superhunk, whom Dalí continued to refer to as Jesus long after his starring stint in the Lloyd Webber musical on Broadway. Klein doesn't have much of interest to say about the way in which Dalí's fussy, meticulous technique, and Gala's role in shaping it, set him apart from other Surrealists, who achieved little more than a fraction of his success. The fact that Dalí and Gala cheerfully moved back to Franco's Spain when his old comrade Luis Buñuel did not – and nor did his former close friend Federico García Lorca, who was in no position to do so, having been murdered by the regime during the Spanish Civil War – is also regarded with incuriosity. Gala's capacity to inspire love comes across strongly in the book. It's striking that she shared a sickly, neurasthenic temperament with both Dalí and her first husband, Éluard (whom she met at a sanatorium in Davos, where Thomas Mann would set The Magic Mountain). Her sheer will to power is also abundantly evident. But we don't hear her voice much, somehow: she's a player in a story, like one of the giant chess pieces that watch over her tomb at Púbol, the castle Dalí bought for her in 1969, and which he was only allowed to visit at her written invitation.
