Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• Abdul Aziz al-Hakim
• Abdul Rahman Arif
• Abdul-Wahab Mirjan
• Abstract algebra
• Adil Osseiran
• Adnan Pachachi
• Ahmad Mukhtar Baban
• Ahmadinejad
• Ahmed Chalabi
• Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
• Al-Qaeda
• Albert Wohlstetter
• Ali Jawdat al-Aiyubi
• Ali Osseiran
• Alma mater
• AlterNet
• Arabic language
• Aram Roston
• Aras Habib
• ARD (TV)
• Argentine Annie
• Arif Abd ar-Razzaq
• Arshad al-Umari
• Ayad Allawi
• Bachelor of science
• Baghdad
• Bahrain
• Bank fraud
• BBC
• BKSH & Associates
• Canada
• Capitol Hill
• Central Bank
• Chalabi, Armenia
• CIA
• CNN
• Code (cryptography)
• Code-breaking
• Colin Powell
• Condoleezza Rice
• Constance Drexel
• Counterfeiting
• Cryptography
• Daily Telegraph
• Danielle Pletka
• David Petraeus
• Democracy
• Dick Cheney
• Doctor of Philosophy
• Donald H. Rumsfeld
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Earmark (politics)
• Eoghan Harris
• Erdős number
• Ezzedine Salim
• Fred W. Kaltenbach
• George Glauberman
• George W. Bush
• George Washington
• Germany
• Group algebra
• Hala Misrati
• Hamdi al-Pachachi
• Hanoi Hannah
• Hezbollah
• Hikmat Sulayman
• Ibrahim al-Jaafari
• In absentia
• Internet Archive
• Iran
• Iraq
• Iraq Liberation Act
• Iraqi people
• Ireland
• Jacobson radical
• Jafar al-Askari
• Jalal Talabani
• Jamil al-Midfai
• Japan
• Jawad Fairooz
• Jim Hoagland
• Jordan
• Joseph Goebbels
• Kadhimiya
• Karen Kwiatkowski
• Kingdom of Iraq
• Kurd
• Lakhdar Brahimi
• Latifiya
• Laura Bush
• Lebanese people
• Lord Haw-Haw
• Los Angeles Times
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
• Massoud Barzani
• Mathematics
• Melik Kaylan
• Mildred Gillars
• Military tribunal
• Mohsen Abdel Hamid
• Moussa Ibrahim
• Muqtada al-Sadr
• Muzahim al-Pachachi
• Najaf
• Naji al-Suwaidi
• Naji Shawkat
• Naji Talib
• Nayirah (testimony)
• Neoconservatives
• New York Times
• NHK
• Nouri al Maliki
• Nouri al-Maliki
• Nureddin Mahmud
• Nuri as-Said
• Oil for Food
• Oil for Food program
• Ottawa, Ontario
• Pardon
• Paul Bremer
• Paul Ferdonnet
• Paul Wolfowitz
• Pdf
• Petra Bank
• Philippe Henriot
• Politics of Jordan
• Prime minister
• Propaganda
• Pundit (politics)
• Pyongyang Sally
• Richard Perle
• Rita Zucca
• Robert Henry Best
• Robert Zoellick
• Sa'dun Hammadi
• Saddam Hussein
• Salem Chalabi
• Salon.com
• Sayyid Salih Jabr
• Seoul City Sue
• Seymour Hersh
• Shi'ite
• Shia Islam
• Slate.msn.com
• SourceWatch
• Stephen Hadley
• Sunday Herald
• Sunday Telegraph
• Tahir Yahya
• Tawfiq al-Suwaidi
• Template IraqiPMs
• The Daily Telegraph
• The Economist
• The New Republic
• The New York Times
• The Pentagon
• The Washington Post
• Thomas Baty
• Tokyo Rose
• Tony Blair
• U.N.
• United Kingdom
• United States
• United States dollar
• Wafiq Al-Samarrai
• Washington, D.C.
• Whitfield Diffie
• Wikipedia Persondata
• William Joyce
• Yasin al-Hashimi
• Zuhair al-Maliki
• 
  

• 
  Baghdad
  Baghdad (Arabic: بغداد‎, Baġdād, IPA: [bæɣˈdæːd]) is the capital of Republic of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Province. The population of Baghdad as of 2011 is approximately 7,216,040, making it the largest city in Iraq, the second largest city in the Arab World (after Cairo, Egypt), and the second largest city in Western Asia (after Tehran, Iran).
  Located along the Tigris River, the city was founded in the 8th century and became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Within a short time of its inception, Baghdad evolved into a significant cultural, commercial, and intellectual center for the Islamic World. This in addition to housing several key academic institutions (e.g. House of Wisdom) garnered the city a worldwide reputation as the "Center of Learning". Throughout the High Middle Ages, Baghdad was considered to be the largest city in the world with an estimated population of 1,200,000 people. The city was largely destroyed at the hands of the Mongol Empire in 1258, resulting in a decline that would linger through many centuries due to frequent plagues and multiple successive empires. With the recognition of Iraq as an independent state (formerly the British Mandate of Mesopotamia) in 1938, Baghdad gradually regained some of its former prominence as a significant center of Arabic culture.
  
  wn.com/Baghdad
• 
  Bahrain
  Bahrain ( pronunciation) (Arabic: ‏البحرين‎, al-Baḥrayn) (Persian: ‏بحرين‎, Baḥrain), officially the Kingdom of Bahrain (Arabic: مملكة البحرين‎,  Mamlakat al-Baḥrayn), is a small island state near the western shores of the Persian Gulf. It is ruled by the Al Khalifa royal family. The population in 2010 stood at 1,234,571, including 666,172 non-nationals. Formerly an emirate, Bahrain was declared a kingdom in 2002.
  Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 islands, the largest being Bahrain Island, at 55 km (34 mi) long by 18 km (11 mi) wide. Saudi Arabia lies to the west and is connected to Bahrain by the King Fahd Causeway. The peninsula of Qatar is to the southeast across the Gulf of Bahrain. The planned Qatar Bahrain Causeway will link Bahrain and Qatar and become the world's longest marine causeway.
  Known for its oil and pearls, Bahrain is also home to many large structures, including the Bahrain World Trade Center and the Bahrain Financial Harbour, with a proposal in place to build the 1,022 m (3,353 ft) high Murjan Tower. The Qal'at al-Bahrain (the harbour and capital of the ancient land of Dilmun) was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. The Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix takes place at the Bahrain International Circuit.
  
  wn.com/Bahrain
• 
  Canada
  Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km² (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
  The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
  
  wn.com/Canada
• 
  Chalabi, Armenia
  Coordinates: 40°49′32″N 45°31′34″E / 40.82556°N 45.52611°E / 40.82556; 45.52611
  Chalabi is a town in the Tavush Province of Armenia.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Chalabi,_Armenia
• 
  Germany
  Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
  A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
  
  wn.com/Germany
• 
  Iran
  Coordinates: 32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53
  Iran (ⁱ/ɪˈrɑːn/ or /aɪˈræn/;Persian: ایران‎ [ʔiˈɾɒn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران‎ Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān), is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran", which in Persian means "Land of the Aryans", has been in use natively since the Sassanian era. It came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia ( /ˈpɜrʒə/ or /ˈpɜrʃə/). Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, "Iran" is the name used officially in political contexts.
  The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km² (636,372 sq mi), Iran has a population of around 79 million. It is a country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in the Middle East and central Eurasia. Iran is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. As Iran is a littoral state of the Caspian Sea, which is an inland sea, Kazakhstan and Russia are also Iran's direct neighbors to the north. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey. Tehran is the capital, the country's largest city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power, and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the second largest proven natural gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest proven petroleum reserves.
  
  wn.com/Iran
• 
  Iraq
  Iraq (/ɪˈræk/ or ⁱ/ɪˈrɑːk/; Arabic: العراق‎ al-‘Irāq); officially the Republic of Iraq (Arabic:  جمهورية العراق (help·info) Jumhūriyyat al-‘Irāq), is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.
  Iraq borders Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Jordan to the southwest and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south. Iraq has a narrow section of coastline measuring 58 km (36 mi) on the northern Persian Gulf. The capital city, Baghdad is in the center-east of the country.
  Two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, run through the center of Iraq, flowing from northwest to southeast. These provide Iraq with agriculturally capable land and contrast with the steppe and desert landscape that covers most of Western Asia.
  Historically, Iraq was the center of the Abbasid Arabic Islamic Empire. Iraq has been known to the west by the Greek toponym 'Mesopotamia' (Land between the rivers) and has been home to continuous successive civilizations since the 6th millennium BC. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is often referred to as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing, law and the wheel. At different periods in its history, Iraq was the center of the indigenous Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires. It was also part of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.
  
  wn.com/Iraq
• 
  Ireland
  Coordinates: 53°20′N 08°00′W / 53.333°N 8°W / 53.333; -8
  Ireland (pronounced [ˈaɪrlənd] ( listen); Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] ( listen); Ulster Scots: Airlann or Airlan) is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth. To its east is the larger island of Great Britain, from which it is separated by the Irish Sea.
  Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers just under five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, which covers the remainder and is located in the northeast of the island. The population of Ireland is approximately 6.4 million. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just under 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.
  Relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain epitomise Ireland's geography with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild but changeable oceanic climate, which avoids extremes in temperature. Thick woodlands covered the island until the 17th century. Today, it is one of the most deforested areas in Europe. There are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland.
  
  wn.com/Ireland
• 
  Japan
  Japan ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
  Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.
  Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.
  
  wn.com/Japan
• 
  Jordan
  Jordan ( /ˈdʒɔr.dən/;Arabic: اَلأُرْدُنّ, Al-'Urdunn), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Arabic: اَلمَمْلَكَة اَلأُرْدُنِيَّة اَلهَاشِمِيَّة), Al-Mamlakah Al-Urdaniyyah Al-Hashimiyyah) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing control of the Dead Sea with the latter. Jordan's only port is at its south-western tip, at the Gulf of Aqaba, which is shared with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Over half of Jordan is covered by the Arabian Desert. However, the western part of Jordan is arable land and forests. Jordan is part of the Fertile Crescent. The capital city is Amman. According to the CIA World Factbook, Jordan has the second highest life expectancy in the Middle East, after Israel. The average life expectancy is one position behind the United Kingdom, although the age remains exactly the same (80.05 years).
  The precursor to modern Jordan was founded in 1921 as the Hashemite Emirate, and it was recognized by the League of Nations as a state under the British mandate in 1922 known as The Emirate of Transjordan. In 1946, Jordan became an independent sovereign state officially known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. After capturing the West Bank area of Cisjordan during the 1948–49 war with Israel, Abdullah I took the title King of Jordan and Palestine, and he officially changed the country's name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in April 1949.
  
  wn.com/Jordan
• 
  Kadhimiya
  al-Kāżimiyyah (Arabic: الكاظمية‎ al-Kāżimiyyah; alternatively, Arabic: الكاظمين‎ al-Kāżimayn), is a town located in what is now a northern neighbourhood of Baghdad, Iraq about five kilometres from the city center. Al-Kāżimiyyah is one of nine administrative districts in Baghdad.
  Al-Kāżimayn is regarded as a holy city in Shī‘ah Islām. It received its name (lit. "the Two Kāżims" or "the Two who swallow their anger"), for the two Shī‘ah Imāms buried there: Mūsā al-Kādhim and his grandson and successor Shī‘ah Imām Muhammad at-Taqī. A shrine was first built over their tombs, and subsequently the al-Kadhimiya Mosque.
  The area that now constitutes al-Kāżimiyyah was originally the location of a graveyard reserved for members of the Quraish tribe. This land was set aside for this purpose by the Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid.
  In its early history, the town was an important center of Shia learning, perhaps the main center, but over time the town declined, and other cities rose to prominence. The location of the city has lent it to numerous plunders, that have resulted in damage to its shrines at different times in history. Among the most damage ever experienced by the town was after the Mongol sack of Baghdad where the shrine of the Shia Imams was burnt down. The area was also an important center of resistance against the British after World War I.
  
