George Gershwin was an American composer who wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin composed both for Broadway and for the classical concert hall. He also...

Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger (April 16, 1927) is Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1981, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope John Paul II, made a Cardinal Bishop...

Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker and economist. He is the developer and founder of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus is also t...

William Jefferson Clinton served as the forty-second President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He was the third-youngest president, older only than Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. He became president at the end of the Cold W...

George Walker Bush is an American politician who was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. The eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush, he was born in New Haven, Conn...

Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical...

Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer and producer. He is best known as the creator of some of the best-selling, most critically acclaimed, most enduring, and most influential games and franchises of all time. Miyamoto join...

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic...

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who is the 44th President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office and the first president born outside the continental United States. Born in Honolulu, Hawa...

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist best known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series. The books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, and sold more than 400 mil...

William Dalrymple is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Trav...

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur and a wiki pioneer who is best known as the founder and leader of Wikipedia, an international collaborative open-source free encyclopedia on the Internet....

The twenty-first century is the first century of the third millennium (2001 - 3000). The increasing prevalence of global communications and encounters with other calendars (Islamic calendar, Chinese calendar, Persian calendar, Hebrew calend...

A tsunami is a series of waves generated when a body of water is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. The deadliest tsunami in recorded history, the Indian Ocean tsunami on Sunday, 26th December 2004, killed about 300,000 people. It was tr...

Live 8 was a series of concerts that took place in July 2005, in the G8 nations and South Africa. They were timed to precede the G8 Conference and Summit held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland from July 6-8, 2005; they also co...