World – Dagdya – Uttarakhand

Kofi Atta Annan

April 8, 1938 Kofi Atta Annan is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, from 1 January 1997 to 31 December 2006. Annan and the United Nations were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world”. From 23 February until 31 August 2012, Annan was the UN-Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria, to help find a resolution to ongoing conflict there.Annan quit after [...]

Harriet Beecher Stowe

June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896 Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles [...]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi, and founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential, and many have labelled his book The Cost of Discipleship a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer became known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. He strongly opposed Hitler’s euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews.He was also involved [...]

steven-paul-2

September 29, 1943 Lech Walesa is a Polish politician, trade-union organizer, philanthropist and human-rights activist. A charismatic leader, he co-founded Solidarity, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland between 1990 and 1995. Walesa was an electrician by trade. Soon after beginning work at the Gdansk (then, “Lenin”) Shipyards, he became a dissident trade-union activist. For this he was persecuted by the Communist authorities, placed under surveillance, fired in [...]

Steven Paul

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off as Pixar.He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney’s purchase of Pixar in 2006.In 1996, after Apple had [...]

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett

June 11, 1847-August 5, 1929 Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, GBE was an English suffragist (one who campaigned for women to have the vote) and an early feminist. She was a British suffragist, an intellectual, political leader, Union leader, mother, wife and writer. However, she is primarily known for her work as a suffragist. She was born Millicent Garrett in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. As a suffragist, as opposed to a suffragette, she took a moderate line, but was a tireless campaigner. She concentrated [...]

Maya Angelou

April 4, 1928 Maya Angelou is an American author and poet. She has published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged [...]

Aung San Suu Kyi AC

June 19, 1945 Aung San Suu Kyi AC is a Burmese opposition politician and chairperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma. In the 1990 general election, the NLD won 59% of the national votes and 81% (392 of 485) of the seats in Parliament.She had, however, already been detained under house arrest before the elections. She remained under house arrest in Burma for almost 15 of the 21 years from 20 July 1989 until her most recent [...]

Sir Titus Salt

20 September 1803 – 29 December 1876 In 1833 he took over his father’s business and within twenty years had expanded it to be the largest employer in Bradford. In 1848 Titus Salt became mayor of Bradford. Smoke and pollution emanated from mills and factory chimneys and Salt tried unsuccessfully to clean up the pollution using a device called the Rodda Smoke Burner. Around 1850, he decided to build a mill large enough to consolidate his textile manufacture in one [...]

Malala Yousafzai

July 12, 1997 On 9 October 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head and neck in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen while returning home on a school bus. In the days immediately following the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, for intensive rehabilitation. On 12 October, a group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against [...]