Martial Bourdin (1868 - 1894) was a French anarchist, who died on 15 February 1894 when the chemical explosives he carried prematurely detonated outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park.

Although Bourdin sustained massive injuries, he remained alive and able to speak. He did not, however, reveal his name, specific target, or motives. He was carried to the Seamen's Hospital nearby, where he died 30 minutes later.

Later, police investigators discovered that Bourdin had left his room on Fitzroy Street in London and traveled by tram from Westminster to Greenwich Park. The police concluded that "some mischance or miscalculation or some clumsy bungling" had caused the bomb to explode in Bourdin's hand. Because he was found with a large sum of money, the police speculated that he had planned to leave for France immediately.

The police later raided the Club Autonomie in London -- a popular club for foreign anarchists, including Bourdin.

Bourdin's gruesome death -- and the mystery surrounding his act of terrorism -- inspired Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent.

Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial) (March 1, 40 AD – between 102 and 104 AD), was a Latin poet from Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. He is considered to be the creator of the modern epigram.

Knowledge of his origins and early life are derived almost entirely from his works, which can be more or less dated according to the well-known events to which they refer. In Book X of his Epigrams, composed between 95 and 98, he mentions celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday; hence he was born on March 1 (x. 24) 38, 39, 40 or 41 AD, under Caligula or Claudius. His place of birth was Augusta Bilbilis (now Calatayud) in Hispania Tarraconensis. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla, appear to have died in his youth.

Corinne Dominique Marguerite Lepage, also known as Corinne Lepage (born 11 May 1951) is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament elected in the 2009 European election for the North-West constituency.

A former minister of the Environment, she is the founder and President since 1996 of the Citizenship, Action, Participation for the XXIst Century Party (CAP 21). She was also co-founder and Vice-President of the centrist Mouvement démocrate until March 2010, when she announced that she was leaving the movement.

She is also the founding member of the CRII-VIE, the Association for the Study of the Impact of Genetic Techniques upon the Living.

Lepage was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the department of Hauts-de-Seine. She attended Sciences-Po in Paris, where she obtained her law diploma; she started practising law in 1975. At the same time, she was appointed Maître de conférences (Note: the equivalent of a university lecturer), and later a Professor at Sciences-Po and Paris II from 1982 to 1986, and then at the Université de Paris at Val-deMarne from 1984 to 1990. She has taught at the Université de Paris at St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines since 2005. She is married and the mother of two children.

Joseph Druce (born 1965 as Darren Smiledge) is a convicted murderer best known for having killed John Geoghan, the former Roman Catholic priest who was convicted of sexually abusing children, and who had also been at the center of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal.

In August 2003, while in protective custody at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, Geoghan was trapped in his cell by Druce, who jammed the door closed so guards could not reach him. Druce then strangled and stomped Geoghan to death. An autopsy revealed Geoghan's cause of death to be "ligature strangulation and blunt chest trauma."

The state immediately began an investigation into procedures at the prison. There have been questions raised about the wisdom and propriety of placing these two men in the same unit, since prison officials had been warned by another inmate Druce had something planned. It was noted while two guards are normally stationed in the unit where Geoghan and Druce were being held, there was only one guard in the unit at the time - one had left temporarily to escort another inmate to a medical station. Union officials had noted there were staffing cuts previously at the prison, which they feel led to the prison being a more dangerous and volatile place.