David Conn

David Conn is a sports journalist and writer who focuses predominantly on football. He writes for The Guardian.

He attended Bury Grammar School before studying English Literature & Politics at the University of York.

He has written three books, The Football Business: Fair Game in the '90s? (1998),The Beautiful Game?: Searching the Soul of Football (2005) and Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up (2012). All three focus on the influence of money on modern day football.

He also ghost-wrote the autobiographies of the 100m hurdles world record holder Colin Jackson and former Manchester United player Lee Sharpe.

Conn has been named sports news reporter of the year three times, in 2004, 2009 and 2013, by the Sports Journalists Association, and has been named Football Writer of the Year by the Football Supporters Federation three times, in 2002, 2005 and 2009. In December 2013 he was named Sports Journalist of the Year in the Press Gazette British Journalism Awards. The judges said: "He delves beyond the glitzy veneer of modern football to hold the game’s gilded elite to account.”

David

David (/ˈdeɪvɪd/; Hebrew: דָּוִד, Modern David, Tiberian Dāwîḏ;ISO 259-3 Dawid; Arabic: داوُد‎ Dāwūd; Syriac: ܕܘܝܕ‎ Dawid; Ancient Greek: Δαυίδ; Latin: Davidus, David; Strong's: Daveed) was, according to the Books of Samuel, the second king of the United Kingdom of Israel, and according to the New Testament, an ancestor of Jesus. His life is conventionally dated to c. 1040 – 970 BCE, his reign over Judah c. 1010–970 BCE.

The Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles are the only Old Testament sources of information on David, although the Tel Dan Stele (dated c. 850–835 BCE) contains the phrase בית דוד (bytdwd), read as "House of David", which many scholars confirm to be a likely plausible match to the existence in the mid-9th century BCE of a Judean royal dynasty called the House of David.

Depicted as a valorous warrior of great renown, and a poet and musician credited for composing much of the psalms contained in the Book of Psalms, King David is widely viewed as a righteous and effective king in battle and civil justice. He is described as a man after God's own heart in 1 Samuel 13:14 and Acts 13:22.

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, infamous due to the mass murder-suicide in November 1978 of 918 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, and the ordering of four additional Temple member deaths in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. Nearly three-hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning. Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head; it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Early life

Jones was born in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902–1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah. He was of Irish and Welsh descent. Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to Lynn, Indiana, in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.

Hillsborough disaster

The Hillsborough disaster was a human crush that caused the deaths of 96 people and injured 766 others, at a football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, England, on 15 April 1989. The 1990 official inquiry into the disaster, the Taylor Report, concluded that "the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control." The findings of the report resulted in the elimination of standing terraces at all major football stadiums in England, Wales and Scotland. It remains the worst stadium-related disaster in English sports history, and one of the world's worst football disasters.

The match was the 1988–89 FA Cup semi-final, with Hillsborough, home ground of Sheffield Wednesday, selected as a neutral venue. In English football, fans are routinely segregated to avoid crowd trouble; at the time of the disaster fans had a reputation for hooliganism, which meant that terraces were additionally divided into pens, enclosed at the sides and front in fencing. The crush occurred in pens in the Leppings Lane stand, allocated to Liverpool fans. Entry was possible only via one of seven decrepit turnstiles, a restriction that led to dangerous overcrowding outside the ground before kick-off. In an attempt to ease pressure outside the ground, Police Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, the senior police officer responsible for the match, ordered an exit gate to be opened. The opened exit gate led to a tunnel marked "Standing", which led directly to the two already overcrowded enclosures. In previous years the tunnel had been closed off by police when the two central pens were full; however, on this occasion the tunnel was unmanned.

Peoples Temple

The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, commonly shortened to Peoples Temple, was a new religious movement founded in 1955 by Jim Jones. By the mid-1970s it included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco.

It is best known for the events of November 18, 1978, in Guyana, in which 918 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally, and now commonly, called "Jonestown") and nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown in an organized mass murder/suicide. The mass suicide and killings at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Casualties at the airstrip included, among others, US Congressman Leo Ryan.

Before California

Indiana formation

Before forming a church, Jim Jones had become enamoured by communism and frustrated by the harassment communists received in the U.S. This, among other things, provided a seminal inspiration for Jones; as he himself described in a biographical recording,