Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (/beɪzəs/, born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.

Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos. Miguel was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old, worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married, and legally adopted Jeff. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."

Lucia Annunziata (Sarno, August 8, 1950) is an Italian journalist.

Born in Sarno (in the Salerno province), at the age of 13 she moved to Salerno, where she attended high school and university, obtaining a degree in History and Philosophy. In 1979 she became a professional journalist, working as a correspondent from the United States first for Il Manifesto, then for La Repubblica. In 1993 she won an International Fellowship from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She then went on to work for the Corriere della Sera and finally for RAI (Italy's national public broadcasting company) in 1995 (with the "Linea Tre" program on Rai Tre); in August 1996 she became executive editor of the TG 3, although she resigned from the job at the end of November. In 2000, she became executive editor of the neonate news agency ApBiscom (subsequently renamed APCOM). She became President of RAI on March 13, 2003, and resigned on May 4, 2004; she was the second woman President of RAI (after Letizia Moratti in 1994). In 2005-2006, she hosted the interview programm In 1/2 h for Rai Tre, in which she famously interviewed then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Currently, she works as columnist for La Stampa and as a panelist for The Washington Post.

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.

Patrick Mendis is an educator, diplomat, author, and executive in government service. He taught MBA/MPA as well as international trade and American foreign policy courses at the University of Minnesota, University of Maryland University College, and Yale University before joining the U.S. Department of State, where he served under Secretaries Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. For his leadership, Mendis was honored with the State Department's Meritorious Honor Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award. Previously, he worked at the Minnesota House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Mendis is currently an affiliate professor of public and international affairs (PIA) as well as an adjunct professor of geography and geoinformation science (GGS) at George Mason University and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.

Mendis has authored more than 100 journal articles, government reports, newspaper columns, and several books, including most recently, Commercial Providence: The Secret Destiny of the American Empire (2010) as well as TRADE for PEACE: How the DNA of America, Freemasonry, and Providence Created a New World Order with Nobody in Charge (2009). Professor Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of the George Washington University and Professor J. Brian Atwood, dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs respectively wrote the forewords for these two internationally acclaimed books.

Paul Goldberger (born December 4, 1950 in Passaic, New Jersey) is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City. He was formerly Dean of the Parsons School of Design, a division of The New School.

Goldberger, the son of Morris Goldberger and Edna Kronman, grew up in distinctly low-rise Nutley, New Jersey, where he graduated from Nutley High School. He subsequently attended and graduated from Yale University.

He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism.

He is the author of several books, most recently Why Architecture Matters, published in 2009 by Yale University Press;Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, a collection of his architecture essays published in 2009 by Monacelli Press, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, published in 2010 by Taschen. In 2008 Monacelli published Beyond the Dunes: A Portrait of the Hamptons, which he produced in association with the photographer Jake Rajs. Paul Goldberger’s chronicle of the process of rebuilding Ground Zero, entitled UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, which was published by Random House in the fall of 2004, and brought out in a new, updated paperback edition in 2005, was named one of The New York Times Notable Books for 2004. Paul Goldberger has also written The City Observed: New York, The Skyscraper, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-Modern Age, Above New York, and The World Trade Center Remembered.