  wn.com/Kadhimiya
• Latifiya
  Latifiya (Arabic اللطيفية) is an Iraqi city south of Baghdad, inhabited by 250 thousand people. It is home to the 1/4/6 Iraqi Army Battalion and US Patrol Base Latifiya.
  Coordinates: 33°02′N 44°10′E / 33.033°N 44.167°E / 33.033; 44.167
  
  wn.com/Latifiya
• 
  Najaf
  Najaf (Arabic: النجف‎; BGN: An Najaf) is a city in Iraq about 160 km (roughly 100 miles) south of Baghdad. Its estimated population in 2008 is 560,000 people. It is the capital of Najaf Governorate. It is widely considered the third holiest city of Shi'a Islam and the center of Shia political power in Iraq.
  Najaf is renowned as the site of the tomb of Alī ibn Abī Tālib also known as "Imām Alī"the First Imam of Shia's , the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad whom the Shia consider to be the righteous caliph . The city is now a great center of pilgrimage from throughout the Shi'a Islamic world. It is estimated that only Mecca and Medina receive more Muslim pilgrims. As the burial site of Shia Islam's second most important figure, the Imam Ali Mosque is considered by Shias as the third holiest Islamic site.
  The Imam Ali Mosque is housed in a grand structure with a gold gilded dome and many precious objects in the walls. Nearby is the Wadi-us-Salaam cemetery, reputed to be the largest in the world. It contains the tombs of several prophets and many of the devout from around the world aspire to be buried here, to be raised from the dead with Imām Alī on Judgement Day. Over the centuries, numerous hospices, schools, libraries and Sufi convents were built around the shrine to make the city the centre of Shīʻa learning and theology.
  
  wn.com/Najaf
• 
  NHK
  NHK (日本放送協会, nippon housou kyoukai; official English name: Japan Broadcasting Corporation) is Japan's national public broadcasting organization. NHK, which has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, is a publicly owned corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee.
  NHK operates two terrestrial television services (NHK General TV and NHK Educational TV), two satellite television services (NHK BS-1 and NHK BS Premium, both now high-definition television services), and three radio networks (NHK Radio 1, NHK Radio 2, and NHK FM).
  NHK also provides an international broadcasting service, known as NHK World. NHK World is composed of NHK World TV, NHK World Premium, and the shortwave radio service NHK World Radio Japan. World Radio Japan also makes some of its programs available on the internet.
  Until the 1940s, NHK was a national radio broadcasting monopoly.
  On 22 March 1925, one and a half years after the Great Kantō earthquake, Radio Japan produced the first radio broadcast in the country, transmitting from Atago Hill just north of the Tokugawa Tombs in Shiba Park. The first programme included Beethoven, classical Japanese music, and a play by Ōyō. In the same year, there were also broadcasts from Ōsaka and Nagoya.
  
  wn.com/NHK
• 
  Ottawa, Ontario
  Ottawa (ⁱ/ˈɒtəwɑː/ or /ˈɒtəwə/) is the capital of Canada. It is the second largest city in Ontario and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, located on the north bank of the Ottawa River; together they form the National Capital Region (NCR).
  Founded in 1826 as Bytown and incorporated as "Ottawa" in 1855, the city has evolved into a political and technological centre of Canada. Its original boundaries were expanded through numerous minor annexations and ultimately replaced by a new city incorporation and major amalgamation in 2001 which significantly increased its land area. The name "Ottawa" is derived from the Algonquin word adawe, meaning "to trade". Initially an Irish and French Christian settlement, Ottawa has become a multicultural city with a diverse population.
  The 2011 census had the city's population as 883,391, and the metropolitan population as 1,236,324.Mercer ranks Ottawa with the second highest quality of living of any large city in the Americas, and 14th highest in the world. It is also rated the second cleanest city in Canada, and third cleanest city in the world. In 2012, the city was ranked for the third consecutive year as the best community in Canada to live in by MoneySense.
  
  wn.com/Ottawa,_Ontario
• 
  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
  The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
  
  wn.com/United_Kingdom
• 
  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
• 
  Washington, D.C.
  Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a federal district to become the national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. It was formed from land along the Potomac River donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion was returned by Congress in 1846.
  A new capital city named after George Washington was founded in 1791 to the east of the preexisting port of Georgetown. Congress consolidated the City of Washington, Georgetown, and the remaining unincorporated area within the District under a single municipal government in 1871. The city shares its name with the U.S. state of Washington, located on the country's Pacific coast.
  Washington, D.C., had an estimated population of 617,996 in 2011. The city was the 24th most populous place in the United States as of 2010. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's population to over one million during the workweek. The Washington Metropolitan Area, of which the District is a part, has a population of nearly 5.6 million, the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the country.
  
  wn.com/Washington,_D.C.

• 
  Abd al-Karim Qasim
  Abd al-Karim Qasim (Arabic: عبد الكريم قاسم‎ `Abd al-Karīm Qāsim) (21 November 1914 – 9 February 1963), was a nationalist Iraqi Army general who seized power in a 1958 coup d'état, wherein the Iraqi monarchy was eliminated. He ruled the country as Prime Minister of Iraq until his downfall and death in 1963.
  His name can be transliterated from the Arabic in a number of ways, e.g. Abdel Karim Kassem, Abdul Karim Kassem, Abdulkarim Kasem, Abdel-Karim Qaasim, `Abdul Karim Qasem, Qassem. During his rule, he was popularly known as al-za‘īm (الزعيم) or, "The Leader".
  Abd al-Karim Qasim's father was a Sunni Muslim of Arab descent who died shortly after his son's birth during World War I as a soldier for the Ottoman Empire. Qasim's mother was a Shiite and the daughter of a Feyli Kurd farmer from Baghdad.
  When Qasim was six years of age his family moved to Suwayra, a small town near the Tigris, then to Baghdad in 1926. Qasim was an excellent student; he entered secondary school on a government scholarship. After graduation in 1931, he taught at Shamiyya Elementary School from Oct 22 of that year until Sept 3 1932, when he was accepted into Military College. In 1934, he graduated as a second lieutenant. Qasim then attended al-Arkan (Iraqi Staff) College and graduated with honor (grade A) in December 1941. In 1951, he completed a senior officers’ course in Britain.
  
  wn.com/Abd_al-Karim_Qasim
• 
  Abdul Aziz al-Hakim
  Sayyed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (Arabic: سید عبد العزيز الحكيم‎) (1953 - August 26, 2009) was an Iraqi theologian and politician and the leader of Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a party that enjoys approximately 5% support in the Iraqi Council of Representatives.
  He was a member of the United States-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and served as its president in December 2003. Brother of the Shia leader Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, he replaced him as leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq when Mohammed Baqir was assassinated in August 2003 in Najaf.
  He was born in 1953, the son of Grand Ayatollah Muhsin Al-Hakim. Raised in Najaf and then received his theological education through the religious school there, known as the Hawza. He was married to the daughter of Mohammed Hadi al-Sadr and he was the father of two girls and two boys. His son Muhsin Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was a political adviser for him while his other son Ammar al-Hakim is the Secretary General of Al-Mihrab Martyr Foundation. Seven of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim brothers have been killed, six of them on the orders of Saddam Hussein.
  
  wn.com/Abdul_Aziz_al-Hakim
• 
  Abdul Rahman Arif
  Hajj Abdul Rahman Mohammed Arif Aljumaily (Arabic عبد الرحمن محمد عارف الجميلي`Abd al-Raḥmān `Ārif) (1916 – August 24, 2007) was the third President of Iraq from April 16, 1966 to July 17, 1968.
  He was a career soldier, and supported the military coup in 1958 that overthrew the monarchy. He also supported the coup that brought his brother, Abdul Salam Arif, to power in 1963. His brother appointed him head of the army following the coup, and when the younger Arif died in a helicopter crash in April 1966 (a probable act of sabotage), Prime Minister Abdul Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president; three days later, al-Bazzaz was chosen to become president, then al-Bazzaz immediately relinquished the presidency to Abdul Rahman Arif. The transfer of power possibly occurred because the Iraqi military thought that Abdul Salam should be succeeded by his weak and easier to manipulate brother instead. Arif was appointed president by the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council. He continued his brother's policies, but with a more nationalistic profile.
  
  wn.com/Abdul_Rahman_Arif
• 
  Abdul-Wahab Mirjan
  Abdul-Wahab Mirjan (1909–1964) (Arabic: عبد الوهاب مرجان‎) served as prime minister of Iraq (December 15, 1957 – March 3, 1958) at the time of that country's short-lived union with Jordan, which was formalized on February 14, 1958. A relative newcomer to the Iraqi government, Mirjan first joined the cabinet in 1947. He resigned, less than a month after the federation was declared, in favor of Nuri as-Said. He survived the republican coup later that year and died in 1964. He was known, along with his father Abdul-Razzak Mirjan, as being compassionate to his country; Abdul-Razzak Mirjan and his cousin Abdul-Abbas Mirjan donated a number of valuable assets, such as Mirjan Hospital in Hilla province and a large number of houses for the poor people of Iraq.
  Abdul-Wahab, son of Abdul-Razzaq, son of Jawad, son of Mahmood AL Mirjan, came from a renowned family in Al-Hilla, where he was born in 1909. He graduated from the College of Law in Baghdad in 1932 and was appointed Justice of the Peace in Suweira (January 1938). However, he resigned after a short period, devoting himself to his law practice and the management of his estates. In September 1942 he was elected President of Al-Hilla Chamber of Agriculture.
  
  wn.com/Abdul-Wahab_Mirjan
• 
  Adil Osseiran
  Adel Osseiran (Arabic: عادل عسيران) was a prominent Lebanese politician and statesman, a former Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, and one of the founding fathers of the Lebanese Republic.
  Adel Osseiran played a significant role at various points in the history of modern Lebanon, such as the struggle for independence (1943), the mini-civil war of 1958, and the Lausanne Conference for Peace(1984).
  Born on June 5, 1905 to Abdallah Ali Effendi Osseiran and Zahra Al Hajj Hassan Osseiran, Adel was his parents' only son, followed by three sisters. His father died of the Typhus plague in 1917 when Adel was 12 years old, and he was raised by his uncle Rashid Osseiran who effectively made him head of his immediate family after him.
  The Osseirans are a prominent family of notables based in Sidon and the Jabal Amel region of Lebanon.
  Adel Osseiran received his early education at the French Orthodox Elementary School (Les Freres) in Sidon, and completed his secondary education at the International College (IC) in Beirut. He then pursued his higher studies at the American University of Beirut, graduating with a degree in History and Politics in 1928. He returned to his alma mater to do an MA in Political Science, graduating in 1936. During the interval, he had also begun a law degree at the Universite Saint Joseph (USJ) but did not complete it. A powerful orator in Classical Arabic, he was also fluent in English and French.
  
