Union Oil Company of California, dba Unocal /ˈjuːnɵkæl/ is a defunct company that was a major petroleum explorer and marketer in the late 19th century, through the 20th century, and into the early 21st century. It was headquartered in El Segundo, California, United States.

On August 10, 2005, Unocal merged with Chevron Corporation and became a wholly owned subsidiary. Unocal has now ceased operations as an independent company, but continues to conduct many operations as Union Oil Company of California, a Chevron company.

The Union Oil Company of California was founded on October 17, 1890, in Santa Paula, California, by Lyman Stewart, Thomas Bard, and Wallace Hardison. It was a merger of three Southern California Oil Companies: the Sespe Oil Company, the Hardison and Stewart Oil Company, and the Mission Transfer Company. All three were notable as being completely unaffiliated with Standard Oil. Union Oil moved its headquarters to Los Angeles, in 1901. The original headquarters in Santa Paula is a California Historical Landmark.

Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays. Her writings on various social, environmental and political issues have been a subject of major controversy in India.

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Ranjit Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea planter and Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist.

She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard da Cunha.

Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and played a village girl in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. Until made financially secure by the success of her novel The God of Small Things, she worked various jobs, including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the leading Indian TV media group NDTV. She lives in New Delhi.

Richard Lee Petty (born July 2, 1937) is a former NASCAR driver who raced in the Strictly Stock/Grand National Era and the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. "The King", as he is nicknamed, is most well known for winning the NASCAR Championship seven times (Dale Earnhardt is the only other driver to accomplish this feat), winning a record 200 races during his career, winning the Daytona 500 a record seven times, and winning a record 27 races (ten of them consecutively) in the 1967 season alone. (A 1972 rule change eliminated races under 250 miles (400 km) in length, reducing the schedule to 30 [now 36] races.) Petty is widely considered one of the greatest NASCAR drivers of all time and is one of the most respected figures in motorsports as a whole. He also collected a record number of poles (127) and over 700 top-ten finishes in his 1,185 starts, including 513 consecutive starts from 1971–1989. Petty is a member of the inaugural class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Hall in 2010.

William Clyde "Bill" Elliott (born October 8, 1955), also known as Awesome Bill from Dawsonville or Million Dollar Bill, is a part-time driver and former champion of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Elliott was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America on August 15, 2007. He won the 1988 NASCAR Winston Cup Series Championship and has garnered 44 wins in that series. He had two Daytona 500 victories, and a record four consecutive wins at Michigan International Speedway during 1985-86. He holds the track record for fastest qualifying speed at Talladega at 212.809 mph and Daytona International Speedway at 210.364 mph Both of these were set in 1987. The mark at Talladega is the fastest speed for any NASCAR event ever.

Elliott won NASCAR's Most Popular Driver Award 16 times, a record. He withdrew his name from the ballot for that award after winning it in 2002. In 2005, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue declared October 8 as Bill Elliott Day in the state of Georgia.^{[citation needed]} Elliott has also been honored by the state legislature, having a stretch of road in his native Dawsonville renamed Elliott Family Parkway. Elliott was born in Dawsonville, Georgia.

George Soros ( /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/;Hungarian: Soros György; Hungarian: [ˈʃoroʃ]; born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian-American business magnate,investor, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros supports progressive-liberal causes. He is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his US$1 billion in investment profits during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.

Between 1979 and 2011, Soros gave away over $8 billion to human rights, public health, and education causes. He played a significant role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89), and provided Europe's largest higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest. Soros is also the chairman of the Open Society Institute.

Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary to a well-to-do, nonobservant Jewish family. His mother Elizabeth (also known as Erzebet), whom Tivadar married in 1924, came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro) was a lawyer and had been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest. Tivadar was an Esperantist writer and taught George to speak Esperanto from birth. Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish home and that his parents were cautious with their religious roots. Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. Soros took a job with the Jewish Council, which had been established during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Soros later described this time to writer Michael Lewis: