Michael "Mike" Barnicle (born October 15, 1943) is an award-winning American print and broadcast journalist as well as a social and political commentator. After a long career at the Boston Globe that ended with his dismissal for lying and plagiarizing, he is now a frequent contributor and occasional guest host on MSNBC's Morning Joe and Hardball with Chris Matthews and is frequently seen on NBC's Today Show with news/feature segments. He has been a regular contributor to the country's longest-running, award-winning local television news magazine, "Chronicle" on WCVB-TV, since 1986. Barnicle has also appeared on the PBS NewsHour, CBS's 60 Minutes, ESPN, and HBO sports programming.

The Massachusetts native has written more than 4,000 columns collectively for the New York Daily News (1999–2005), Boston Herald (2004–2005 and occasionally contributing from 2006–2010) and The Boston Globe, where he rose to prominence with his biting, satirical, and at times heart-wrenching columns that closely followed the triumphs, travails, and ambitions of Boston's working and middle classes. He also has written articles and commentary for Time magazine, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, ESPN Magazine, and Esquire, among others.

Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks is known for his roles in Philadelphia and as the title character in Forrest Gump, roles which won him two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor. Hanks is also known for his Oscar nominated roles in Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.

Hanks' other acting roles include Apollo 13 as Jim Lovell, The Green Mile as Paul Edgecomb, Toy Story as Woody and Charlie Wilson's War as Charlie Wilson.

Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 1924 – died in Alameda, California, on January 31, 1992), was an itinerant cook. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager; born in Alameda County, California, on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker. Hanks' mother is of Portuguese ancestry, while two of his paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain. Hanks's parents divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer)^{[citation needed]}, Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California.^{[citation needed]}

Ann Curry (born November 19, 1956) is an American television news journalist, photojournalist, and co-anchor on NBC's morning television program Today. She is the former news anchor on Today, a role she began in March 1997, and was the host of Dateline NBC from 2005–2011.

Curry is a Board Member at the International Women's Media Foundation.

Curry was born in Guam to Bob Curry, of Cherokee, French, German, Scottish and Irish descent from Pueblo, Colorado, and Hiroe Nagase, originally from Japan. Her American father, a career Navy man, met her mother during the U.S. occupation of Japan following the Second World War. The U.S. military initially did not allow the marriage, but her father returned to Japan two years later to marry Nagase.

Curry lived in Japan for several years as a child, attending the Ernest J. King School on the military base in Sasebo. Later she moved to Ashland, Oregon, where she graduated from Ashland High School. She graduated with a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon in 1978.