Saint Joachim ("he whom YHWH has set up", Hebrew: יְהוֹיָקִים Yəhôyāqîm, Greek Ἰωακείμ Iōākeím) was the husband of Saint Anne and the father of Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions. The story of Joachim and Anne appears first in the apocryphal Gospel of James. Joachim and Anne are not mentioned in the Bible.

Since the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke do not explicitly name either of Mary's parents, but apparently name two different fathers for Saint Joseph, many scholars from John of Damascus (8th C.), and particularly Protestant scholars, argue that the genealogy in Luke is actually the family tree of Mary, and that Heli is her father. To resolve the problem of Joseph having two fathers - one descended from Solomon, one descended from Nathan, son of David, traditions from the 7th Century specify that Heli was a first cousin of Joachim.

In the Protoevangelium of James, Joachim is described as a rich and pious man of the house of David who regularly gave to the poor and to the temple (synagogue) at Sepphoris. However, as his wife was barren, the high priest rejected Joachim and his sacrifice, as his wife's childlessness was interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure. Joachim consequently withdrew to the desert where he fasted and did penance for forty days. Angels then appeared to both Joachim and Anne to promise them a child. Joachim later returned to Jerusalem and embraced Anne at the city gate. The cycle of legends concerning Joachim and Anne were included in the Golden Legend and remained popular in Christian art until the Council of Trent restricted the depiction of apocryphal events. Traditional depictions (e.g., vestibular statuary) of Joachim show him bearing a shovel.

Gerard Joseph Batten (born 27 March 1954, London) is a Member of the European Parliament for London for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). He was first elected in 2004.

He sits as a member of the Independence and Democracy Group. He was a founder member of UKIP in September 1993. He was the first Party Secretary from 1994 to 1997. He has fought local elections, a by-election, a European election, and two general elections as a UKIP candidate. As well as his seat in the European Parliament he is a member of UKIP's National Executive Committee.^{[citation needed]}

Batten was appointed a member of the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Security and Defence in July 2004, and shortly afterwards was also appointed UKIP's official spokesman on Security and Defence. In this role, he has attacked the Labour government's plans to introduce Identity Cards.

Before becoming an MEP he was a salesman for British Telecom for 28 years. At the 2007 UK Independence Party conference, he was selected as the party's candidate to contest the London mayoral election, 2008. He stood in the 2009 UKIP leadership election, coming second.

Elisabeth Schroedter (b. 11 March 1959, Dresden) is a German politician and Member of the European Parliament for Alliance '90/The Greens, part of the European Greens.

Matthias Groote is a German politician and has been a Member of the European Parliament since October 2005. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which is a part of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. He is the current chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and the delegation for relations with Japan. He is a substitute on the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and the delegation for relations with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Matthias Groote was born on 21 October 1973 in Leer and went to secondary school in Westrhauderfehn, taking the leaving exam in 1990. He became an industrial engineer in 1995 and worked on plant design. In 1995 and 1996 he ran an alternate public service with the German Red Cross. He was a technical engineer in 1999, became a qualified industrial engineer in 2005, and also became a sales engineer in 2005.

Matthias Groote has been a member of the Ostrhauderfehn local council since 1996, a member of the Leer district council since 2001, and the chair of the Ostrhauderfehn SPD council group since 2001. He first became a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1996 and has been a member of the Leer SPD District Executive since 1997. He was chair of the Leer District Young Socialists from 1997 to 2002, vice-chair of the Weser-Ems District Young Socialists from 1999 to 2002, and has been a member of the Executive of the Weser-Ems Social-Democratic Association for Local Politics since 2003.

Joachim Fuchsberger (born 11 March 1927) (pronounced [ˈjoaçim ˈfʊksberɡer]) is a German actor, television host, lyricist and businessman best known to a wide German-speaking audience as one of the recurring actors in various Edgar Wallace movies (always playing one of the good guys, often a Detective Inspector with Scotland Yard). In the English-speaking world, he is sometimes credited as Akim Berg or Berger.

Fuchsberger was born in Zuffenhausen, today a district of Stuttgart, and was a member of the obligatory Hitler Youth. During World War II, at the age of 16, he was trained as a Fallschirmjäger, combat instructor and sent to the Eastern Front where he was wounded. He was captured in a hospital in Stralsund by Soviet forces and came into Soviet captivity and later in American and British captivity. Because of this turbulent time of his youth on the Eastern front, he could never make a school diploma. In 1946 he worked as a coal miner for the British in Recklinghausen. His nickname Blacky, which has been incessantly used by the media, hails from that time.