Fidel Alejandro Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is a Cuban revolutionary leader who led his country from January 1959 until his resignation in February 2008. He took power in an armed revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and was shortly thereafter sworn in as the Prime Minister of Cuba. In 1965 he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and led the transformation of Cuba into a one-party socialist republic. In 1976 he became President of the Council of State as well as of the Council of Ministers. He also held the supreme military rank of Comandante en Jefe ("Commander in Chief") of the Cuban armed forces. On July 31, 2006, after undergoing intestinal surgery from an undisclosed digestive illness believed to have been diverticulitis, he transferred his responsibilities to the First Vice-President, his younger brother Raúl Castro. On February 19, 2008, five days before his mandate was to expire, he announced he would neither seek nor accept a new term as either president or commander-in-chief. On February 24, 2008, the National Assembly elected Raúl Castro to succeed him as the President of Cuba.
Childhood and education

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on a sugar plantation in Birán, near Mayarí, in the modern-day province of Holguín – then a part of the now-defunct Oriente province. He was the third child born to Ángel Castro y Argiz, a Galician immigrant who became relatively prosperous through work in the sugar industry and successful investing. His mother, Lina Ruz González, who was a household servant, was also of Galician background. Angel Castro was married to another woman, Maria Luisa Argota, until Fidel was 17, and thus Fidel as a child had to deal both with his illegitimacy and the challenge of being raised in various foster homes away from his father's house.Castro has two brothers, Ramón and Raúl, and four sisters, Angelita, Juanita, Enma, and Agustina.He also has two half siblings, Lidia and Pedro Emilio who were raised by Ángel Castro's first wife.Although accounts of his education differ, most sources agree that he was an intellectually gifted student, more interested in sports than in academics, and spent many years in private Catholic boarding schools, finishing high school at El Colegio de Belén, a Jesuit school in Havana in 1945. While at Belén, the 21-year-old Castro pitched on the school's baseball team.
Political beginnings

In late 1945, Castro entered law school at the University of Havana. He became immediately embroiled in the political culture at the University, which was a reflection of the volatile politics in Cuba during that era.Since the fall of president Gerardo Machado in the 1930s, student politics had degenerated into a form of gangsterismo dominated by fractious action groups, and Castro, believing that the gangs posed a physical threat to his university aspirations, experienced what he later described as "a great moment of decision."He returned to the university from a brief hiatus to involve himself fully in the various violent battles and disputes which surrounded university elections, and was to be implicated in a number of shootings linked to Rolando Masferrer's MSR action group. "To not return", said Castro later, "would be to give in to bullies, to abandon my beliefs". Rivalries were so intense that Castro apparently collaborated in an attempt on Masferrer's life during this period,while Masferrer, whose paramilitary group Les Tigres later became an instrument of state violence under Batista, perennially hunted the younger student seeking violent retribution.
In 1947, growing increasingly passionate about social justice, Castro joined the Partido Ortodoxo which had been newly formed by Eduardo Chibás. A charismatic and emotional figure, Chibás was running for president against the incumbent Ramón Grau San Martín who had allowed rampant corruption to flourish during his term.[citation needed] The Partido Ortodoxo publicly exposed corruption and demanded government and social reform. It aimed to instill a strong sense of national identity among Cubans, establish Cuban economic independence and freedom from the United States, and dismantle the power of the elite over Cuban politics. Though Chibás lost the election, Castro, considering Chibás his mentor, remained committed to his cause, working fervently on his behalf. In 1951, while running for president again, Chibás shot himself in the stomach during a radio broadcast. Castro was present and accompanied him to the hospital where he died.
Decision for revolution

Castro returned to Cuba and married Mirta Díaz Balart, a student from a wealthy Cuban family where he was exposed to the lifestyle of the Cuban elite. In 1950 he graduated from law school with a Doctor of Laws degree and began practicing law in a small partnership in Havana. By now he had become well known for his passionately nationalistic views and his intense opposition to the influence of the United States on Cuban internal affairs. Increasingly interested in a career in politics, Castro had become a candidate for a seat in the Cuban parliament when General Fulgencio Batista led a coup d'état in 1952, successfully overthrowing the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás and canceling the election.
Batista established himself as de facto leader with the support of establishment elements of Cuban society and powerful Cuban agencies. His government was formally recognized by the United States, buttressing his power. Castro, nearing thirty, was now a politician without a legitimate platform and thus he broke away from the Partido Ortodoxo to marshal legal arguments based on the Constitution of 1940 to formally charge Batista with violating the constitution. His petition, entitled Zarpazo, was denied by the Court of Constitutional Guarantees and he was not allowed a hearing.This experience formed the foundation for Castro's opposition to the Batista government and convinced him that revolution was the only way to depose Batista.

Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto

Born in 1953, and served as the Prime Minister of Pakistan 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. She was the first ever Muslim woman to lead a Muslim country. Early days She was born into a wealthy landholding family in province of Sindh, Pakistan into a family which had an illustrious tradition of political activism. Her Father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had also served as both President as well as Prime Minister of Pakistan while her grandfather Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto was one of the most high profile Sindhi politicians under British India and also served as a ‘dewan’ or the Prime Minister of the state of Junagagh.
Education

Bhutto enjoyed a privileged childhood, and studied at the Jesus and Mary convent school in Murree Hills, before proceeding overseas for higher studies. She was educated at Harvard's Radcliffe College in the United States and at the University of Oxford in England, where she excelled in studies as well as other activities including debating competitions. While at Oxford University she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union.

Return to Pakistan

After completing her studies she returned to Pakistan in 1977, planning on a career in the foreign service. Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Prime Minister at the time. Only weeks after her return military officers led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup,a nd arrested her father. Benazir Bhutto spent the next eighteen months in and out of house arrest as she struggled to rally political support to force Zia to drop fallacious murder charges against her father. The military dictator ignored worldwide appeals for clemency and had Zulfikar Bhutto hanged in April of 1979.
Benazir Bhutto's persecution began in earnest after the dismissal of her father's government in 1977 and his execution in 1979 as she intensified her denunciations of Zia and sought to organize a political movement against him. Repeatedly put under house arrest, she was finally imprisoned under solitary confinement in a cell in Sindh province during the summer of 1981. Bhutto described the hellish conditions in her wall less cage in her book "Daughter of the East ":
In her books Daughter of the East, she writes "The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe."
Released in 1984, she went into exile in Britain until 1986, when martial law was lifted in Pakistan. She returned with a huge crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands turned out on the streets to greet her, by then the leading symbol of the anti-Zia movement, when she returned to Lahore in April of 1986. Formally elected chair in the following month, Bhutto lost no time in organizing mass protests and civil disobedience campaigns to pressure Zia to relinquish office and call national elections. Bhutto's stirring oratory, familiar name, and striking appearance helped give her a strong mass appeal, but she had to struggle to wrest real power from the PPP's old-guard leadership, members of which were wary of her gender, youth, and political wisdom. Supported by tumultuous crowds, Bhutto again called for fresh elections, resulting in another short prison term that same year. She also had to contend with internal dissension among the anti-Zia forces.
In 1988 Zia was killed in an airplane crash, less than three months after announcing that elections would take place. In the November elections the PPP gained a huge popularity in the National Assembly, and in December 1988 Bhutto, 35 only became prime minister of Pakistan, the first woman to hold this office in any modern Islamic state. During her first term, Her objective was to return Pakistan to civilian rule and oust the men who executed her father, she also started Peoples Program for economic uplift of the masses. Benazir Bhutto lifted a ban on student and trade unions. The PPP. Government hosted the fourth S. A. A. R. C. Summit held in Islamabad, in December 1988.
In August 1990, however, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her government using controversial powers which were introduced under military government. After the dismissal of her government, her husband, Mr. Asif Ali Zardari was arrested and imprisoned for over two years on a number of up charges. In the next elections, which were disputed her party did not secure enough seats to form government and Bhutto became an opposition leader in the parliament. Subsequent attempts to oust the ruling party resulted in Bhutto’s deportation to the city of Karachi in 1992, and she was temporarily banned from entering Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
In July 1993, the President of Pakistan dismissed the Government of Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif on corruption charges and called for fresh elections. The Pakistan Peoples Party went to the people in October, 1993 with a new "Agenda for Change". The programme envisaged government at the door-step of the people and priority to the social sectors. Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was again elected Prime Minister with a broad mandate after achieving strong popular support in all the four provinces of Pakistan .Bhutto's platform has been leftist, including food for the hungry, health care, jobs, slum clearance and a monthly minimum wage. She has been opposed by Islamic fundamentalists who have been suspicious of the PPP because of its alleged leftist.
Due to Benazir’s Personal world popularity, during her term Pakistan’s relation with other countries improved ,her moderate foreign policy had been credited for improving the wrong image of Pakistan around the world ,however domestically she and her party have been widely blamed for excessive corruption.
Benazir again faced trouble from the opposition. In the autumn of 1994, Nawaz Sharif led a "train march" from Karachi to Peshawar. This was followed by general strike on September 20. Two weeks later Nawaz Sharif called a "wheel jam" strike on October 11.
Once again, using the controversial powers given to the President under Article 58-2 B, elected government of Benazir Bhutto was dismissed from office for the second time in late 1996. Once again a a vendetta was launched against Benazir Bhutto in which politically motivated cases were registered against her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari in order to persecute her and put her under pressure. She denounced all charges as politically motivated, and went into self-imposed exile. Since then she 1999 until 18th October 2007, she remained in exile.
Home Coming - Back with her people

