Background: James Anthony Traficant Jr. (May 8, 1941 - September 27, 2014) was a Democratic, and later independent, politician and member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. He represented the 17th Congressional District, which centered on his hometown of Youngstown and included parts of three counties in northeast Ohio's Mahoning Valley. He was expelled from the House after being convicted of taking bribes, filing false tax returns, racketeering and forcing his aides to perform chores at his farm in Ohio and houseboat in Washington, D.C.
Context: Born into a working-class Catholic family in Youngstown, Ohio, Traficant was the son of Agnes (nee Farkas) and James Anthony Traficant Sr. He was of mostly Italian and Slovak ancestry. Traficant graduated from Cardinal Mooney High School in 1959 and the University of Pittsburgh in 1963. He played quarterback for Pitt's football team, and his teammates included Mike Ditka. Traficant was drafted in the NFL's twentieth round (276th overall) by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1963, and tried out for the Steelers and the Oakland Raiders of the American Football League, but did not play professionally. He later obtained a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh (1973) and another from Youngstown State University (1976).  At the start of his career, Traficant worked as consumer finance director for the Youngstown Community Action Program. He taught courses on drug and alcohol dependency and recovery at Youngstown State University and Kent State University, as well as lecturing on drug and alcohol abuse for colleges and government agencies outside Ohio. In addition, Traficant taught at the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy. He was the executive director of the Mahoning County Drug Program from 1971 to 1981, and Sheriff of Mahoning County from 1981 to 1985. While serving as sheriff, Traficant made national headlines by refusing to execute foreclosure orders on several unemployed homeowners, many of whom had been left out of work by the recent closures of steel mills. This endeared him to the local population, which was dealing with a declining economy following the closures and relocations of steel making and steel-associated businesses.  In 1983, he was charged with racketeering for accepting bribes. Traficant, who represented himself in the criminal trial, argued that he accepted the bribes only as part of his own alleged secret undercover investigation into corruption. Traficant was acquitted of the charges, becoming the only person ever to win a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case while representing himself.  Publicity from the RICO trial increased Traficant's local visibility. He was elected as a Democrat to Congress from Ohio's 17th District, defeating Lyle Williams, a three-term Republican incumbent. He was reelected eight times without serious opposition.
Question: did he get a degree?
Answer: the University of Pittsburgh in 1963.

Background: Stein was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Mildred (nee Fishman), a homemaker, and Herbert Stein, a writer, economist, and presidential adviser. He is Jewish and grew up in the Woodside Forest neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland. Stein graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1962 along with classmate journalist Carl Bernstein (class of 1960); actress Goldie Hawn (class of 1963) was one year behind.
Context: Stein writes frequently on a variety of topics, including politics, investing, and economics. He writes a regular column in the conservative magazines The American Spectator and Newsmax. He has also written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Penthouse, Los Angeles Magazine, and Barron's Magazine, where his discussion of the Michael Milken Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond situation, as well as the ethical dimensions of management buyouts, attracted heavy US national attention in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a regular biweekly column for Yahoo! Finance online, with his last article dated August 7, 2009. His bestselling books (with investment advisor Phil DeMuth) include Yes, You Can Retire Comfortably, Can America Survive?, and Yes, You Can Time the Market. In 2009, he published a collection of essays, The Real Stars.  Stein was fired from his position as a Sunday Business columnist at The New York Times in August 2009, due to a policy prohibiting writers from performing product endorsements or advertising. Stein had recently become an advertising spokesman for credit information company Freescore.com, and according to a Times statement, had assumed there would be no conflict provided that he did not discuss credit scoring in general or FreeScore.com itself in his column. However, the publication felt that it would be inappropriate for him to write for them while he was involved in advertising, and terminated his contract. Writing in The Spectator, Stein states his belief that the real reasons for his firing were budget cuts at the Times, his criticism of President Obama, and pressure from those critical of Expelled, who "bamboozled some of the high pooh-bahs at the Times into thinking there was a conflict of interest".  Stein is currently an in-house journalist at Newsmax Magazine, a magazine by the conservative media group Newsmax Media.
Question: Was he shammed for this?
Answer: the publication felt that it would be inappropriate for him to write for them while he was involved in advertising, and terminated his contract.

Background: Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Russian: Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov; 21 May 1921 - 14 December 1989) was a Russian nuclear physicist, dissident, and activist for disarmament, peace and human rights. He became renowned as the designer of the Soviet Union's RDS-37, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov later became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he faced state persecution; these efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
Context: After 1965 Sakharov returned to fundamental science and began working on particle physics and physical cosmology.  He mainly tried to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe; in that regard, he was the first to propose proton decay and to consider CPT-symmetric events occurring before the Big Bang:  We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at t < 0 from contracting matter having an excess of antiquarks, that they pass "one through the other" at the instant t = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when t > 0, realizing total CPT symmetry of the universe. All the phenomena at t < 0 are assumed in this hypothesis to be CPT reflections of the phenomena at t > 0.  Sakharov was the first scientist to introduce twin universes he called "sheets". He achieved a complete CPT symmetry since the second sheet is populated by invisible "shadow matter" which is antimatter (C-symmetry) because of an opposite CP-violation there, and the two sheets are mirror of each other both in space (P-symmetry) and time (T-symmetry) through the same initial gravitational singularity.  In his first model the two universes did not interact, except via local matter accumulation whose density and pressure become high enough to connect the two sheets through a bridge without spacetime between them, but with a continuity of geodesics beyond the Schwarzschild radius with no singularity, allowing an exchange of matter between the two conjugated sheets, based on an idea after Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. Novikov called such singularities a collapse and an anticollapse, which are an alternative to the couple black hole and white hole in the wormhole model. Sakharov also proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity.
Question: What happen in the 70s
Answer:
Sakharov was the first scientist to introduce twin universes he called "sheets".