Hurricane Gordon (2006)

Hurricane Gordon (2006).
Hurricane Gordon was the third hurricane and first major hurricane of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the first tropical cyclone since 1992 to affect the Azores while retaining tropical characteristics. Gordon formed on September 10 in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. It gradually matured into a hurricane as it tracked northward, reaching its peak intensity with winds of 195 km/h (121 mph) early on September 14 while located about 925 km (575 mi) southeast of Bermuda. It weakened after moving over cooler waters, and passed through the Azores on September 20. Wind gusts reached hurricane force on Santa Maria Island, but the Azores sustained little damage. Gordon then became an extratropical cyclone and affected Spain, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In Spain, wind gusts reached 183 km/h (114 mph) along the northwest coast, left 100,000 people without power, and injured five people. In Northern Ireland, high winds left 120,000 people without power and caused one injury.

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Michelle Williams (actress)

Michelle Williams (actress).
Michelle Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an American actress. Her accolades include two Golden Globe Awards, and she has been nominated for four Academy Awards and one Tony Award. She made her feature film debut in Lassie (1994), and starred in the television teen drama series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003). She earned her first Academy Award nomination playing the wife of a gay man in Brokeback Mountain (2005). Williams played troubled characters in the independent dramas Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), and Manchester by the Sea (2016). For portraying Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Gwen Verdon in Fosse/Verdon, she won two Golden Globe Awards. Her highest-grossing releases came with the thriller Shutter Island (2010), the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), the musical The Greatest Showman (2017), and the superhero film Venom (2018). She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the role of a sexually abused woman in Blackbird.

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The Bread-Winners

The Bread-Winners.
The Bread-Winners is an 1883 anti-labor novel by John Hay, who was Assistant Secretary to the President under Abraham Lincoln, and McKinley's final secretary of state. Originally published anonymously in installments in The Century Magazine, the book attracted wide interest and provoked considerable speculation over the author's identity. Hay wrote his only novel as a reaction to several strikes that affected him and his business interests in the 1870s and early 1880s. In the main storyline, a wealthy former army captain, Arthur Farnham, organizes Civil War veterans to keep the peace when the Bread-winners, a group of lazy and malcontented workers, call a violent general strike. Hay left hints as to his identity in the novel, and some guessed right, but he never acknowledged the book as his, and it did not appear with his name on it until after his death in 1905. Hay's hostile view of organized labor was soon seen as outdated, and the book is best remembered for its onetime popularity and controversial nature.

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Flora of Madagascar

Flora of Madagascar.
The flora of Madagascar consists of more than 12,000 species of vascular and non-vascular plants. Around 83 per cent of Madagascar's vascular plants are found only on the island. These include five entirely endemic plant families as well as most of the over 900 orchid species, the traveller's tree, the Madagascar periwinkle, six species of baobab (pictured) and around 200 species of palms. The high degree of endemism is due to Madagascar's long isolation following its separation from the African and Indian landmasses in the Mesozoic Era. Today, humid forests, including the lowland forests, are found on the eastern plateau. Much of the central highlands is grassland. In the west are dry forest and succulent woodland. Unique spiny thickets are in the southwest, and mangroves occur on the west coast. While 10 per cent of the land surface is protected, much of the native flora is threatened, especially through dramatic deforestation.