Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is The World As It Is (2011).

Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A quotation from the book was used as the opening title quotation in the film The Hurt Locker (2009). The quotation reads: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond ( /ˈsæmənd/; born 31 December 1954) is a Scottish politician and current First Minister of Scotland. He became Scotland's fourth First Minister in May 2007. He is the Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), having served as Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Gordon. From 1987 to 2010 he served as Member of Parliament for Banff and Buchan in the UK House of Commons. Salmond previously held the position of leader of the SNP from September 1990 until he stepped down in September 2000.

Originally from Linlithgow, West Lothian, Salmond is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, where he achieved a Joint Honours MA in Economics and History. After earning his degree he began his career in the Government Economic Service (GES), and later joined the Royal Bank of Scotland as an energy economist where he wrote and broadcast extensively for both domestic and international media outlets.

Following the establishment of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999, he was elected MSP for Banff and Buchan, thus simultaneously representing the area as both Member of Parliament (MP) and MSP. Salmond resigned as SNP leader in 2000 and did not seek re-election to the Scottish Parliament. He did however retain his Westminster seat in the 2001 general election. Salmond was once again elected SNP leader in 2004 and the following year held his Banff and Buchan seat in the 2005 general election. In 2006 he announced his intention to contest the Gordon constituency in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election, an election in which Salmond defeated the incumbent MSP and in which nationally, the SNP emerged as the largest single party. Salmond was voted First Minister by the Scottish Parliament on 16 May 2007.

Marvin Olasky (born June 12, 1950) is editor-in-chief of WORLD Magazine, the author of more than 20 books, including The Tragedy of American Compassion, and Distinguished Chair in Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. He is married to writer and professor Susan Olasky, and they have four sons.

Olasky was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, to a Russian-Jewish family and graduated from Yale University in 1971 with a B.A. in American Studies. In 1976 he earned his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He became an atheist in adolescence and a Marxist in college, ultimately joining the Communist Party USA in 1972. He left the Communist Party the following year and in 1976 became a Christian after reading the New Testament and a number of Christian authors.

Olasky was provost of The King's College in New York City from 2007 to 2011, prior to which he was a professor in the University of Texas at Austin journalism department. He is now dean of the World Journalism Institute and a senior fellow of the Acton Institute. He joined World Magazine in 1990 and became its editor in 1994 and its editor-in-chief in 2001. Earlier, he was a reporter on the Boston Globe and a speechwriter at the Du Pont Company.