  wn.com/Adil_Osseiran
• 
  Adnan Pachachi
  Adnan al-Pachachi or Adnan Muzahim Ameen al-Pachachi (Arabic: عدنان الباجه جي‎) (born May 14, 1923) is a veteran Iraqi politician and diplomat. Pachachi was Iraq's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1959 to 1965 and Foreign Minister of Iraq from 1965 to 1967 during the Six-Day War with Israel; he again served as Permanent Representative to the UN from 1967 to 1969. After 1971, he spent a long period in exile. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pachachi has been an important figure in Iraqi politics, often described as Iraq's elder statesman. He rejected the role of President in the Iraqi Interim Government.
  Pachachi was born in Baghdad into the Abdah branch of the Shammar tribe. As the son of Muzahim al-Pachachi, nephew of Abdul Hamdi al-Pachachi and the cousin of Nadim al-pachachi, he is the scion of a Sunni Arab nationalist family with a long tradition in Iraqi politics and a graduate from Victoria College, Alexandria in Egypt. He supported the 1941 Iraqi coup d'état led by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani as a member of the Kata'ib al-Shabab (Youth Brigade). Pachachi completed his undergraduate studies in 1943 at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, majoring in Political Science, attending the university during this period he was inspired by the early emergence of the Arab Nationalist Movement on the campus. After his return to Iraq, his application for a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was refused by the Iraqi Criminal Investigation Department due to his participation in the Kata'ib al-Shabab and support for the 1941 coup. Eventually in 1950, he was appointed assistant director of the Political Department in the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs and continued to work in the Foreign Service over the next 8 years. In 1958 the union of Egypt and Syria was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the United Arab Republic was founded.
  
  wn.com/Adnan_Pachachi
• 
  Ahmad Mukhtar Baban
  Ahmad Mukhtar Baban (1900 - 1976) (Arabic: أحمد مختار بابان‎) was the last Prime Minister of Iraq under the monarchy in 1958. Baban became prime minister on May 18, 1958, during a time of political tension. The monarchies of Iraq and Jordan had recently agreed upon a confederation known as the Arab Federation. The federation, and Baban's time as prime minister, lasted for only two months, as on July 14, 1958, the monarchy was overthrown in a coup, and a republic was established under Abdul Karim Qassim. Baban was arrested and sentenced to death by the People's Court—established under Qassim's leadership following the coup—though unlike the royal family and many Iraqi politicians in the monarchy, the sentence was commuted and he was not executed.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Ahmad_Mukhtar_Baban
• 
  Ahmed Chalabi
  Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (Arabic: أحمد الجلبي‎) (born October 30, 1944) is an Iraqi politician. He was interim oil minister in Iraq in April-May 2005 and December-January 2006 and deputy prime minister from May 2005 until May 2006. Chalabi failed to win a seat in parliament in the December 2005 elections, and when the new Iraqi cabinet was announced in May 2006, he was not given a post. Once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq" by American supporters, he has fallen out of favor and is currently under investigation by several U.S. government sources. He was also the subject of a 2008 biography by investigative journalist Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War; The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, And Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi and a 2011 biography by 60 Minutes producer Richard Bonin, "Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq".
  Chalabi was also part of a three-man executive council for the umbrella Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), created in 1992 for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Although the INC received major funding and assistance from the United States, it never had any influence or any following to speak of in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The INC's influence gradually waned until the December 2005 elections, in which it failed to win a single seat in Parliament.
  
  wn.com/Ahmed_Chalabi
• 
  Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
  Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr (Arabic أحمد حسن البكر 'Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr; 1 July 1914 – 4 October 1982) was the fourth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 17 July 1968 until 16 July 1979. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region (the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi cell), which espoused ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
  Al-Bakr first rose to prominence following the 14 July Revolution which overthrew the monarchy. In the newly-established regime, al-Bakr was involved in improving Iraqi–Soviet relations. In 1959 al-Bakr was forced to resign from the Iraqi military; the then Iraqi regime accused him of being involved in anti-government activities. Following his forced retirement, he became the chairman of the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi cell's Military Bureau. Through this office he was able to recruit members to the ba'athist cause through patronage and cronyism. Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim was overthrown in the Ramadan (8 February) Revolution; al-Bakr was appointed Prime Minister, and later, Vice President of Iraq in a ba'ath-nasserist coalition government. The government lasted for little more than a year, and was ousted in November 1963.
  
  wn.com/Ahmed_Hassan_al-Bakr
• Albert Wohlstetter
  Albert Wohlstetter (December 19, 1913 – January 10, 1997) was an influential and controversial nuclear strategist during the Cold War. He was major intellectual force behind efforts to deter nuclear war and avoid the further spread of nuclear weapons to more nations. He and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter, an accomplished historian and intelligence expert, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan on November 7, 1985. He was one of the inspirations for the film Dr. Strangelove.
  A native of New York, New York, Wohlstetter earned degrees from the City College of New York and Columbia University in the 1930s. During the 1940s, he worked with the War Production Board, at Atlas Aircraft Products Company and, after World War II, at the General Panel Corporation of California.
  From 1951 to 1963, he served first as a consultant and later as a senior policy analyst for the RAND Corporation, and maintained his affiliation with RAND for years afterward. At RAND, he researched how to posture and operate U.S. strategic nuclear forces to deter plausible forms of Soviet nuclear-armed aggression in way that was credible, cost-effective and controllable.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Wohlstetter
• 
  Ali Jawdat al-Aiyubi
  Ali Jawdat al-Ayubi (علي جودت الأيوبي) was Prime Minister of Iraq 1934–1935, 1949–1950, 1957. He was born in 1886 and died in 1969.
  Ali Jawdat Al-Ayubi was born in Mosul in 1886 while Iraq was under Ottoman rule. His father served as a police sergeant, and upon retirement owned a grocery store. At a young age, Ali was dispatched by his parents from Mosul on a ten-day boat trip to Baghdad, where he stayed in the care of an aunt and attended the Rashidiyeh military school. Upon graduation, he went by camel and ship to Istanbul where he attended the Military College with other Iraqis, including Jaafar al-Askari, Nuri al-Said, Jamil al-Madfai and Yaseen al-Hashimi. With these latter, he fought during the First World War throughout the Arab lands for independence from Ottoman rule. While in the Ottoman Army, he had been caught singing in the shower and was jailed for two weeks as punishment. Upon establishment in 1921 of the Kingdom of Iraq, with King Feisal the First as its ruler, each served in turn in positions of leadership. Ali Jawdat served as Military Governor for Aleppo and Homs, during the short-lived tenure of the first Arab kingdom in Syria, under King Faisal, and thereafter served in turn as Governor of Hilla, Nejef, Kerbela, Mosul, Diyala, and Basra and variously as Minister of Finance, Minister of the Interior, Foreign Minister and Iraqi Ambassador to the Court of St. James, France and Washington, where he established the first Iraqi embassy in the US. He served three times as Prime Minister (1934, 1949 and 1957), successively under King Faisal the First, King Ghazi the First and King Faisal the Second.
  
  wn.com/Ali_Jawdat_al-Aiyubi
• Aram Roston
  Aram Roston is an American investigative journalist, a correspondent at Newsweek Magazine and The Daily Beast, and author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.
  In 2010, Roston was awarded the Daniel Pearl Award for a story called "How the US Funds the Taliban." The expose, which ran in November 2009 in The Nation Magazine, sparked a congressional investigation, and disclosed how a web of Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan routinely pay millions of dollars in protection money to the Taliban. The Pearl Award is named after the Wall Street Journal correspondent murdered in 2002 in Pakistan and recognized outstanding international investigative journalism.
  Other journalism awards include a 2011 Investigative Reporters and Editors prize, two Emmy awards for investigative business reporting, and a merit award from the Society of Silurians.
  He has written for The New York Times, GQ, Mother Jones, The Nation, "Playboy Magazine,"The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman and other publications.
  
  wn.com/Aram_Roston
• Aras Habib
  Aras Habib was a colonel in the Free Iraqi Fighters and the long-term director of intelligence for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC). He may have been the man in charge of the INC’s quest to hunt down former high-level Ba’athists in Iraq, using Ba'athist Party archives they had seized; in this area information relayed to US-led forces proved far more reliable than the inferences of weapons of mass destruction that had lured the US into Iraq. Chalabi's Pentagon connection, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, decided to close off funding following emerging disclosures that some of Chalabi's INC aides supplied sensitive information about U.S. security operations in Baghdad to the Iranian government.
  In the raid of Chalabi's house and office, May 20, 2004, because of which the US Pentagon's public break with Chalabi surfaced, a warrant for Aras Habib's arrest was not executed. He remained at large.
  
  wn.com/Aras_Habib
• 
  Arif Abd ar-Razzaq
  Arif Abd ar-Razzaq (1921 - 2007) was Prime Minister of Iraq in 1965.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Arif_Abd_ar-Razzaq
• 
  Arshad al-Umari
  Arshad Pasha al-Umari (1888–1978) (Arabic: أرشد العمري‎) was born in Mosul, Iraq on April 8, 1888, when his father was Mayor of Mosul. He obtained his high school degree in 1904 when he was 16 years old. After finishing high school at Mosul he left for Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to complete his studies. He did the trip by horses via Aleppo to the port of Alexandretta on the Mediterranean Sea. Such a trip in those days took about 40 days. From Alexandretta he took the steamer to Istanbul where he was admitted to the Architectural Division of the Royal Engineering College. The teaching staff of the college were professors from Germany, Belgium and Austria.
  He graduated as an architect in 1908 when he was 21 years old, and was appointed in the Architectural Division of the Municipality of Istanbul. When World War I broke out in 1914 he was conscripted as an engineer in the Ministry of Defense and when the war was over in 1918 he returned to the Municipality of Istanbul as Chief Engineer when Jamil Pasha Topuslu was Lord Mayor of Istanbul. He married Rafi'a Khanim, the younger sister of Jamil Pasha the Lord Mayor of Istanbul. Jamil Pasha and Rafi'a Khanim's father was Dhia Pasha who occupied several prominent positions in the Ottoman Empire, the most important of which was the personal supervision of the renovation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, ordered by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He lived with his family several years in Jerusalem to carry out this job.
  
  wn.com/Arshad_al-Umari
• 
  Ayad Allawi
  Ayad Allawi (Arabic: إياد علاوي‎. Iyād ʿAllāwī; born 1945) is an Iraqi politician, and was the interim Prime Minister of Iraq prior to Iraq's 2005 legislative elections. A prominent Iraqi political activist who lived in exile for almost 30 years, the politically secular Shia Muslim became a member of the Iraq Interim Governing Council, which was established by U.S.-led coalition authorities following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He became Iraq's first head of government since Saddam Hussein when the council dissolved on June 1, 2004 and named him Prime Minister of the Iraqi Interim Government. His term as Prime Minister ended on April 7, 2005, after the selection of Islamic Dawa Party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari by the newly-elected transitional Iraqi National Assembly.
  A former Ba'athist, Allawi helped found the Iraqi National Accord, which today is an active political party. In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the INA provided intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction to MI6. Allawi has lived about half of his life in the UK. His wife and children still live in Britain for their security. He survived assassination attempts in 1978, in 2004, and on April 20, 2005.
  
  wn.com/Ayad_Allawi
• 
  Colin Powell
  Colin Luther Powell ( /ˈkoʊlɨn/; born April 5, 1937) is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military career, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989), as Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989) and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Gulf War. He was the first, and so far the only, African American to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937 in Harlem, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, to Jamaican immigrant parents Maud Arial (née McKoy) and Luther Theophilus Powell. He also has Scottish ancestry. Powell was raised in the South Bronx and attended Morris High School, a former public school in the Bronx, from which he graduated in 1954. While at school, he worked at a local baby furniture store where he picked up Yiddish from the shopkeepers and some of the customers. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in geology from the City College of New York in 1958 and was a self-admitted C average student. He was later able to earn a Master of Business Administration degree from the George Washington University in 1971, after his second tour in Vietnam.
  
