Bio
Recep Tayyip Erdogan - Recep Tayyip Erdogan has served as the Prime Minister of Turkey since March 14, 2003. He is the chairman of the Justice and Development Party.
Erdogan was born in Istanbul. His family has descended from Adjara Georgian immigrants who settled from Batumi to Rize. Erdgan spent his early childhood in Rize where his family had settled, before returning to Istanbul at the age of 13. After graduating from a religious high school Imam Hatip school he studied management at Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Erdogan played semi-professional football in a local neighborhood club for 16 years.
He married Emine Erdogan on 4 July 1978 and they have two sons (Ahmet Burak, Necmeddin Bilal) and two daughters (Esra, Sumeyye).
David Ignatius - David Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post. His twice-weekly column on global politics, economics, and international affairs began appearing on the op-ed page of the Post in January 1999.
He continued to write weekly after becoming executive editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune in September 2000. When the Post sold its interest in the IHT in January 2003, Mr. Ignatius resumed writing twice a week for the op-ed page and was syndicated worldwide by The Washington Post Writers Group.
Prior to becoming a columnist, Mr. Ignatius was the Post's assistant managing editor in charge of business news, a position he assumed in 1993. He served as the Post's foreign editor from 1990 to 1992, supervising the paper's Pulitzer Prize - winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From 1986 to 1990, he was editor of Sunday "Outlook" section.
Before joining the Post in 1986, Mr. Ignatius spent 10 years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He covered the steel industry in Pittsburgh, the Justice Department, the CIA, and the U.S. Senate in Washington, and was the Middle East correspondent and chief diplomatic correspondent. He has published five novels and is finishing a sixth.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon - Ban Ki-moon is a South Korean diplomat and the current Secretary-General of the United Nations. He succeeded Kofi Annan in this capacity on January 1, 2007.
Ban was the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea from January 2004 to November 1, 2006. On October 13, 2006, he was elected to be the eighth Secretary-General by the United Nations General Assembly and was sworn in on December 14, 2006. He had previously addressed the General Assembly in his capacity as foreign minister during its annual general debate each year since 2004.
Amr Moussa - Amr Moussa has been the current Secretary-General of the League of Arab States since his election to the position in May 2001. He is a former Egyptian Foreign Minister and diplomat.
He served as Cairo's ambassador to India in 1967 and as Egypt's ambassador to the United Nations in 1990. He was appointed Foreign Minister in the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Atef Sedki in 1991 and remained in this position until 2001.
During his tenure as Foreign Minister, Moussa was critical of the United States foreign policy and its relationship with Israel.
Shimon Peres - Shimon Peres is the ninth and current President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as Prime Minister of Israel and once as Acting Prime Minister, and has been a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years. Peres was elected to the Knesset in November 1959 and, except for a three-month-long hiatus in early 2006, served continuously until 2007, when he became President.
Born in Vishneva, in Poland (now Belarus) in 1923, Peres moved with his family to Mandate Palestine in 1934. He held several diplomatic and military positions during and directly after the War for Independence in Israel. His first high level government position was as Deputy Director-General of Defense in 1952, and Director-General in 1953 through 1959. During his career, he has represented five political parties in the Knesset: Mapai, Rafi, the Alignment, Labour and Kadima, and has led Alignment and Labour. Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace talks which he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords. Peres was nominated in early 2007 by Kadima to run in that year's presidential election, being elected by the Knesset for the presidency on 13 June 2007 and sworn into office on 15 July 2007 for a seven-year term.
