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.

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)
  

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, he lived most of his childhood in Honolulu, Hawaii. From ages six to ten, he lived in Jakarta with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, university lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office and serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
The following year, while still an Illinois state legislator, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he co-sponsored bipartisan legislation for controlling conventional weapons and for promoting greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the current 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as major priorities.He married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has written two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics.

Education:- Graduated: Columbia University (1983) - Major: Political Science- Law Degree from Harvard (1991) - Major: J.D. - Magna Cum Laude- Attended: Occidental College

Career: U.S. Senator from Illinois sworn in January 4, 2005

Books:- Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)- The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006)- It Takes a Nation: How Strangers Became Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina (2006)

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is the junior United States Senator from New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Bill Clinton—the 42nd President of the United States—and was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she delivered a controversial address as the first student to speak at commencement exercises for Wellesley College. She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988 and 1991. She was the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare of children, and was on the board of Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.
As First Lady of the United States, she took a prominent position in policy matters. Her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval by the U.S. Congress in 1994, but in 1997 she helped establish the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the Adoption and Safe Families Act. She became the only First Lady to be subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal in 1996. She was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage to Bill Clinton was the subject of considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Moving to New York, Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, the first time an American first lady ran for public office and the first female senator from that state. There she initially supported the George W. Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, which included voting for the Iraq War Resolution. She has subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the Iraq War and has opposed it on most domestic issues. She was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. Clinton is the first woman in U.S. history with a realistic chance of being elected president and as the 2008 primaries take place, she is in a tight race with Senator Barack Obama for the nomination of the Democratic Party.

Shaw, George Bernard

Born: 1856 AD
Died: 1950 AD, at 94 years of age.
Nationality: Irish


Shaw, George Bernard

1856 – He was born on the 26th day of July this year in Dublin, Ireland. He was a strong advocate for socialism and women's rights, a vegetarian and teetotaler, and a harsh critic of formal education.

1876 – He joined his mother’s London household. She, Vandeleur Lee, and his sister Lucy, provided him with a pound a week while he frequented public libraries and the British Museum reading room where he studied earnestly and began writing professionally.

1879 – From this year until 1883, due to a series of rejected novels, his literary earnings remained negligible.

1881 – He became a vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H. F. Lester.

1885 - As music, art and drama critic he wrote under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto" (Basset Horn) for the Wolver Hampton Star and, as GBS, for Dramatic Review.

1897 – His first significant financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American production of The Devil's Disciple.

1898 – He met Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian; they married in this year. In addition, this year, he was also the drama critic for Frank Harris’ Saturday Review. His income as a critic made him self-supporting.

1904 – From this year until 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres in notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne.

1906 – He and his wife moved into a house in Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire; it was to be their home for the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a flat in London.

1925 – He was famous as a playwright, he wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honored by being awarded for a Nobel Prize in this year.

1931 – His novel “Immaturity” was published this year in London, Constable. His first novel written in 1879, it was the last one to be printed.

1938 – He was awarded in Oscar for Pygmalion this year.

1946 - His last full-length work was Buoyant Billions.

1950 – He died at age 94, on the 2nd day of November this year in Hertfordshire, England.

1971 - His home, now called Shaw's Corner, in the small village of Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire is now a National Trust property, open to the public. The Shaw Theatre, Euston Road, London, opened in this year, was named in his honor.


Famous Quotes from Shaw, George Bernard

• "You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell:"All hope abandon ye who enter here."
  


• "If I wanted any shit from you, I'd scrape it off your dick!"
  


• "And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand."
  


• "It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind."
  


• "You see things as they are and ask,'Why?'I dream things as they never were and ask,'Why not?'"