  wn.com/Colin_Powell
• Constance Drexel
  File:Constancedrexel.djvu
  Constance Drexel (ca. November 28, 1894 (disputed) – August 28, 1956), a naturalized United States citizen, and groundbreaking feature writer for U.S. newspapers, was indicted (but not tried or convicted) for treason in World War II for radio broadcasts from Berlin that extolled Nazi virtues. She had made a name for herself by claiming, falsely, that she was an heiress of the famous Drexel family of Philadelphia. Arrested in Vienna and jailed at war’s end by American troops, she was released and allowed to return to the United States to live. The U.S. Department of Justice eventually dismissed the treason charges against her because her broadcasts were not deemed “political in nature.”
  Public references to Drexel’s nation of origin and pedigree were contrary to privately recorded facts. As early as 1915 (in American press reports) and as late as the 1940s (in Nazi broadcasts), she was described as a member of the “famous Drexel family” of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an apparent reference to the descendants of Francis Martin Drexel (who founded the Drexel & Company banking empire), including his son Anthony Joseph Drexel (who founded Drexel University in Philadelphia) and his granddaughter Saint Katharine Drexel. Yet by all accounts, including the one provided by Constance Drexel to the Bureau of Investigation in 1918, she was born in Germany late in the 19th century (many decades after Francis Drexel emigrated from Europe to Philadelphia in 1817). After she began broadcasting from Nazi Germany during wartime, at least one American syndicated columnist speculated that “Drexel” was a pseudonym.
  
  wn.com/Constance_Drexel
• Danielle Pletka
  Danielle Pletka (born 1963 in Melbourne, Australia) is the vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
  Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC. Pletka was editorial assistant with the Los Angeles Times and Reuters, working in Jerusalem from 1984 to 1985. From 1987 to 1992, she was a staff writer for Insight on the News.^{[citation needed]}
  Pletka was a senior professional staff member for Near East and South Asia with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1992 to 2002.
  Pletka was a strong supporter of Iraqi opposition leader, Ahmed Chalabi, even after it emerged he was being investigated by the US authorities as an Iranian spy. Pletka defended Mr Chalabi saying that he had been "shoddily" treated and that CIA and US State Department personnel had been fighting "a rear guard" action against him.
  Pletka researches topics related to the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism, and weapons proliferation, and is an AEI expert on Iraq. Pletka is also involved in various other projects such as the Committee on the Present Danger.
  
  wn.com/Danielle_Pletka
• 
  David Petraeus
  David Howell Petraeus (pronunciation: /pɨˈtreɪ.əs/; born November 7, 1952) is the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was sworn in on September 6, 2011. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus was a four-star general serving over 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 4, 2010 to July 18, 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th Commander, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from October 13, 2008, to June 30, 2010, and as Commanding General, Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I) from February 10, 2007, to September 16, 2008. As commander of MNF-I, Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq.
  Petraeus has a B.S. degree from the United States Military Academy from which he graduated in 1974 as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class). He was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983. He subsequently earned an M.P.A. in 1985 and a Ph.D. degree in International Relations in 1987 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University.
  
  wn.com/David_Petraeus
• 
  Dick Cheney
  
  
  Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney (born January 30, 1941) served as the 46th Vice President of the United States (2001–2009), under George W. Bush.
  Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was primarily raised in Sumner, Nebraska, and Casper, Wyoming. He began his political career as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger, eventually working his way into the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations, where he served the latter as White House Chief of Staff. In 1978, Cheney was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming; he was reelected five times, eventually becoming House Minority Whip. Cheney was selected to be the Secretary of Defense during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, holding the position for the majority of Bush's term. During this time, Cheney oversaw the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, among other actions.
  Out of office during the Clinton presidency, Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000.
  Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Marjorie Lorraine (née Dickey) and Richard Herbert Cheney. He is of predominantly English, as well as Welsh, Irish, and French Huguenot, ancestry; Cheney's 8th great-grandfather, William Cheney, immigrated from England to Massachusetts in the 17th century. Although not a direct descendant, he is collaterally related to Benjamin Pierce Cheney (1815–1895), the early American expressman. Cheney is a very distant cousin of both Harry S. Truman and Barack Obama; the three share a common ancestor in Mareen Duvall, a Huguenot who fled from France to England in the 17th century and later settled in Maryland. His father was a soil conservation agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and his mother was a softball star in the 1930s; Cheney was one of three children.
  
  wn.com/Dick_Cheney
• 
  Donald H. Rumsfeld
  Donald Henry Rumsfeld (born July 9, 1932) is an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the oldest person to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a four-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1962–1969), Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–1970), Counsellor to the President (1969–1973), the United States Permanent Representative to NATO (1973–1974), and White House Chief of Staff (1974–1975).
  Born in Illinois, Rumsfeld attended Princeton University, graduating in 1954 with a degree in political science. After serving in the Navy for three years, he mounted a campaign for Congress in Illinois' 13th Congressional District, winning in 1962 at the age of 30. Reelected four times, he was a leading co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act. Rumsfeld was reluctantly appointed by President Richard Nixon to head the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969; appointed Counselor by Nixon and entitled to Cabinet-level status, he would also head up the Economic Stabilization Program before being appointed Ambassador to NATO. Called back to Washington in August 1974, Rumsfeld was appointed Chief of Staff by President Ford, recruiting a young one-time staffer of his, Dick Cheney, to succeed him when Ford nominated Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense in 1975.
  
  wn.com/Donald_H._Rumsfeld
• 
  Donald Rumsfeld
  Donald Henry Rumsfeld (born July 9, 1932) is an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the oldest person to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a four-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1962–1969), Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–1970), Counsellor to the President (1969–1973), the United States Permanent Representative to NATO (1973–1974), and White House Chief of Staff (1974–1975).
  Born in Illinois, Rumsfeld attended Princeton University, graduating in 1954 with a degree in political science. After serving in the Navy for three years, he mounted a campaign for Congress in Illinois' 13th Congressional District, winning in 1962 at the age of 30. Reelected four times, he was a leading co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act. Rumsfeld was reluctantly appointed by President Richard Nixon to head the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969; appointed Counselor by Nixon and entitled to Cabinet-level status, he would also head up the Economic Stabilization Program before being appointed Ambassador to NATO. Called back to Washington in August 1974, Rumsfeld was appointed Chief of Staff by President Ford, recruiting a young one-time staffer of his, Dick Cheney, to succeed him when Ford nominated Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense in 1975.
  
  wn.com/Donald_Rumsfeld
• Eoghan Harris
  Eoghan Harris (born 1943) is an Irish journalist, fiction writer, director, columnist and politician. He currently writes for the Sunday Independent. He was a member of Seanad Éireann from 2007–11, having been nominated by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
  Harris has held posts at various and diverse political parties throughout his career. He was a Marxist ideologue of the Workers' Party and its predecessor, Official Sinn Féin. He now says that he abhors Marxism. He was also a short-lived adviser to former Taoiseach John Bruton; an adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party and most recently a supporter of the Fianna Fáil-led government of Bertie Ahern. At one stage an Irish republican, he is now a bitter critic of modern day Sinn Féin, expressing his political views in the Sunday Independent. Harris's critics accuse him of demonstrating ideological malleability, hypocrisy, neoconservatism and inconsistency. Harris is also noted for his screenwriting work; he lectures at IADT, the Irish national film school, and teaches a screenwriting workshop. Harris is also a judge on the Irish language talent show Glas Vegas, on TG4.
  
  wn.com/Eoghan_Harris
• 
  Ezzedine Salim
  Ezzedine Salim, (Arabic: عزالدين سليم‎), also known as Abdelzahra Othman Mohammed (1943 - 17 May 2004 , عبدالزهرة عثمان محمد), was an Iraqi politician, author, educator, Islamist theorist and one of the leading members of the Iraqi Dawaa Movement between 1980 and 2004.
  Author of over 50 books, including history, Islamic events and works on education, he is best known in the Muslim world for his work on what he believed to be the social and political role of Islam, particularly in his book Political Opposition in the experience of Imam Ali(as). His magnum opus, Fatima Bint Muhammad, is a high calibre commentary on the life of Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad.
  He has been described as a great philosopher and martyr for Islam.
  Born in the city of Basra, Salim began studying religion and politics at a young age. At the age of 19 he joined the Shiite group Islamic Dawa Party, whose members were quickly noticed by the Baath Party as a threat to their power. He left Iraq in his early twenties to go and live in Kuwait.
  
  wn.com/Ezzedine_Salim
• 
  George W. Bush
  George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. The eldest son of Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush, he was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush worked in oil businesses. He married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. In a close and controversial election, Bush was elected President in 2000 as the Republican candidate, defeating Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College. Bush is the second American president to have been the son of a former president. He is also the brother of Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida.
  Terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term as president on September 11, 2001. In response, Bush announced the War on Terror, an international military campaign which included the war in Afghanistan launched in 2001 and the war in Iraq launched in 2003. In addition to national security issues, Bush promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, and social security reform. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors. His tenure saw national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. His administration also withdrew the U.S. from a some international treaty processes, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
  
  wn.com/George_W._Bush
• 
  George Washington
  George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731] – December 14, 1799) was the first President of the United States of America, serving from 1789 to 1797, and the dominant military and political leader of the United States from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of the Constitution in 1787. Washington became the first president, by unanimous choice, and oversaw the creation of a strong, well-financed national government that maintained neutrality in the wars raging in Europe, suppressed rebellion, and won acceptance among Americans of all types. His leadership style established many forms and rituals of government that have been used since, such as using a cabinet system and delivering an inaugural address. Washington is universally regarded as the "Father of his country."
  
  wn.com/George_Washington
• 
  Hamdi al-Pachachi
  Abdul Hamdi al-Pachachi (1886 – March 1948), Iraqi politician born to a prominent family in Baghdad. He studied law at the Royal School in Istanbul, graduating in 1909. He taught at the Baghdad Law School from 1913 to 1916. While in Istanbul, he joined the Covenant Society and became active in the Arab nationalist movement. Upon his return to Baghdad, he joined with the nationalists, who were demanding the decentralization of the Ottoman Empire. As a result of his violent activities during the Iraqi revolt against the British in 1920, al-Pachachi was arrested and exiled to Hanja, an island in the Persian Gulf. After his release, he continued to take part in anti-British activities.
  In 1925, he began cooperating with Abd al-Muhsin as-Sa'dun. Al-Pachachi served as minister of waqf in one of as-Sa'dun's cabinets (1925-26). He then retired from politics for many years. A large landowner, he concentrated on business matters and agriculture.
  In 1935, he was elected deputy to Parliament, but did not play a major role. He was minister of social welfare in 1941 and was elected president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1943.
  
  wn.com/Hamdi_al-Pachachi
• Hanoi Hannah
  Trịnh Thị Ngọ (born in 1931), also known as Hanoi Hannah, is a Vietnamese radio personality best known for her work during the Vietnam War, when she made English-language propaganda broadcasts for North Vietnam directed at US troops.
  Ngọ was born in Hanoi in 1931 in a rich factory owner's family. She recalls that she grew eager to learn English because of her desire to watch her favorite films such as Gone with the Wind without subtitles. Her family provided her with private lessons in English. When she was 25 years old she began reading the English language newscast for Vietnam’s national radio station that was aimed at listeners in Asia’s English-speaking countries.
  
