Kofi A. Annan of Ghana, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, is the first to be elected from the ranks of UN staff. His first five-year term began on 1 January 1997 and, following his subsequent re-appointment by the UN Member States, he will begin a second five-year term on 1 January 2002. As…

“Banker to the Poor”Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fueled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could…

William Randal Cremer (March 18, 1828-July 22, 1908) was born in the small town of Fareham, England, not far from Portsmouth, into a working class family at a time when intense misery was the workingman’s lot. His father, a coach painter, deserted the family while the boy was still an infant. His mother, an indomitable…

In the first third of the twentieth century, Christian Lous Lange (September 17, 1869-December 11, 1938) became one of the world’s foremost exponents of the theory and practice of internationalism. His career from his school days to his death was closely focused on international affairs. Lange was born in Stavanger, an old city on Norway’s…

Edgar Algernon Robert Cecil (September 14, 1864-November 24, 1958) British lawyer, parliamentarian and cabinet minister, one of the architects of the League of Nations and its faithful defender, was the distinguished son of the third Marquess of Salisbury, that remarkable man who occupied, in the course of his career, the highest offices in the land:…

A jurist, humanitarian, and internationalist, René Samuel Cassin (October 5, 1887- ) is one of the world’s foremost proponents of the legal as well as the moral recognition of the rights of man. Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, the peace laureate, eighty-one years old when awarded the prize in 1968, confessed that “men are…

  Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo has not submitted a biography.

Theodore Roosevelt (October 27, 1858–January 6, 1919) was born in New York into one of the old Dutch families which had settled in America in the seventeenth century. At eighteen he entered Harvard College and spent four years there, dividing his time between books and sport and excelling at both. After leaving Harvard he studied…

Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain (October 16, 1863-March 17, 1937) was the eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, the great British statesman known as the «Empire-builder» he was a half-brother of Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from 1937 to 1940. Like William Pitt the Younger, son of a famous father a hundred years earlier, he was trained for…

Henry Alfred Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977, continuing to hold the position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs which he first assumed in 1969 until 1975. After leaving government service, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm, of which he is…