James M. Cain was born in Annapolis, Maryland on July1, 1892. He studied at Washington College, in Chesterton, Maryland and worked as a clerk, a meat-packer, a singer, and a teacher.
During World War I, in army service, he was the editor of an army newspaper in France and after the war he was Professor of Journalism at St. John's College, Annapolis.
From 1932 to 1947 he lived in Southern California writing for films, but he did not have much success as a filmwriter and he drank too much. Then his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934 and became an instant bestseller.
Cain was very critical of Hollywood's treatment of writers, and he set up the short-lived American Authors' Society to seek better deals with the studios. Many of Cain's novels were turned into movies.
Cain returned to Maryland in 1948, settling in Hyattsville. He was married four times.
James M. Cain died on October 27, 1977, in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804. His father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was a sea captain and descendent of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. He died when the young Nathaniel was four years old. From Salem the family moved to Maine.
Between the years 1825 and 1836, Hawthorne worked as a writer and contributor to periodicals.
In 1842 Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody. They settled first in Concord, but a growing family and mounting debts compelled their return to Salem. Hawthorne was unable to earn a living as a writer and in 1846 he was appointed surveyor of the Port of Salem.
His novel "The Scarlet Letter" was a critical and popular success. He was one of the first American writers to explore the hidden motivations of his characters.
In 1853 he was appointed consul in Liverpool, England. He lived there for four years, and then spent a year and a half in Italy.
Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, N.H. on a trip to the mountains.

UNAIDS on Wednesday hailed a joint bid by a dozen African nations and health partners to end AIDS in children by 2030, by ensuring that they have better access to lifesaving HIV medication and testing kits.
Globally, three quarters of adults with HIV receive antiretrovirals for the illness, which if untreated can develop into full-blown AIDS.
But only one in two children gets treatment, and they account for 15 per cent of all AIDS deaths, even though they make up only four per cent of people with HIV.
With more on the Africa initiative, here’s UNAIDS spokesperson, Charlotte Sector: “Last year alone, 160,000 children were infected with HIV. So, what is happening is that 12 countries are coming together in Africa because six countries in sub-Saharan Africa represent 50 per cent of those new infections. And therefore, there is a global alliance coming together to try and put an end to that.”
In addition to boosting access to HIV medication, the alliance aims to halt transmission of the virus from mother to baby during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
In Nigeria, almost one in four mothers pass HIV to their child, said UNAIDS. The UN agency explained that a key way of helping is to map where pregnant women live, so they can get HIV testing kits to find out if they have the disease in the first place.

Remember when Barbie whined that “math is hard.” Maybe you got annoyed at hearing a popular female doll say that to little girls. Or maybe you also had a nagging suspicion that, in fact, boys are better at math. Well, the latest research is in, and the answer is a resounding no: boys are not more math savvy. The finding appears in the July 25 issue of the journal Science.
Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin-Madison led the study. The group dug through piles of information from seven million students tested through the No Child Left Behind program across ten states. Researchers had detailed personal info on the test takers. Researchers checked out math tests in different grades. They took the average. No difference. Some critics have said that the difference only shows up among the highest levels of math skills. So the team checked out the most gifted children. Again, no difference. From any angle, girls measured up to boys. Still, there’s a lack of women in the highest levels of professional math, engineering and physics. Some have said that’s because of an innate difference in math ability. But the new research shows that that explanation just doesn’t add up.

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn-merchant, with a drinking problem; his mother was a professional singer. When Shaw was sixteenth, his mother left her husband and son. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).
In 1876, Shaw left Dublin moving in with his mother. There he pursued a career in journalism and writing.
In 1891 Shaw wrote his first play, Widower's Houses. For the next twelve years, he wrote close to a dozen plays, though he generally failed to persuade the managers of the London Theatres to produce them.
In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic, and moved out of his mother's house to marry Charlotte Payne-Townsend.
The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw's life. For Shaw, the war represented the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. He expressed his opinions in a series of newspaper articles under the title Common Sense About the War. After the war, Shaw found his dramatic voice again and rebuilt his reputation, first with a series of five plays about "creative evolution," Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity.
In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, outside of London, and died a few days later of complications from the injury, at age 94.