  wn.com/Hanoi_Hannah
• 
  Hikmat Sulayman
  Hikmat Sulayman (1889–1964^{[citation needed]}) (Arabic: حكمت سليمان‎) was prime minister of Iraq from October 30, 1936 to August 12, 1937 at the head of a Party of National Brotherhood government. Sulayman, an ethnic Turkmen, was a key figure in the early days of Iraqi independence and the effort to create a multi-ethnic state. He came to power in Bakr Sidqi's coup, the first that the country experienced. His position was confirmed by King Ghazi.
  Together with Sidqi, an ethnic Kurd, Sulayman veered away from the pan-Arab nationalism of the preceding Iraqi governments. Together with Sidqi, he forged an alliance with Turkey and settled the border dispute with Iran, two countries he regarded as potential allies in the struggle against Arab nationalist sentiment. Nevertheless, he differed with Sidqi over the emphases of the new government, preferring to address social issues in the country, while Sidqi focused on military affairs and expanding Iraq's borders.
  Sulayman was forced to resign following Sidqi's assassination in 1937.
  
  wn.com/Hikmat_Sulayman
• 
  Ibrahim al-Jaafari
  Sayyid Ibrahim al-Eshaiker al-Jafari (Arabic: إبراهيم الأشيقر الجعفري‎; born 1947) is an Iraqi politician who was Prime Minister of Iraq in the Iraqi Transitional Government from 2005 to 2006, following the January 2005 election. He was previously one of the two Vice-Presidents of Iraq under the Iraqi Interim Government from 2004 to 2005, and he was the main spokesman for the Islamic Dawa Party. He withdrew his nomination for premiership for the permanent government because he disagreed with some of the Kurdish leaders with regards to securing Kirkuk as part of Iraq. Some members of his own group, the United Iraqi Alliance, conspired with some of the Kurdish personalities and some of the sectarian Sunni politicians and in turn these groups involved the US President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to convince al-Jafari to withdraw his nomination. Al-Jafari refused any foreign interference in the Iraqi politics and instead gave the United Iraqi Alliance the choice to decide whom they wanted, be it him or another political figure as Prime Minister. Al-Jafari refused to use force against any political group in society.
  
  wn.com/Ibrahim_al-Jaafari
• 
  Iraqi people
  The Iraqi people (Arabic: العراقيون ʿIrāqīyūn, Kurdish: گه‌لی عیراق Îraqîyan, Aramaic: ܥܡܐ ܥܝܪܩܝܐ‎ ʿIrāqāyā) or Mesopotamian people (Arabic: شعب بلاد ما بين النهرين) are the native inhabitants of the country of Iraq, (also known as Mesopotamia), and their related diaspora. From late Assyrian and Babylonian times until the early Islamic era, the Iraqi people spoke Aramaic but also witnessed a minority Arab presence.
  Arabic had been a minority language in Iraq since the 8th century BC, it was spoken in Hatra in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and by Iraqi Christians in Al-Hirah from the 3rd century, and from the 8th century following the Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia it became the common language of Iraqi Muslims, due to Arabic being the language of the Qur'an and the Caliphate. This change was facilitated by the fact that Arabic being a Semitic language, shared a close resemblance to Iraq's traditional languages of Akkadian and Aramaic. Some of Iraq's Christians and Mandaeans retained dialects of Aramaic, since it remained the liturgical language of their faiths. Kurdish-speaking Iraqis live in the mountainous Zagros region of northeast Iraq to the east of the upper Tigris. The Kurds and Arabs of Mesopotamia have interacted and intermarried for well over a millennium. Modern genetic studies indicate that Iraqi Arabs and Kurds are very closely related. Arabic and Kurdish are Iraq's national languages.
  
  wn.com/Iraqi_people
• 
  Jafar al-Askari
  Ja'far Pasha al-Askari (جعفر العسكري)‎ (1887–1936) served twice as prime minister of Iraq: from November 22, 1923, to August 3, 1924; and from November 21, 1926, to December 31, 1927.
  Al-Askari served in the Ottoman Empire Army during World War I until he was captured by British forces attacking the Empire from Egypt. After he was released he was converted to the cause of Arab nationalism and joined forces with Amir Faisal and T. E. Lawrence (Lawerence of Arabia), with his brother-in-law, Nuri as-Said, who would also serve as prime minister of Iraq. Al-Askari took part in the conquest of Damascus in 1918 and supported placing Faisal on the Syrian throne. When Faisal was deposed by the French in 1920, he advocated granting him a new throne in Iraq.
  As a reward for his loyalty, Faisal granted Al-Askari several important cabinet positions, including minister of defense in the first Iraqi government. He served as prime minister twice, and was also minister of foreign affairs. Al-Askari was minister of defense in Yasin al-Hashimi's government when it was overthrown by Chief of Staff Bakr Sidqi in 1936, in Iraq's first coup. Al-Askari was assassinated during the coup.
  
  wn.com/Jafar_al-Askari
• 
  Jalal Talabani
  Jalal Talabani (Sorani: جەلال تاڵەبانی Celal Tallebanî, Arabic: جلال طالباني‎ Jalāl Ṭālabānī; born November 12, 1933) is the sixth and current President of Iraq, a leading Kurdish politician. He is the first non-Arab president of Iraq, although Abdul Kareem Qasim was of partial Kurdish heritage.
  Talabani is the founder and secretary general of one of the main Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). He was a prominent member of the Interim Iraq Governing Council, which was established following the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Talabani has been an advocate for Kurdish rights and democracy in Iraq for more than 50 years.
  Talabani was born in 1933 in Talaban Village and descends from the Talabani tribe that has produced many leading social figures^{[citation needed]}. He received his elementary and intermediate school education in Koya (Koysanjak) and his high school education in Erbil and Kirkuk. In the late 1950s Mustafa Barzani sent him to Syria to study law. He is fluent in Kurdish and Arabic and has working knowledge in Persian with Kurdish accent and English. His youngest son, Qubad, is the representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government in the United States. Talabani is a member of the Socialist International.
  
  wn.com/Jalal_Talabani
• 
  Jamil al-Midfai
  Jamil al-Midfai (جميل المدفعي)‎ (1890–1958) was an Iraqi politician. He served as that country's prime minister on five separate occasions:
  Born in the town of Mosul, Midfai served in the Ottoman army during World War I, but deserted in 1916 to take part in the nationalist Arab Revolt. After the war, he was an aide to the Emir Faisal during his brief reign in Syria. He returned to Iraq in 1920, but was soon forced into exile in Jordan because of his anti-British nationalist activities. Upon his return in 1923, he served in various senior provincial capacities and finally joined the cabinet in 1930.
  As a seasoned politician and two-time prime minister, he was asked to form a new government in August 1937, following the assassination of General Bakr Sidqi, who had ruled the country as military dictator for almost a year. A staunch monarchist, Midfai was again forced into exile in Transjordan following the short-lived pro-Axis coup by Rashid Ali al-Kaylani in 1941. Upon his return, he served in various senior capacities including President of the Senate and briefly as prime minister. He died in 1959 suffering from lung cancer.
  
  wn.com/Jamil_al-Midfai
• Jim Hoagland
  Jim Hoagland (born January 22, 1940) is an American journalist and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. He is an associate editor, senior foreign correspondent, and columnist for The Washington Post.
  Born in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Hoagland is a graduate of the University of South Carolina. He attended post graduate programs at both the University of Aix-en-Provence in France and Columbia University in New York.
  Writing for the Washington Post, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1971 "for his coverage of the struggle against apartheid in the Republic of South Africa." Again for the Post he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1991 "for searching and prescient columns on events leading up to the Gulf War and on the political problems of Mikhail Gorbachev."
  Hoagland is also known for receiving the Legion of Honor, France's equivalent to the British Knighthood for his lifelong effort to better Franco-American relations.
  Hoagland has three children and is married to the author Jane Stanton Hitchcock.
  
  wn.com/Jim_Hoagland
• 
  Joseph Goebbels
   Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels (help·info) (German: [ˈɡœbəls]; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism.
  Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921, writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century romantic drama; he then went on to work as a journalist and later a bank clerk and caller on the stock exchange. He also wrote novels and plays, but they were rejected by publishers. Goebbels came into contact with the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party in 1923 during the French occupation of the Ruhr and became a member in 1924. He was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin. In this position, he put his propaganda skills to full use, combating the local socialist and communist parties with the help of Nazi papers and the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts). By 1928, he had risen in the party ranks to become one of its most prominent members.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Goebbels
• 
  Karen Kwiatkowski
  Karen U. Kwiatkowski (born September 24, 1960) is an American activist and commentator. She is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency. Since retiring, she has become a noted critic of the U.S. government's involvement in Iraq. Kwiatkowski is primarily known for her insider essays which denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She is currently challenging the ten-term incumbent, Bob Goodlatte, in the Republican primary for Virginia's 6th congressional district seat in the United States House of Representatives.
  While in the Air Force, she wrote two books about U.S. policy towards Africa: African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 2000) and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (Air University Press, 2001). More recently, she has contributed or co-written several books on neoconservatism and foreign policy. She contributed to "Ron Paul: A Life of Ideas," (Variant Press, 2008) and "Why Liberty: Personal Journeys Toward Peace and Freedom" (Cobden Press, 2010). She has been featured in a number of documentaries, including "Why We Fight" in 2005. She has written extensively for LewRockwell.com since 2003.
  
  wn.com/Karen_Kwiatkowski
• 
  Kingdom of Iraq
  The Kingdom of Iraq (Arabic: المملكة العراقية‎ al-Mamlakah al-'Irāqiyyah) was officially declared as an independent state in 1932, granting full sovereign rights to Hashemites and ending the British Mandate regime.
  Although the League of Nations mandate was awarded to Britain in 1920, the 1920 Iraqi revolt resulted in the scrapping of the original mandate plan in favor of British administered semi-independent kingdom, under the Hashemite allies of Britain. The kingdom of Iraq was granted full independence in 1932, following the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1930).
  The kingdom ended in 1958, when the monarchy was over thrown in a military coup, led by Abd al-Karim Qasim.
  Mandatory Mesopotamia was created under the League of Nations Class A mandate under Article 22 and entrusted to Britain, when the Ottoman Empire was divided in August 1920 by the Treaty of Sèvres, following World War I. This award was prepared on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo conference in Italy. France controlled the Mandates of Syria and Lebanon. Faisal ibn Husayn, who had been proclaimed King of Syria by a Syrian National Congress in Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July of the same year. Faisal was then granted the territory of Iraq, to rule it as a kingdom, with the British RAF retaining certain military control, though de facto, the territory remained under British Mandate until 1932.
  
  wn.com/Kingdom_of_Iraq
• 
  Kurd
  The Kurdish people, or Kurds (Kurdish: کورد Kurd), are an Iranic people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They speak the Kurdish language, which is a member of the Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. The Kurds number about 30 million, the majority living in the Middle East, with significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey, in Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Russia, Lebanon and, in recent decades, some European countries and the United States. The Kurds are an indigenous ethnic minority in countries where the Kurdistan region is located, although they have enjoyed partial autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan since 1991. An irredentist movement pushes for the creation of a Kurdish nation state.
  The exact origins of the name, "Kurd", are unclear. Reynolds believes that the term Kurd is most likely related to the ancient term Qardu. The common root of Kurd and Qardu is first mentioned in a Sumerian tablet from the third millennium B.C. as the "land of Kar-da." Qardu is etymologically related to the Assyrian term Urartu corresponding to Ararat. According to Asatrian, the most reasonable explanation of this ethnonym is its possible connections with the Cyrtii (Cyrtaei)
  
  wn.com/Kurd
• Lakhdar Brahimi
  [1] Lakhdar Brahimi (Arabic: الأخضر الإبراهيمي‎, al-Akhḍar al-Ibrāhīmī) (born January 1, 1934 in Algeria) is a veteran United Nations envoy and advisor. He retired from his duties at the end of 2005. Brahimi is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the first global initiative to focus specifically on the link between exclusion, poverty and law. He is also a member of the Global Leadership Foundation, an organization which works to promote good governance around the world.[2]. Mr. Brahimi is currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. [3] and a governing board member of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
  He was the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan and Iraq. Before his appointment in 2001 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he had served the U.N. as special representative to Haiti and to South Africa. Before coming to the U.N., Brahimi, who represented the National Liberation Front in Jakarta during Algeria's 1956–1961 independence movement, was an Arab League official (1984–1991) and the Algerian Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1991 until 1993. Mr. Brahimi was educated in Algeria and France (law and political science), and is fluent in Arabic, English and French. Brahimi is married with three children. His daughter, Reem (also spelled Rym), who was a CNN Correspondent in Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq War, is married to Prince Ali of Jordan. Lakhdar Brahimi was also chair of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, which produced the influential Brahimi Report [4].
  
  wn.com/Lakhdar_Brahimi
• 
  Laura Bush
  Laura Lane Welch Bush (born November 4, 1946) is the wife of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. She was the First Lady from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009. She graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in education and soon took a job as a second grade teacher. After attaining her Master's degree in Library Science at the University of Texas at Austin, she was employed as a librarian. She met George Walker Bush in 1977, and they were married later that year. The couple had twin daughters in 1981.
  Bush's political involvement began with her marriage. She campaigned during her husband's unsuccessful 1978 run for the United States Congress and later his successful Texas gubernatorial campaign. As First Lady of Texas, Bush implemented many initiatives focused on health, education, and literacy. In 1999, she aided her husband in campaigning for the presidency in a number of ways, most notably delivering a keynote address at the 2000 Republican National Convention, which gained her national attention. She became first lady after her husband defeated Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 election.
  
  wn.com/Laura_Bush
• 
  Lebanese people
  The Lebanese people (Arabic: الشعب اللبناني‎ el shaab el libnene, Lebanese Arabic pronunciation: [eʃˈʃaʕb ellɪbˈneːne]) are a nation and ethnic group of Levantine people originating in what is today the country of Lebanon, including those who had inhabited Mount Lebanon prior to the creation of the modern Lebanese state.
  The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Lebanese people is a rich blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years.
  Lebanon does not collect official census data on ethnic background and therefore is difficult to have an exact demographic analysis of Lebanese society, with the last census conducted by the French Mandate government in 1932. The largest concentration or people of Lebanese ancestry is in Brazil having an estimated population of 6 to 7 million. As with their predecessors, the Lebanese have always travelled the world, many of them settling permanently, most notably in the last two centuries.
  
  wn.com/Lebanese_people
• 
  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Persian: محمود احمدی‌نژاد‎, Mahmūd Ahmadinezhād [mæhˈmuːd(-e) æhmædiːneˈʒɒːd] ( listen),English: /ɑːkməˈdɪnɨʒɒd/; born 28 October 1956) is the sixth and current President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the main political leader of the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran, a coalition of conservative political groups in the country. An engineer and teacher from a poor background, Ahmadinejad joined the Office for Strengthening Unity after the Islamic Revolution. Appointed a provincial governor, he was removed after the election of President Mohammad Khatami and returned to teaching. Tehran's council elected him mayor in 2003. He took a religious hard line, reversing reforms of previous moderate mayors. His 2005 presidential campaign, supported by the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran, garnered 62% of the runoff election votes, and he became President on 3 August 2005. His second presidency term ends on August 3, 2013. He is not eligible to run for another term under the current Iranian constitution.
  
  wn.com/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad
• 
  Massoud Barzani
  Massoud Barzani (Kurdish: مەسعوود بارزانی; Arabic: مسعود بارزاني‎; born 16 August 1946) is the current President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Barzani was born in Mahabad, Iran, during the rule of the Republic of Mahabad. He has five sons (including Masrour) and three daughters.
  Massoud Barzani succeeded his father, the former Kurdish nationalist leader Mustafa Barzani, as the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in 1979. Working closely with his brother Idriss Barzani until Idriss' death, Barzani and various other Kurdish groups fought Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. For much of this time, the Kurdish leadership was exiled to Iran.
  With Saddam Hussein's defeat in the first Gulf War, Kurdish forces were able to retake much of the traditional homeland of the Kurds in Iraq. However, as Iraqi forces regrouped they pushed the Kurdish fighters back and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled to the mountains bordering Iran and Turkey, where thousands died under heavy fire from Iraqi gunships and many more succumbed to starvation and exposure. United States-led allies started Operation Provide Comfort to establish a safe zone within Iraq. This zone, protected by a no-fly zone, eventually developed into an autonomous Kurdish zone under the control of the two dominant Kurdish political parties, the KDP led by Massoud Barzani and the PUK led by Jalal Talabani. This zone incorporated most of the three governorates of Duhok, Hewler, and Silemani.
  
  wn.com/Massoud_Barzani
• 
  Mildred Gillars
  Mildred Elizabeth Gillars (November 29, 1900 – June 25, 1988), nicknamed "Axis Sally" along with Rita Zucca, was an American broadcaster employed by the Third Reich in Nazi Germany to proliferate propaganda during World War II. She was convicted of treason by the United States in 1949 following her capture in post-war Berlin.
  Born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk in Portland, Maine, she took the surname Gillars in 1911 after her mother remarried. At 16, she moved to Conneaut, Ohio, with her family. In 1918 she enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University to study dramatic arts but left before graduating.
  She then moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, where she worked in various low-skill jobs to finance drama lessons. She toured with stock companies and appeared in vaudeville but she was unable to establish a theatrical career.
  In 1929, Gillars left the U.S. for France, where she worked as an artist’s model in Paris. In 1933 she left the US again, residing first in Algiers, where she found work as a dressmaker's assistant.
  
  wn.com/Mildred_Gillars
• 
  Mohsen Abdel Hamid
  Mohsen Abdel Hamid (* 1937 Arabic: محسن عبد الحميد‎) is an Iraqi politician and Islamic scholar who was a member of the Interim Iraq Governing Council (president, February 2004), created following the United States's 2003 invasion of Iraq.
  Abdel Hamid was born in 1937 in Kirkuk and is of Kurdish background. He studied Islamic Law in Cairo and returned to Iraq in 1986 to work as a professor at Baghdad University. Abdel Hamid has written over 30 books on interpretation of the Qur'an. He was arrested in 1996 by the government of Saddam Hussein but opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
  Until 2004 he was the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni party in Iraq, and as a result was appointed to the Iraqi Governing Council.
  On May 30, 2005, Abdel Hamid was mistakenly arrested by U.S. troops.
  
  wn.com/Mohsen_Abdel_Hamid
• Moussa Ibrahim
  Moussa Ibrahim (Arabic: موسى إبراهيم‎ ; romanized also as Mussa and Musa) is a Libyan political figure, serving as Libyan Minister of Information and the official spokesman for Muammar Gaddafi from March 2011 until the fall of the regime. He came to general international attention during the Libyan civil war.
  Ibrahim was born in 1974 into Gaddafi's Qadhadhfa tribe. He has a German wife and a young son, and studied politics at the University of Exeter in the early 2000s. He worked on a PhD in media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, completing his final exam in May 2010, although he has not formally received his doctorate as supervisors are awaiting a small number of required amendments to his thesis. One of Ibrahim's lecturers at the University of Exeter, Dr. Larbi Sadiki, described him as an engaging, friendly but serious student—"a nice guy but with a short fuse".
  He told Sky News: "I lived in London for 15 years. I know every street in London. I know how decent the British people are."
  
  wn.com/Moussa_Ibrahim
• Muqtada al-Sadr
  Sayyid Muqtadā al-Ṣadr (Arabic: سيد مقتدى الصدر) (born August 12, 1973) is an Iraqi Islamic political leader.
  Along with Ali al-Sistani and Ammar al-Hakim of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Sadr is one of the most influential religious and political figures in the country not holding any official title in the Iraqi government.
  He is often referred to as Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr. The title Sayyid (approx. "Mr." or "Sir") is generally used among the Shi‘a to denote persons descending directly from the Prophet Muhammad, through his daughter Fatimah's marriage with Ali. Thus a great deal of respect is paid by the Shi'as to the Sayyids throughout Shi'a society. The al-Sadr family has a clear and distinct lineage that can be traced directly to Muhammad. The lineage is traced through Imam Jafar al-Sadiq and his son Imam Musa al-Kadhim, the sixth and seventh Shi‘a Imams respectively.
  Muqtada al-Sadr's formal religious standing is comparatively low, at a mid-ranking Shia religious rank perhaps reflecting his young age, and he does not claim the title of mujtahid (the equivalent of a senior religious scholar) or the authority to issue fatwas (religious edicts). In his youth, he was more pre-occupied with videogames than Islamic studies which earned him the nickname "Mullah Atari." (citation: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/04/200861517227277282.html)
  
  wn.com/Muqtada_al-Sadr
• 
  Muzahim al-Pachachi
  Muzahim Ameen al-Pachachi (1890 – 1982) was an Iraqi politician who served as Prime Minister of Iraq during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Born to a prominent family and graduated from the Baghdad School of Law he organized the Arab nationalist Cultural Club in Baghdad in 1912; its members included Hamdi al-Pachachi, Talib al-Naqib and Muhammad Ridha. In 1924, al-Pachachi was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting the Constitution of Iraq. He held a number of cabinet and diplomatic positions. He served as Minister of Works (1924-25) before becoming a member of parliament (1925-27). He was appointed ambassador to Britain (1927-28) and was briefly Minister of the Interior (1930). Al-Pachachi opposed the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty because it failed to meet nationalist demands. He held a succession of ambassadorial posts: ambassador to the League of Nations (1933-35), to Italy (1935-39), and to France (1939-42). During the occupation of France in World War II, al-Pachachi stayed in Switzerland. He became active in the 1930s and 1940s in pro-Palestinian activities and opposed the 1948 United Nations truce in Palestine. The prime ministers of Iraq in 1948 were Sayyid Muhammad as-Sadr (January-June) and Muzahim al-Pachachi (June 1948-January 1949), both were distinguished personalities who were not part of the pro-British political circle and whose governments included ministers who identified with the anti-British elements.
  
  wn.com/Muzahim_al-Pachachi
• Naji al-Suwaidi
  Naji al-Suwaidi (1882 – 1942) was an Iraqi politician who served as Prime Minister from November 1929 to March 1930.
  Naji al-Suwaidi became prime minister in November 1929, following the suicide of Abd al-Muhsin as-Sa'dun. His short time in the post was marked by street protests agitating for a treaty that would pave the way towards Iraqi independence from the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. That turmoil, combined with attacks from hostile newspapers and undermining from both King Faisal I and Nuri as-Said, led him to resign in March 1930.
  Al-Suwaidi presided over the 1937 Bloudan Conference, one of the first pan-Arab conferences held in solidarity with Palestinian Arabs against the Zionist movement.
  He was the brother of Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, also a Prime Minister of Iraq.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Naji_al-Suwaidi
• Naji Shawkat
  Muhammad Naji Shawkat Bey (1893–1980) was an Iraqi politician who served as Prime Minister of Iraq under King Faisal I.
  Muhammad Naji Shawkat was born to an Arabized family of Turkish and Caucasian origins in the Iraqi town of al-Kut where his father was stationed as provincial governor. He had three brothers:Saaib, Sami and Rifat.Concurrent with Naji's conclusion of his school education in Baghdad, his father was elected to the Ottoman parliament of 1909, thereby providing him with the opportunity to join the Ottoman Law School in Istanbul.
  Naji Shawkat was the assistant general prosecutor in the Iraqi city of al-Hila when World War I broke out, upon which he interrupted his legal career and joined the Ottoman army as a reserve officer. After two years of involvement in the Ottoman military defense of Iraq, Shawkat was captured by the advancing British troops in March 1917. He was subsequently taken to a British Indian prison camp where he, like many other detained Arab officers, was offered the choice of joining the Arab Revolt, an offer he promptly accepted.
  
