Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, also known as Madame Le Brun, was a prominent French portrait painter of the late 18th century.

Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style. Her subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but her style is aligned with the emergence of Neoclassicism. Vigée Le Brun created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities.

Vigée Le Brun created some 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to many works in private collections, her paintings are owned by major museums, such as the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and many other collections in continental Europe and the United States.

Diane Julie Abbott is a British politician who served as the Shadow Home Secretary in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn from 2016 to 2020. She has been the Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. As a member of the Labour Party, she has held various positions in successive Shadow Cabinets; she was the country's first black female MP and is the longest-serving black MP in the House of Commons.

Born in Paddington to a British Jamaican family, Abbott studied History at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked in the civil service and as a reporter for Thames Television and TV-am before becoming a press officer for the Greater London Council. Joining Labour, she was elected to Westminster City Council in 1982 and then as an MP in 1987, being re-elected in the 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections. She has faced disproportionate sexism and racism as a public figure, individually receiving almost half of all abusive tweets directed at women MPs during the 2017 election campaign.

The Battle of Cocos was a single-ship action that occurred on 9 November 1914, after the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney responded to an attack on a communications station at Direction Island by the German light cruiser SMS Emden.

After the retreat of the German East Asia Squadron from south-east Asia, Emden remained behind to function as a commerce raider. During a two-month period, the German cruiser captured or sank 25 civilian vessels, shelled Madras, and destroyed two Allied warships at Penang. In early November, von Müller decided to attack the communications station at Direction Island, in the Cocos Islands, to hamper Allied communications and frustrate the search for his ship. Around the same time, a convoy of Europe-bound transports carrying Australian and New Zealand soldiers departed from Albany, Western Australia, with HMAS Melbourne, HMAS Sydney, HMS Minotaur, and Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki escorting.

During the night of 8–9 November, Emden reached the islands, and sent a party ashore at around 06:00 to disable the wireless and cable transmission station on Direction Island. The station was able to transmit a distress call before it was shut down.