William Rufus Day (April 17, 1849 – July 9, 1923) was an American diplomat and jurist, who served for nineteen years as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Day was born in Ravenna, Ohio, son of Luther Day of the Ohio Supreme Court. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1870 and spent the following year in the school's law department. He settled in Canton, Ohio in 1872, where he began practicing law in a partnership with William A. Lynch. For twenty-five years, Day worked as a criminal and corporate lawyer in the growing industrial town while participating in Republican politics.

During these years, Day became a good friend of William McKinley. Day became McKinley's legal and political adviser during McKinley's candidacies for the Congress, the governorship of Ohio, and the presidency of the United States. After he won the presidency, McKinley appointed Day to be Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary of State John Sherman. Sherman was considered to be ineffective, and in 1898, President McKinley replaced Sherman with Day

George Ralph Noory (born June 4, 1950) is a radio talk show host. In January 2003, following Art Bell's retirement, Noory took over as weekday host of the late-night radio talk show Coast to Coast AM, having previously been a guest host for the show.

Noory grew up in Detroit with two younger sisters. He graduated from the University of Detroit in 1972 with a bachelor's degree in Communications. In 1996 he hosted a late-night program called Nighthawk.

Noory was president of Norcom Entertainment, Inc., a St. Louis-based company that developed and marketed video training films by television to law enforcement and security agencies nationwide.

Noory and his partners in Norcom Restaurants opened a restaurant, Cafe Marrakesh and Oasis Bar, in Brentwood, Mo. in 1987. The restaurant's theme revolved around a fictional Englishman named Col. William Berry, who opened a restaurant following an exciting secret mission to Marrakesh.

In an article about Noory published in the respected news magazine The Atlantic, Timothy Lavin wrote that "Noory can be an uneven broadcaster, sometimes seems to not pay full attention to his guests, offers strangely obvious commentary, and often lets clearly delusional or pseudoscientific assertions slide by without challenge." According to Media Life Magazine, "Noory says it doesn’t matter whether he believes what his callers and guests say. Ultimately, it's about entertainment, creating a show that people will be drawn to." Author and frequent Coast to Coast AM guest Whitley Strieber has commented on Noory's style, asserting "It's not that he's credulous or easily led. He's willing to take these intellectual journeys. He'll have guests on that you think are completely off the wall -- nothing they're saying is real -- but by the end of the program you will have made a discovery that there is a kernel of a question worth exploring."

Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich ( /ˈnjuːt ˈɡɪŋɡrɪtʃ/; born Newton Leroy McPherson; June 17, 1943) is an American politician, author, and political consultant. He represented Georgia's 6th congressional district as a Republican from 1979 until his resignation in 1999, and served as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Gingrich was a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.

In the 1970s, Gingrich taught history and geography at the University of West Georgia. During this period he ran twice (1974 and 1976) for the United States House of Representatives before winning in November 1978. He served as House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995.

A co-author and architect of the "Contract with America", Gingrich was a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. In 1995, Time named him "Man of the Year" for "his role in ending the four-decades-long Democratic majority in the House". While he was House speaker, the House enacted welfare reform, passed a capital gains tax cut in 1997, and in 1998 passed the first balanced budget since 1969. The poor showing by Republicans in the 1998 Congressional election and pressure from Republican colleagues caused Gingrich's resignation from the speakership on November 5, 1998, and then the House on January 3, 1999.

William Richard "Rich" Higgins (January 15, 1945 – July 6, 1990) was a United States Marine Corps colonel who was captured in 1988 while serving on a United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. He was held hostage, tortured and eventually murdered by his captors.

William Higgins was born in Danville, Kentucky on January 15, 1945. He graduated from Southern High School in Louisville and earned his Bachelor’s degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A scholarship student in the Navy ROTC, he received the Marine Corps Association Award and was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1967. He later obtained Master’s degrees from Pepperdine University and Auburn University. He graduated from the Army Infantry Officers Advanced Course, the Air Force Command and Staff College, and the National War College.

As a lieutenant, he participated in combat operations during 1968 with C Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines in the Republic of Vietnam as a rifle platoon commander and rifle company executive officer, and was aide-de-camp to the Assistant 3rd Marine Division Commander.

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.

Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech". The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.