  wn.com/Naji_Shawkat
• Naji Talib
  Naji Talib (1917 – March 23, 2012) was the 52nd Prime Minister of Iraq from 1966 to 1967, replacing Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz.
  Talib was born in 1917 in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His family were from the landowning class in Iraq; his father was a landowner in and mayor of Nasiriyah and a member of parliament.
  Talib was educated at the British Military Academy from 1936 to 1939. During 1954 and 1955 he was stationed in London as a military attaché, In 1958 Naji Talib's rank and post was that of Staff brigadier, commander, 15th Infantry Brigade, 1st Division, Basrah, and upon retirement from the army he had reached the rank of Major General.
  In 1956 Staff Colonel Naji Talib was the commandant of the Senior Officers School in Baghdad. During this year he proposed the immediate union of Iraq with the United Arab Republic upon an antagonistic intervention by any of the parties to the Baghdad Pact, The Supreme committee committed itself unanimously to the proposal. In 1957 Naji Talib became the second deputy chairman of the Free Officers Movement in Iraq. Naji Talib's role in government included taking up the positions of Minister of Social Affairs 14 July 1958 – 7 February 1959, Minister of Industries 1963, Minister of Foreign Affairs 1964–1965, and finally Prime Minister 9 August 1966 – 9 May 1967. Naji Talib later became a middle-of-the-roader after holding ministerial portfolios under Qasim and in the days of the Ba'th. While politically he wavered between an independent nationalist attitude and a mild Nasirism, he had succeeded in remaining in all the good graces of all the contending military factions.
  
  wn.com/Naji_Talib
• Nayirah (testimony)
  Nayirah Testimony refers to the controversial testimony given before the non-governmental Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a female who provided only her first name, Nayirah. In her emotional testimony, Nayirah stated that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die. Though reporters did not then have access to Kuwait, her testimony was regarded as credible at the time and was widely publicized. It was cited numerous times by United States senators and the president in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War.
  Her story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International and testimony from evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, reporters were given access to the country and found the story of stolen incubators unsubstantiated. However, they did find that a number of people, including babies, died when nurses and doctors fled the country.
  
  wn.com/Nayirah_(testimony)
• 
  Nouri al-Maliki
  Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki (Arabic: نوري كامل محمّد حسن المالكي‎ Nūrī Kāmil al-Mālikī; born June 20, 1950), also known as Jawad al-Maliki or Abu Esraa, is the Prime Minister of Iraq and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party. Al-Maliki and his government succeeded the Iraqi Transitional Government. He is currently in his second term as Prime Minister. His first Cabinet was approved by the National Assembly and sworn in on May 20, 2006; his second Cabinet, in which he also holds the positions of acting Interior Minister, acting Defense Minister, and acting National Security Minister, was approved on December 21, 2010.
  Al-Maliki began his political career as a Shia dissident under Saddam Hussein's administration in the late 1970s and rose to prominence after he fled a death sentence into exile for 24 years. During his time abroad, he became a senior leader of Dawa, coordinated the activities of anti-Saddam guerillas and built relationships with Iranian and Syrian officials whose help he sought in overthrowing Saddam. While having worked closely with US and coalition forces in Iraq since their departure by the end of 2011, there have been claims that al-Maliki has been trying to gain control over the armed groups in his country as means to consolidate the Prime Minister's power and marginalize Sunni opposition.
  
  wn.com/Nouri_al-Maliki
• Nuri as-Said
  Nuri Pasha al-Said (1888 – July 15, 1958) (Arabic: نوري السعيد‎) was an Iraqi politician during the British Mandate and during the Kingdom of Iraq. He served in various key cabinet positions, and served seven terms as Prime Minister of Iraq.
  From his first appointment as prime minister under the British mandate in 1930, Nuri was a major political figure in Iraq under the monarchy. During his many terms in office, he was involved in some of the key policy decisions that shaped the modern Iraqi state. In 1930, during his first term, he signed the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, which, as a step toward greater independence, granted Britain the unlimited right to station its armed forces in and transit military units through Iraq. It also gave legitimacy to British control of the country's oil industry. While the treaty nominally reduced British involvement in Iraq's internal affairs, this was only to the extent that Iraq's behavior did not conflict with British economic or military interests. This agreement led the way to nominal independence as the Mandate ended in 1932. Throughout his career Nuri was a supporter of a continued and extensive British role within Iraq. These policies were always matters of great contention.
  
  wn.com/Nuri_as-Said
• 
  Paul Bremer
  Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III (born September 30, 1941) is an American diplomat. He is most notable for his role as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority charged with overseeing Iraq's occupation after the 2003 invasion. He reported primarily to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and exercised authority over Iraq's civil administration. He served in this capacity from May 11, 2003, until June 28, 2004.
  Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Bremer was educated at New Canaan Country School, Kent School and Phillips Academy. Bremer's father was president of the Christian Dior Perfumes Corporation in New York. His mother was a lecturer in art history at the University of Bridgeport. Bremer graduated from Yale University in 1963 and went on to earn an MBA from Harvard University in 1966. He later continued his education at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he earned a Certificate of Political Studies (CEP).
  That same year he joined the Foreign Service, which sent him first to Kabul, Afghanistan, as a general services officer. He was assigned to Blantyre, Malawi, as economic and commercial officer from 1968 to 1971.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Bremer
• Paul Ferdonnet
  Paul Ferdonnet (1901 – 1945), dubbed "the Stuttgart traitor" (le traître de Stuttgart) by the French press, was a French journalist.
  A Nazi sympathizer, Ferdonnet was known for having published an anti-semitic book, La Guerre juive (The Jewish War). He relocated to Germany in the 1930s and was an employee of Radio-Stuttgart where he worked on propaganda broadcast in French and aimed at promoting the Nazi regime and demoralizing French troops and civilians. Ferdonnet was identified in 1939 by French intelligence as the main French speaker of Radio-Stuttgart. After the fall of France, transmissions in French were progressively discontinued and Ferdonnet stopped working for Radio-Stuttgart around 1942. He was arrested after the fall of Nazi Germany and executed for treason in 1945. During his trial, Ferdonnet asserted in vain that he had not been the speaker. Some historians consider that he might have merely worked for Radio-Stuttgart as a translator of the scripts submitted by the Germans, his translations being read by another Frenchman. According to writer Maurice-Yvan Sicard (writing under the pseudonym Saint-Paulien and himself a former collaborationist), the actual speaker was "a former actor named Obrecht".
  
  wn.com/Paul_Ferdonnet
• 
  Paul Wolfowitz
  Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is a former United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.
  He is a leading neoconservative. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its most hawkish advocate."Donald Rumsfeld in his interview with Fox News on February 8, 2011 said that Wolfowitz was the first to bring up Iraq after 9/11 attacks during a meeting at presidential retreat at Camp David. After serving two years, he resigned as president of the World Bank Group ending what a Reuters report called "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion."
  
  wn.com/Paul_Wolfowitz
• Philippe Henriot
  Philippe Henriot (January 7, 1889, Reims—June 28, 1944, Paris) was a French politician, journalist and official in the Vichy government, where he directed propaganda broadcast by Radio Paris. He joined the Milice part-time, but his more important work was for the government. In January 1944, he was appointed as Minister of Information and Propaganda. About six months later, he was assassinated by members of the French Resistance.
  Philippe Henriot was born in Reims in the Gironde, and raised in a conservative Catholic family.
  Henriot became politically active during the Republican Federation, but moved increasingly to the far right. He was elected to the Third Republic's Chamber of Deputies for the Gironde département in 1932 and 1936. His speeches showed him to be an anti-communist, anti-Semite, Anti-Freemasonry, and against the parliamentary system.
  At the beginning of World War II, he was strongly anti-German. In 1941 Henriot began to support Nazi Germany after it invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, as he hoped for the defeat of Communism.
  
  wn.com/Philippe_Henriot
• Richard Perle
  Richard Norman Perle (born 16 September 1941) is an American political advisor, consultant, and lobbyist who began his career in government as a senior staff member to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. Later he was heavily involved with the Reagan administration and served as the assistant Secretary of Defense and also worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004. He was Chairman of the Board in 2001 under the Bush Administration but eventually resigned in 2003 due to conflict of interests.
  He is a member of several think-tanks including the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) Board of Advisors, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (as a resident fellow), the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He is also a patron of the Henry Jackson Society. Perle has written extensively on a number of issues; his cited research interests including defense, national security, and the Middle East. Aside from these engagements, Perle is the former co-chairman and director of Hollinger, Inc., a partner of Trireme Partners and a non-executive director of Autonomy Corporation.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Perle
• Rita Zucca
  Rita Luisa Zucca (born 1912) was an Italian-American radio announcer who broadcast Axis propaganda to Allied troops in Italy and North Africa. She became known as one of the "Axis Sallys", along with Mildred Gillars, who broadcast out of Berlin, Germany.
  Zucca's father, Louis, owned a very successful restaurant in New York's midtown in the 1930s and 1940s, called Zucca's Italian Garden. Located at 116-118-120 West 49th Street, the restaurant had its own promotional postcards which displayed a distinctly refined setting. Zucca spent her teenage years in a convent school in Florence and, as a young woman, had worked in the family business.
  She returned to Italy in 1938, working as a typist and renouncing her American citizenship three years later to save her family's property from expropriation by Mussolini's government.
  As the Allied invasion of Italy progressed, the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini decided to try and emulate the German radio’s Axis Sally broadcasts of Mildred Gillars. In the summer of 1943, the Italian national radio network in Rome hired the 30-year-old Zucca with this aim in mind, in spite of her losing a typing job in 1942 for copying an anti-Fascist pamphlet.
  
