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Nicholas Witchell
Nicholas Newton Henshall Witchell OStJ FRGS (born 23 September 1953) is a retired English journalist and news presenter. The latter half of his career was as royal correspondent for BBC News. Early life and career Witchell was born on 23 September 1953 in Shropshire. He was educated at Epsom College, a British fee-paying school in Surrey, and at Leeds University, where he read Law and edited the '' Leeds Student'' newspaper. In 1974, Terence Dalton Limited published his book ''The Loch Ness Story'', a history of alleged sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. Witchell worked for the BBC from 1976 until his retirement in 2024.Tim Luckhurst (28 August 2005"Nicholas Witchell: more touchy than feely" ''The Independent''. Retrieved on 7 March 2016. In 1979, he joined the corporation's Northern Ireland office, moving to London to cover the Falklands War in 1982, and then returning to Belfast as the BBC's Ireland correspondent. He and Sue Lawley were the first readers of the '' BBC Six ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OStJ
The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (), commonly known as the Order of St John, and also known as St John International, is an order of chivalry constituted in 1888 by royal charter from Queen Victoria and dedicated to St John the Baptist. The order traces its origins back to the Knights Hospitaller in the Middle Ages, the oldest surviving Order of chivalry, chivalric order which is generally considered to be founded in Jerusalem in 1099, which was later known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Order of Malta. A faction of them emerged in France in the 1820s and moved to Britain in the early 1830s, where, after operating under a succession of grand priors and different names, it became associated with the founding in 1882 of the St John Ophthalmic Hospital near the Old City (Jerusalem), old city of Jerusalem and the St John Ambulance, St John Ambulance Brigade in 1887. The order is found throughout the Commonwealth of Nations, Hong Kong, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BBC Six O'Clock News
The ''BBC News at Six'' is the BBC's evening news programme on British television channels BBC One and BBC News (UK feed), broadcast weeknights at 6:00pm and produced by BBC News. It is normally broadcast for 30minutes, except on bank holidays when it may be shorter and only shown on BBC One. For a long period, the ''BBC News at Six'' was the most watched news programme in the UK but since 2006 it has been overtaken by the '' BBC News at Ten'' (10:00pm). On average it is watched by four million viewers. The programme is presented alternately by Fiona Bruce, Reeta Chakrabarti, Clive Myrie and Sophie Raworth. Since December 2007, the length of the programme was shortened from 30minutes to 28minutes to allow for a news summary being shown on BBC One at 7:58pm. On 8 May 2017, SBS in Australia began airing ''BBC News at Six'' during their English-language news programming segment. It is broadcast at 7:00am every day on delay from Britain. During the COVID-19 pandemic, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lockerbie Disaster
Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. Shortly after 19:00 on 21 December 1988, the Boeing 747 "Clipper Maid of the Seas" was destroyed by a bomb while flying over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew aboard. Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, the event, which became known as the Lockerbie bombing, is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom. Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in 1991. After protracted negotiations and United Nations sanctions, in 1999, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi handed over the two men for trial at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster
MS ''Herald of Free Enterprise'' was a roll-on/roll-off (RORO) ferry which capsized moments after leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on the night of 6 March 1987, killing 193 passengers and crew. The eight-deck car and passenger ferry was owned by Townsend Thoresen, designed for rapid loading and unloading on the competitive cross-channel route between Dover and Calais. As was common at the time, it was built with no watertight compartments. The ship left harbour with her bow door open, and the sea immediately flooded the vehicle deck; within minutes, she was lying on her side in shallow water. The immediate cause of the capsizing was found to be negligence by the assistant boatswain, who was asleep in his cabin when he should have been closing the bow door. The official inquiry, however, placed more blame on his supervisors and a general culture of poor communication in Townsend Thoresen. The vessel was salvaged, put up for sale, and sold to Naviera SA Kingstown on 30 Septemb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986), was a British statesman and Conservative Party (UK), Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. Nicknamed "Supermac (cartoon), Supermac", he was known for his pragmatism, wit, and wiktionary:unflappability, unflappability. Macmillan was seriously injured as an infantry officer during the First World War. He suffered pain and partial immobility for the rest of his life. After the war he joined Macmillan Publishers, his family book-publishing business, then entered Parliament at the 1924 United Kingdom general election, 1924 general election for Stockton-on-Tees (UK Parliament constituency), Stockton-on-Tees. Losing his seat in 1929, he regained it in 1931, soon after which he spoke out against the high rate of unemployment in Stockton. He opposed the appeasement of Germany practised by the Conservative government. He rose to high office du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Mountbatten
Admiral of the Fleet (Royal Navy), Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg; 25 June 1900 – 27 August 1979), commonly known as Lord Mountbatten, was a British statesman, Royal Navy officer and close relative of the British royal family. He was born in the United Kingdom to the prominent Battenberg family. He was a maternal uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and a second cousin of King George VI. He joined the Royal Navy during the First World War and was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, in the Second World War. He later served as the last Viceroy of India and briefly as the first Governor-General of the Dominion of India. Mountbatten attended the Royal Naval College, Osborne, before entering the Royal Navy in 1916. He saw action during the closing phase of the First World War, and after the war briefly attended Christ's College, Cambridge. During the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radio 4 News FM
Radio 4 News FM was the national BBC station devoted to rolling news service that was on air during the Gulf War from 16 January until 2 March 1991. It was broadcast on Radio 4's FM frequencies, whilst regular scheduled service continued on longwave. This station was also broadcast on BBC World Service. At the time, some journalists gave it the nickname Scud FM from the Scud missiles used by Iraqi forces in the war. The long-term impact of Radio 4 News FM was that the popularity of the station was taken as evidence that a rolling news service was required at the BBC, and three years later, the BBC launched a continuous news and sport station, BBC Radio 5 Live. History Operation When Coalition forces began military operations against Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the BBC discontinued to broadcast usual mixed schedule on Radio 4's FM frequencies and replaced it with a rolling news service, known by the emergency staff as ''Scud FM'' after "Sadda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gulf War
, combatant2 = , commander1 = , commander2 = , strength1 = Over 950,000 soldiers3,113 tanks1,800 aircraft2,200 artillery systems , page = https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-PEMD-96-10/pdf/GAOREPORTS-PEMD-96-10.pdf , strength2 = 1,000,000+ soldiers (~600,000 in Kuwait)5,500 tanks700+ aircraft3,000 artillery systems , casualties1 = Total:13,488 Coalition:292 killed (147 killed by enemy action, 145 non-hostile deaths)776 wounded (467 wounded in action)31 tanks destroyed/disabled28 Bradley IFVs destroyed/damaged1 M113 APC destroyed2 British Warrior APCs destroyed1 artillery piece destroyed75 aircraft destroyedKuwait:420 killed 12,000 captured ≈200 tanks destroyed/captured 850+ other armored vehicles destroyed/captured 57 aircraft lost 8 aircraft captured (Mirage F1s) 17 ships sunk, 6 captured. Acig.org. Retrieved on 12 June 2011 , casualties2 = Total:175,000–300,000+ Iraqi:20,000–50,000 killed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spitting Image
''Spitting Image'' is a British satirical television puppet show, created by Peter Fluck, Roger Law and Martin Lambie-Nairn. First broadcast in 1984, the series was produced by 'Spitting Image Productions' for Central Independent Television over 18 series which aired on the ITV network. The series was nominated and won numerous awards, including ten BAFTA Television Awards, and two Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986 in the Popular Arts Category. The series features puppet caricatures of contemporary celebrities and public figures, including British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major and the British royal family. The series was the first to caricature Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (as an elderly gin-drinker with a Beryl Reid voice). One of the most-watched shows of the 1980s, ''Spitting Image'' satirised politics, entertainment, sport and British popular culture of the era. At its peak, the show was watched by 15 million people. The popularity of the show saw col ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parodied
A parody is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satirical or ironic imitation. Often its subject is an original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice". The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music, theater, television and film, animation, and gaming. The writer and critic John Gross observes in his ''Oxford Book of Parodies'', that parody seems to flourish on territory somewhere between pastiche ("a composition in another artist's manner, without sati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Times
''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (founded in 1821), are published by Times Media, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. ''The Times'' and ''The Sunday Times'' were founded independently and have had common ownership only since 1966. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. ''The Times'' was the first newspaper to bear that name, inspiring numerous other papers around the world. In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as or , although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution. ''The Times'' had an average daily circulation of 365,880 in March 2020; in the same period, ''The Sunday Times'' had an average weekly circulation of 647,622. The two ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daily Mirror
The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily Tabloid journalism, tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1903, it is part of Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), which is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its Masthead (British publishing), masthead was simply ''The Mirror''. It had an average daily print circulation of 716,923 in December 2016, dropping to 587,803 the following year. Its Sunday sister paper is the ''Sunday Mirror''. Unlike other major British tabloids such as ''The Sun (United Kingdom), The Sun'' and the ''Daily Mail'', the ''Mirror'' has no separate Scottish edition; this function is performed by the ''Daily Record (Scotland), Daily Record'' and the ''Sunday Mail (Scotland), Sunday Mail'', which incorporate certain stories from the ''Mirror'' that are of Scottish significance. The ''Mirror'' publishes an Irish edition, the ''Irish Mirror''. Originally pitched to the middle-class reader, it was converted into a worki ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
