Mohammed Bouyeri (Arabic: محمد بويري‎) (born 8 March 1978 in Amsterdam) is an Islamist Dutch and convicted murderer. He is serving a life sentence without parole for the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. He was a member of the Hofstad Network.

In 1995, Mohammed Bouyeri finished his secondary education and subsequently went on to the "INHOLLAND" in Diemen. He changed his major several times and left after five years without obtaining a degree.

A second generation migrant from Morocco, Bouyeri used the pen name "Abu Zubair" for writing and translating. On the Internet he often posted letters and sent e-mail under this name.

At an early age he was known to the police as a member of a group of Moroccan "problem-youth". For a while he worked as a volunteer at Eigenwijks, a neighbourhood organization in the Slotervaart suburb of Amsterdam. After his mother died and his father re-married in the fall of 2003, he started to live according to strict interpretations of Islamic Sharia law. As a result he could perform fewer and fewer tasks at Eigenwijks. For example, he refused to serve alcohol and did not want to be present at activities attended by both women and men. Finally, he put an end to his activities at Eigenwijks altogether. He grew a beard and began to wear a djellaba. He frequently visited the El Tawheed mosque where he met other radical Muslims, among whom was the suspected terrorist Samir Azzouz. With the group of radicals he is said to have formed the Hofstad Network, a Dutch terrorist cell. He claims to have assassinated van Gogh to fulfill his duty as a Muslim. Serving as witness in another court case involving the Hofstad group in May 2007, Bouyeri for the time expressed in more depth his thoughts regarding Islam. Here he said that armed jihad was the only option of Muslims in the Netherlands and that democracy was always a violation of Islam because laws cannot be produced by humans but only by Allah.

Ayaan Hirsi Magan Ali ( pronunciation (help·info); Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; Arabic: أيان حرسي علي‎ / ALA-LC: Ayān Ḥirsī ‘Alī; 13 November 1969) is a Somali-Dutch feminist and atheist activist, writer and politician who is known for her views critical of Islam, practices of circumcision and female genital cutting. Her screenplay for Theo van Gogh's movie Submission led to death threats, resulting in the director's murder. The daughter of the Somali politician and opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse, she is a founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA Foundation.

When she was eight, Hirsi Ali's family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the centre of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet in 2006.

Hans Eduard Marie Teeuwen (born 3 March 1967 in Budel, the Netherlands) is a Dutch comedian, actor and an occasional singer and director. His work can be described as absurdist, apolitical and confrontational.

In the Netherlands, Teeuwen became well known in 1991 when he won an award at the Dutch cabaret festival Cameretten for his show Heist, together with Roland Smeenk. Just before the ending of the try-outs of this show, Smeenk died in a car accident in 1992.

Teeuwen decided to go solo as a 'cabaretier'. (Dutch cabaret is a sort of stand-up comedy often lasting for an hour or two, which has a storyline or theme, and can include songs, music and poetry as opposed to purely stand-up comedy.) Initially he did five shows, Hard en Zielig (Hard and Sad, 1994–1995), Met een Breierdeck (With a Breierdeck, 1995–1997), Trui (Sweater, 1999–2000), Dat Dan Weer Wel (2001–2002, a free translation of the title into English could be On the Other Hand) and Industry of Love (2003–2004). Then after seven years he made a come-back in 2011 with his show Spiksplinter (free translation: Spick and Span, as in 'spick-and-span-new'). One of the other comedy projects he has worked on is Poelmo, Slaaf van het Zuiden (Poelmo, Slave of the South), a series of shorter comedy shows with his friends and colleagues Pieter Bouwman and Gummbah. Bouwman and Teeuwen also worked together on a radio comedy show that was mainly improvised, called Mannen van de Radio (Men of the Radio).

Jens Olov Heinrich Orback (born 21 April 1959 in Stockholm) is a Swedish Social Democratic politician. He was Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration and Gender Equality in the Ministry of Justice in the Cabinet of Göran Persson (2004–2006).

Jens Orback graduated from Stockholm University in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. He was active in the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League at a local level and worked in the Ministry of Finance in the late 1980s, before embarking on a career as a television journalist with the public service channels of Sveriges Television. In 2002 he returned to local politics in Stockholm, serving as the chair of the council of Maria-Gamla Stan borough until he became a minister on November 1, 2004.

Lance Olsen is an American postmodern writer.

Lance Olsen (born 14 October 1956; New Jersey) received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1978, honors, Phi Beta Kappa), an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980), and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia. For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, and at various writing conferences. Currently he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2, or Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review.