  wn.com/Rita_Zucca
• Robert Henry Best
  Robert Henry Best (April 15, 1896 – December 16, 1952) was an American broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. He was convicted of treason in 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
  Best was born in Sumter, South Carolina, a son of Albert H. Best, a Methodist minister. After graduating from Wofford College in 1917 he joined the Coast Artillery in October 1917. He was commissioned in 1918 and stayed in the U.S. Army until 1920. He then went to the School of Journalism at Columbia University, graduating in 1922.
  With the money from a $1,500 Pulitzer^{[disambiguation needed ]} Traveling Scholarship he then traveled extensively in Europe, arriving in Vienna in 1923 where he settled and found work as a foreign freelance news correspondent for the United Press. He also contributed articles to the New York Times, Chicago Daily News, Time and Newsweek. Best gradually fell under Nazi influence following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, the Anschluss, on March 12, 1938.
  In July 1941, United Press fired him for ‘nonperformance’ putting him in financial difficulties. He then made an approach to German State Radio for employment, but with no immediate success.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Henry_Best
• 
  Robert Zoellick
  Robert Bruce Zoellick (/ˈzɛlɪk/; German: [ˈtsœlɪk]; born July 25, 1953) is the eleventh president of the World Bank, a position he has held since July 1, 2007. He was previously a managing director of Goldman Sachs, United States Deputy Secretary of State (resigning on July 7, 2006) and U.S. Trade Representative, from February 7, 2001 until February 22, 2005.
  President George W. Bush nominated Zoellick on May 30, 2007 to replace Paul Wolfowitz as President of the World Bank. On June 25, 2007, Zoellick was approved by the World Bank's executive board.
  Zoellick was born in Naperville, Illinois, the son of Gladys and William T. Zoellick. His family is of German origin and he was raised Lutheran. He graduated in 1971 from Naperville Central High School, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1975 from Swarthmore College as a history major, and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1981.
  Upon graduation from Harvard Law School Zoellick served as a law clerk for Judge Patricia Wald on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Zoellick
• 
  Sa'dun Hammadi
  Sa'dun Hammadi (June 22, 1930 - March 14, 2007) (Arabic: سعدون حمادي‎) was briefly Prime Minister of Iraq under President Saddam Hussein from March until September 1991. He succeeded Hussein, who had previously been prime minister in addition to being president, but was forced out due to his reformist views.
  Hammadi was born in Karbala and was a Shi'ite. He joined the Ba'ath Party during the 1940s. In addition, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956.
  Hammadi previously served a stint as Iraqi Oil Minister and was the Foreign Minister from 1974 until 1983. He also served as the Speaker of the National Assembly of Iraq from 1983 until 1990 and from 1996 until the Fall of Baghdad in 2003.
  Hammadi was later imprisoned at a prison camp in Iraq. In February 2004, after nine months in the custody of the Americans, he was released and subsequently resettled in Qatar while seeking medical treatment abroad.
  He died in a German hospital from leukemia on March 14, 2007. He was survived by his 2nd wife and five sons.
  
  wn.com/Sa'dun_Hammadi
• 
  Saddam Hussein
  Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: صدام حسين عبد المجيد التكريتي Ṣaddām Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-Maǧīd al-Tikrītī; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup, later referred to as the 17 July Revolution, that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.
  As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control, leaving the system eventually insolvent mostly due to the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, and UN sanctions. Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunnis, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.
  
  wn.com/Saddam_Hussein
• Salem Chalabi
  Salem Chalabi (aka "Sam Chalabi") (1963, Baghdad) is an Iraq born, American educated, lawyer. He was appointed as the first General Director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal set up in 2003 to try Saddam Hussein and other members of his regime for crimes against humanity. His appointment, by an order signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, was widely criticized for perceived nepotism (his uncle Ahmed Chalabi was critically involved in the US-led war against Iraq and Hussein) and he himself lacked any significant trial experience (he was a corporate securities lawyer). He was ultimately dropped from the Tribunal after an arrest warrant was issued for investigation into his role in the murder of a director-general of the Iraqi Ministry of Finance who was investigating Chalabi family properties acquired in Iraq; the charge was ultimately dismissed citing lack of evidence.
  Salem Chalabi was primarily educated in the United States. His uncle Ahmed Chalabi was the controversial leader of the Iraqi National Congress and former member of the Iraq Interim Governing Council and a Deputy Prime Minister; he is also "a former banker in Jordan who fled the country in 1989 before he could be arrested in connection with a $200 million financial scandal. He was later tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation." Salem studied at Yale University (where he was on the Rugby Team and a member of the controversial Rockingham Club) graduating in 1985, and in 1993 received a law degree from the Northwestern University School of Law. He worked for Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in New York and lastly for Clifford Chance in London, in both instances as a corporate lawyer specialising in capital markets.
  
  wn.com/Salem_Chalabi
• 
  Seoul City Sue
  Anna Wallis Suh (1900–1969), the woman generally associated with the nickname Seoul City Sue, was a Methodist missionary, educator, and North Korean propaganda radio announcer to United States forces during the Korean War.
  Anna was born in Arkansas, the sixth of six children. After her mother and father died in 1910 and 1914, she relocated to Oklahoma to join a sister's family while she completed high school. She spent her early adult years as an office clerk and Sunday school teacher. Subsequently, she studied at the Southeastern State Teachers College, in Durant, and the Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating in 1930 with a B.A. in ministry. She spent the next eight years working as a member of the American Southern Methodist Episcopal Mission in Korea. As Japanese colonial authorities continued to restrict the activities of foreign missions, Anna joined the staff of Shanghai American School (SAS) in 1938. There she met and married fellow staff member Sŏ Kyu Ch’ŏl (서규철 徐奎哲), thus losing her United States citizenship. Late in World War II she was interned by the Japanese for two years with other White Europeans at a camp in suburban Shanghai. After release, she resumed work at SAS for a year, before returning to Korea with her husband in 1946.
  
  wn.com/Seoul_City_Sue
• 
  Seymour Hersh
  Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."
  He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
  
  wn.com/Seymour_Hersh
• 
  Stephen Hadley
  Stephen John Hadley (born February 13, 1947, in Toledo, Ohio) was the 21st U.S. Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (commonly referred as National Security Advisor), serving under President George W. Bush.
  He received a B.A. degree in government from Cornell University in 1969, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity, the Cornell University Glee Club, and the Quill and Dagger society. He later received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Yale Law School and served as an officer in the United States Navy from 1972 to 1975.
  Hadley has served in a variety of capacities in the defense and national security field, including as an analyst for the Comptroller of the Department of Defense from 1972–1974, as a member of the National Security Council staff under President Gerald Ford from 1974–1977, and serving from 1986–1987 as Counsel to the Special Review Board established by President Ronald Reagan to inquire into U.S. arms sales to Iran.
  During the administration of George H. W. Bush, Hadley was, "[a] Pentagon aide to Wolfowitz," serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1989–1993. In that position, he had responsibility for defense policy toward NATO and Western Europe, on nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defense, and arms control. He also participated in policy issues involving export control and the use of space. Hadley served as Secretary of Defense Cheney's representative in talks led by Secretary of State James Baker that resulted in the START I and START II Treaties.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Hadley
• Tahir Yahya
  Tahir Yahya (1915−1986) (Arabic: طاهر يحيى‎) was Prime Minister of Iraq twice, from 1963 to 1965 and a short term in 1967-1968. He was educated at the Baghdad Military College and the Staff College.
  Commander of 20th Brigade 1955
  General Director of Police and security Directorate July 14, 1958
  Chief of staff February 8, 1963
  
  
  
  wn.com/Tahir_Yahya
• Tawfiq al-Suwaidi
  Tawfiq al-Suwaidi (1892–1968) was an Iraqi politician who served as Prime Minister of Iraq on three occasions stretching from 1929 to 1950.
  Al-Suwaidi (Arabic: توفيق السويدي‎) was born in Baghdad in 1892, he completed his early schooling at sixteen and after a year in the local law college, travelled to Istanbul in 1909 where he continued his studies in the Istanbul College of Law. After completing his studies in Istanbul (graduation 1912) Tawfiq al-Suwaidi's was sent to the Sorbonne in Paris, by his father, to further his Law education. Al - Suwaidi returned to Iraq after finishing his studies in Paris in 1914. He joined the Ministry of Education as a secretary to the committee for the renovation of Shamsuddin Sami's famous French-Turkish Dictionary.
  During the first world war, as well as working as a lawyer, Al -Suwaidi worked as a teacher in the Law college in Damascus, teaching Roman and general international law. He accepted these posts after rejecting a judgeship in Dair al - Zor and resigning from a judgeship in Damascus - al-Suwaidi was adamant to take a professional salary paying position rather than a position of prestige in order to repay his father for his European education.
  
  wn.com/Tawfiq_al-Suwaidi
• 
  Tony Blair
  Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.
  Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
  
  wn.com/Tony_Blair
• Wafiq Al-Samarrai
  Wafiq Al-Samarrai also as Wafeeq Alsammarai (born 1 July 1947) is an Iraqi general formerly chief of Iraqi general military intelligence born in the region of Samarra.
  He defected in 1994 and drove up to Kirkuk, then walked for 30 hours to cross the frontier into the Northern Kurdish enclave. At first he allied himself with Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. They fomented a mini war in March 1995 between Kurdish groups and the Iraqi Army that went wrong when the insurgents failed to secure American military air support.
  Al-Samarrai moved to Syria and eventually made his way to London, where he headed a group called the Higher Council for National Salvation. In 2003, he returned to his hometown Samarra, Iraq and remained there until he was appointed as the national security advisor to President Jalal Talabani in 2005 and moved to the green zone in Baghdad.
  On March 6, 2008, the Iraqi presidency website publicized a judicial decision to lift off all restrictions imposed on General Wafiq Al-Samarrai, including a freeze on his assets, after Supreme Criminal Court Judge Adnan Al Badri reportedly announced that a probe found no evidence to implicating Al-Samarrai in 1991 Iraqi Army attacks on Kurdish and Shia civilians.
  
  wn.com/Wafiq_Al-Samarrai
• 
  Whitfield Diffie
  Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944) is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.
  Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976. It introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that went far toward solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution. It has become known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article also seems to have stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
  After a long career at Sun Microsystems, where he became a Sun Fellow, Diffie is currently serving as the Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and a visiting scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
  Diffie's interest in cryptography began at "age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York."
  
  wn.com/Whitfield_Diffie
• 
  William Joyce
  William Joyce (24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946), nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was an Irish-American fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster to the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He was controversially hanged for treason by the British as a result of his wartime activities, being taken to owe allegiance to the UK by his possession of a British passport, a document to which, ironically, he was not entitled.
  Joyce was born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York to a Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Galway, Ireland. Joyce attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College in Galway from 1915 to 1921. Unusual for Irish Roman Catholics, both Joyce and his father were strongly Unionist. Joyce later said that he had aided the Black and Tans during the Irish War for Independence and had become a target of the Irish Republican Army.
  Following what he alleged to be an assassination attempt in 1921 (which supposedly failed because he took a different route home from school), he left for England where he briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon on a foreign exchange. His family followed him to England two years later. Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, whom he visited on a few occasions. He joined the Royal Worcester Regiment in 1921 but was discharged when it was discovered that he had lied about his age. He then applied to Birkbeck College of the University of London and to enter the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, he worked hard and obtained a First Class degree. He also developed an interest in fascism, and he worked with (but never joined) the British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman.
  
  wn.com/William_Joyce
• Yasin al-Hashimi
  Yasin al-Hashimi (1882 – 1937) (Arabic: ياسين الهاشمى ‎) was an Iraqi politician who served twice as that country's prime minister. Like many of Iraq's early leaders, Hashimi, who was born Yasin Hilmi Salman, served as an officer during Ottoman control of the country. He made his political debut under the government of his predecessor, Jafar al-Askari and replaced Askari as prime minister shortly after, in August 1924.
  Hashimi served for ten months before he was replaced, in turn by Abd al-Muhsin as-Sa'dun. Over the next ten years he filled a variety of governmental positions finally returning to the office of prime minister in 1935. On October 30, 1936 Hashimi had the dubious distinction of being the first Iraqi prime minister deposed in a coup, led by General Bakr Sidqi and a coalition of ethnic minorities. Unlike Jafar al-Askari, who was then his minister of defense, Hashimi survived the coup and made his way to Damascus, Syria, where he died two months later. His older brother, Taha was Prime Minister of Iraq in 1941.
  
  wn.com/Yasin_al-Hashimi

• timeline:
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001

• timeline:
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001