Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (Hebrew: בִּנְיָמִין "בִּיבִּי" נְתַנְיָהוּ (help·info); born 21 October 1949) is the current Prime Minister of Israel. He serves also as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a Knesset member, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel.
Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister born in Israel after the founding of the state. Netanyahu joined the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1967 Six-Day War, and became a team leader in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit. He took part in many missions, including Operation Gift and Operation Isotope, during which he was shot in the shoulder. He fought on the front lines in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, taking part in special forces raids along the Suez Canal, and then leading a commando assault deep into Syrian territory. He achieved the rank of captain before being discharged. Netanyahu served as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988, member of the Likud Party, and was Prime Minister from June 1996 to July 1999.
Barack Hussein Obama II (i/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.
Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.
William Schabas (born November 19, 1950) is an author and academic in the field of international criminal and human rights law. He is a professor of international law, a senior lecturer at Middlesex University, and an internationally respected expert on human rights law, genocide, and the death penalty. In 2009 he has been elected President of International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. As of September 2011, he will be the Professor of International Law at Middlesex University in London.
Schabas received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Toronto, and LL.B., LL.M. and LL.D. degrees from the University of Montreal, Canada. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and Northwestern University, Chicago. From 1991-2000 he was a professor of human rights law and criminal law at the University of Quebec, and chaired the Juridical Department from 1994-1998. He has taught as a visiting or adjunct professor at several other institutions, including McGill University, Queen’s University Belfast, LUISS University in Rome, Cardoza Law School, Université de Paris II and the National University of Rwanda. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights. Schabas served as one of seven commissioners on the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission.