Trita Parsi (Persian: تریتا پارسی‎) is the founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council, and author of the 2007 book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.

Born in Iran to a Zoroastrian family, Parsi moved with his family to Sweden at the age of four in order to escape the political repression of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. His father was an outspoken academic who was also jailed under the reign of the Shah. As an adult, Parsi moved to the United States and studied foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies where he received his Ph.D. Parsi also won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order in 2010.

Fluent in Persian, English, and Swedish, Parsi carries Iranian and Swedish passports, but he is not a citizen of the United States, where he lives as a permanent resident.

In 2002, Parsi founded the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) "to enable Iranian Americans to condemn the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and that he has since run it as a grass-roots group aimed at strengthening their voice." Through the organization, he supports engagement between the US and Iran in belief that it "would enhance our [US] national security by helping to stabilize the Middle East and bolster the moderates in Iran." On the group's formation, he commented, "We realized that our primary thing that separates the Iranian-American community from the Jewish-American community, the Arab-American community, the Armenian-American community is that the Iranian-American community has shunned political participation."

Parsi or Parsee ( /ˈpɑrsiː/) refers to a member of the larger of the two Zoroastrian communities in South Asia, the other being the Irani community.

According to tradition, the present-day Parsis descend from a group of Zoroastrians of Iran who immigrated to India during the 10th century AD, to avoid persecution by Muslim invaders who were in the process of conquering Iran. At the time of the Arab invasion of Iran, the dominant religion of the region was Zoroastrianism. The Iranians rebelled against the Arab invaders for almost 200 years; in Iran this period is now known as the "Two "Centuries of Silence" or "Period of Silence". After many failed attempts to free the country from Arab domination, the Iranians were forced to either pay heavy taxes (Jizya) or to convert to Islam, the latter being the ultimate goal of the new rulers and thus the easier way. During this time many Iranians who are now called Parsi rejected both options and instead chose to take refuge by fleeing from Iran to India.

Hala Basha-Gorani (Arabic : هالة غوراني) (born 1 March 1970), is an American anchor/correspondent for CNN International based in the network's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. She anchors CNN International's 6 p.m. CET International Desk from CNN Center. Gorani previously co-hosted Your World Today with Jim Clancy until February 2009, when she left the program to anchor her own show.

Gorani was born in Seattle, Washington, United States, to Syrian parents from Aleppo, but was mainly raised in Paris, France. She has also lived in Algeria. Her name "Hala" is a common Arabic name which means "halo". She earned a Bachelor of Science in economics from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and graduated from the Institut d'études politiques (better known as Sciences Po) in Paris in 1995.

She began her career as a reporter for La Voix du Nord and Agence France-Presse before joining France 3 in 1994. After a stint at Bloomberg Television in London, she joined CNN in 1998. She has since reported from every country in the Middle East, and covered the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war in the summer of 2006 from Lebanon, which earned CNN an Edward R. Murrow Award. In 2002 and in 2007, she led CNN's coverage of the respective French presidential elections.