Ann Clwyd Roberts (born 21 March 1937) is a Welsh Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Cynon Valley since 1984.

Ann Clwyd is the daughter of Gwilym Henri Lewis and Elizabeth Ann Lewis. She lived in Pentre Halkyn in Flintshire and attended Holywell Grammar School (now Holywell High School), the independent Queen's School in Chester and the University College of Wales in Bangor. She was a student teacher at Hope School in Flintshire. She worked as a journalist, working for the BBC as a studio manager and then became Welsh correspondent for the Guardian and Observer newspapers during 1964-79. She was Vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Wales from 1975-79. She is a member of the NUJ and TGWU.

She was persuaded to stand for Parliament by Huw T. Edwards, who felt that there should be more women in parliament. She was the unsuccessful Labour candidate in Denbigh in 1970 and Gloucester in October 1974. From 1979 to 1984, Ann Clwyd was MEP for Mid and West Wales. She was elected to Parliament in a by-election in May 1984 following the death of Ioan Evans and became the first woman to sit for a Welsh valleys constituency. She served as Shadow Minister of Education and Women's Rights from 1987 but was sacked in 1988 for rebelling against the party whip on further spending on nuclear weapons. She returned as Shadow Secretary of State for Overseas Development from 1989 to 1992 and then served as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales in 1992 and for National Heritage from 1992 to 1993.

Clwyd (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈklʊɨd]) is a preserved county of Wales, situated in the north-east, bordering England with Cheshire to its east, Shropshire to the south-east, and the Welsh counties of Gwynedd to its immediate west and Powys to the south. It additionally shares a maritime border with the metropolitan county of Merseyside along the River Dee. Between 1974 and 1996, it was a county with a county council, and it was divided into six districts. It is named after the River Clwyd, which runs through the region. It was also a Royal Mail postal county before the postal county scheme was abolished in 1996. Clwyd County Council was based in the county town of Mold.

From the late 1950s, the radical reform of local government in Wales was considered more pressing than that in England, due to the small size of many of the existing authorities, especially the upper tier county councils. The Local Government Commission for Wales set up in 1958 was the first to recommend wholesale amalgamation of the administrative counties outside Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, with extensive boundary changes; however the then Minister of Housing and Local Government Sir Keith Joseph decided not to accept the report, noting that county amalgamations in England had been highly unpopular when proposed.

Bradley Edward Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. He was charged over the following months with a number of offenses, including communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, and aiding the enemy, a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty.

Assigned as an intelligence analyst in October 2009 to an army unit based near Baghdad, Manning was given access to several databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, told the FBI that Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from these databases and passed it to WikiLeaks. The material, much of it published between April and November 2010, included videos of a 2007 helicopter gun attack in Baghdad and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan, 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq and Afghan War logs. It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public.

William Jefferson Hague MP FRSL (born 26 March 1961) is a British politician, who is the current Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State. He served as Leader of the Conservative Party from June 1997 to September 2001. In Parliament, he has represented the constituency of Richmond (Yorks) since 1989.

Educated at Wath-upon-Dearne Grammar School, a state grammar school, then the University of Oxford (graduating with First Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and INSEAD, Hague was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1989. Hague rose through the ranks of John Major's government and entered the Cabinet in 1995 as the Secretary of State for Wales. Following the Conservatives' defeat in the 1997 general election, he was elected as leader of the Conservative Party. He resigned as party leader after the 2001 general election following a landslide defeat to the Labour Party. He was the first leader of the Conservatives not to have become Prime Minister since Austen Chamberlain in the early 1920s.

Christopher Shaun Ruane (born 18 July 1958) is a Welsh Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Vale of Clwyd since 1997.

Ruane attended Ysgol Mair Roman Catholic primary school in Rhyl. He then went to the Blessed Edward Jones RC High School (three years above Carol Vorderman) on Cefndy Road in Rhyl, Denbighshire. At the University of Wales College, Aberystwyth, he gained a BSc in Economics in 1979. From the University of Liverpool he gained a PGCE in 1980. He was a town councillor from 1988 and the Chairman of West Clwyd NUT region.

He was a primary school teacher from 1982–97, and a deputy head from 1991-7.

He contested Clwyd North West in 1992.

He was the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Peter Hain from 2003 until his resignation in March 2007 in protest against the decision to replace Trident. [1]

He married Gill Roberts on February 14, 1994 in Rhuddlan, Denbighshire. They have two daughters (born November 1994 and October 1998).