On 18th October 2007 Benazir Bhutto ended her exile and returned to Pakistan and it is estimated that she was received by crowds exceeding 3 million people. This was perhaps the most historic gathering of people in Pakistan. The massive support on the street was evidence that she remains as the most popular leader in Pakistan despite a barrage of disinformation campaign against her. She was assassinated on December 27, 2007, after departing a PPP rally in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 where she was a leading opposition candidate.
She has been mentioned as "The world's most popular politician" in the New Guinness Book of Record 1996. According to The "Times" and the "Australian Magazine" (May 4, 1996) she was one of the 100 most powerful women in the World.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner in1964

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

Stephen William Hawking

• Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (was born on 8 January 1942 - 300 years after the death of Galileo in Oxford, England) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
  His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation, or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.His scientific career spans more than 40 years and his books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and world-renowned theoretical physicist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.Hawking is disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The illness has progressed over the years and he is now almost completely paralysed.
  Research fieldsHawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.
  In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.
  He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler’s "No-Hair Theorem" — namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.
  Hawking also suggested that, upon analysis of gamma ray emissions, after the Big Bang, primordial or mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.
  In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the Universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole: one cannot travel North of the North pole, there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed Universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is consistent with a Universe which is not closed also.
  Among Hawking's many other scientific investigations, included are the study of: quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix; anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy; the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time; spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian; Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation; gravitational radiation, and wormholes.

Popular Books

A Brief History of Time, (Bantam Press 1988)

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (Bantam Books 1993)

The Universe in a Nutshell, (Bantam Press 2001)

On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, (Running Press 2002) A Briefer History of Time, (Bantam Books 2005)

Awards

• 1975 Eddington Medal
• 1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
• 1979 Albert Einstein Medal
• 1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander)
• 1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
• 1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics
• 1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord
• 1989 Companion of Honour
• 1999 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society
• 2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University
• 2006 Copley Medal of the Royal Society
  
  

Nicolas Sarkozy

• Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa was born on January 28, 1955 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, is the current President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, elected on 6 May 2007 after defeating Socialist Party contender Ségolène Royal during the second round of the 2007 election. Before his presidency, he was leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) right wing party. Under Jacques Chirac's presidency, he served as the Minister of the Interior in Jean-Pierre Raffarin (UMP)'s first two governments (from May 2002 to March 2004), then was appointed Minister of Finances in Raffarin's last government (March 2004 May 2005), and again Minister of the Interior in Dominique de Villepin's government (2005-2007). Sarkozy was also president of the General council of the Hauts-de-Seine department from 2004 to 2007 and mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of France from 1983 to 2002. Furthermore, he was also Minister of the Budget in Édouard Balladur (RPR, predecessor of the UMP)'s government during François Mitterrand's last term.
  Sarkozy is known for his strong stance on law and order issues and his desire to revitalise the French economy.In foreign affairs, he has promised closer cooperation with the United States. His nickname "Sarko" is used by both supporters and opponents.
  Nicolas Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father, Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsaand a mother of French Catholic and Greek Jewish descent, Andrée Mallah. His Greek-born grandfather, Benico Mallah (former Aaron Mallah), was a physician from Thessaloniki. Benico, who left for France to become a doctor, was the son of Mordechai Mallah, one of the eight sons of Aaron Mallah, founder of the Rabbinical School of Thessaloniki.
  Education
  Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a state-funded (public) middle and high school in Paris's 8th arrondissement, where he failed his sixième. His family then sent him to the Cours Saint-Louis de Monceau, a private Catholic middle and high school in the 17th arrondissement, where he was reportedly a mediocre pupil, but where he nonetheless obtained his baccalauréat in 1973. He enrolled at the Université Paris X Nanterre, where he read law and graduated with a DEA's degree in Business law. Paris X - Nanterre had been the starting place for the May '68 student movement and was still a strong berth for leftist student unions. Although described as a quiet student, Sarkozy soon joined the right-wing union of the university where he was very active. After graduating, he entered the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (1979-1981) but failed to graduate from it due to an insufficient command of the English language.After passing the bar exam, he became a lawyer specializing in French business law and family law.
  Awards and honours
  
• Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
• Was previously Knight of the Légion d'honneur (since 2004)
• Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
• Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III (2004 - Spain)
• Commander of the Ordre de Léopold (Belgium) Stara Planina (Bulgaria)