Stephen John Sackur (born 9 January 1964) is an English journalist who presents HARDtalk, a current affairs interview programme on BBC World News and BBC News 24. He is also the main Friday presenter of GMT on BBC World News. For fifteen years he was a BBC foreign correspondent and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a number of newspapers and magazines.

Stephen Sackur was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England, and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is married to an Iraqi, Zina Sabbagh and has three children.

Sackur began working at the BBC as a trainee in 1986, and in 1990, he was appointed as one of its foreign affairs correspondents. As a BBC Radio correspondent, Stephen reported on the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the re-unification of Germany in 1990. During the Gulf War, he was part of a BBC team covering the conflict and spent eight weeks with the British Army. At the end of the war, he was the first correspondent to report the massacre of the retreating Iraqi army on the road leading out of Kuwait. Stephen was based in Cairo, Egypt, between 1992 and 1995 as the BBC's correspondent in the Middle East and he later moved to Jerusalem in 1995 until 1997. He covered both the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the growth of the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat. Between 1997 and 2002, he was appointed the BBC's correspondent in Washington and covered the Lewinsky scandal. He later covered the U.S. Presidential Election in 2000 and interviewed President George W. Bush. Stephen went back to Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein and was the first to report Iraq's mass graves of victims of the regime. He was also the moderator of BBC's worldwide broadcast of a debate on climate change with a panel of five world leaders from South Africa, the Maldives, Sweden, Australia and Mexico.

James Beeland Rogers, Jr. (born October 19, 1942) is an American investor and author. He is currently based in Singapore. Rogers is the Chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests, Inc. He was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros and creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI).

Rogers is an outspoken proponent of the free market, but he does not consider himself a member of any school of thought. Rogers acknowledged, however, that his views best fit the label of Austrian School of economics.

Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. He started in business at the age of five by selling peanuts and by picking up empty bottles that fans left behind at baseball games. He got his first job on Wall Street, at Dominick & Dominick, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in History from Yale University in 1964. Rogers then acquired a second BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University in 1966.

Imran Khan Niazi (Urdu: عمران خان نیازی; born 25 November 1952) is a Pakistani politician and former cricketer, playing international cricket for two decades in the late twentieth century. After retiring, he entered politics. Currently, besides his political activism, Khan is also a philanthropist, cricket commentator, Chancellor of the University of Bradford and Founder and Chairman Board of Governors of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Centre.

Arguably Pakistan's most successful cricket captain, Khan played for the Pakistani cricket team from 1971 to 1992 and served as its captain intermittently throughout 1982–1992. After retiring from cricket at the end of the 1987 World Cup, he was called back to join the team in 1988. At 39, Khan led his teammates to Pakistan's first and only World Cup victory in 1992. He has a record of 3807 runs and 362 wickets in Test cricket, making him one of eight world cricketers to have achieved an 'All-rounder's Triple' in Test matches. On 14 July 2010, Khan was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

Kishore Mahbubani (born October 24, 1948, Singapore) is a notable academic and former Singaporean diplomat. He is currently Professor in the Practice of Public Policy and Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. From 1971 to 2004 he served in the Singaporean Foreign Services, ending up as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. In that role he served as President of the United Nations Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002.

His earlier postings included Cambodia (where he served during the war in 1973-74), Malaysia and Washington, DC, and he was Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998. He continues to serve in Boards and Councils of several institutions in Singapore, Europe and North America, including the Yale President's Council on International Activities (PCIA), Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, Indian Prime Minister’s Global Advisory Council, University of Bocconi International Advisory Committee, World Economic Forum - Global Agenda Council on China and Chairman of the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Nominating Committee.