by Mark Stover | Aug 17, 2023
Starting with one bankrupt UHF television station in Atlanta, Robert Edward (Ted) Turner built a media empire that included TNT, TBS-the first new television network since PBS-and the revolutionary twenty-four-hour Cable News Network (CNN). As the largest private land owner in the United States, Turner works to restore overgrazed ranchland and to reintroduce native plants and bison. The owner of the Atlanta Braves and winner of sailing’s America’s Cup, he established the Goodwill Games in 1986 to improve relations with the then Soviet Union. His family’s Turner Foundation donates $25 million to environmental groups annually, and in 1997 he donated $1 billion to the United Nations.
by Mark Stover | Aug 17, 2023
As its coordinator, Jody Williams brought the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) from a coalition of two nongovernmental organizations at its founding in 1992 to include more than one thousand groups from more than sixty countries. After receiving her master’s in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, Williams worked on American foreign policy in Central America as coordinator of the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project and as associate director of Medical Aid to El Salvador. Williams and the ICBL won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to ban and remove land mines, which claim roughly twenty-six thousand victims every year, most of them civilians.
by Mark Stover | Aug 16, 2023
Her Majesty Queen Noor al-Hussein was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby into a prominent Arab-American family in Washington, D.C. Her father served as head of the Federal Aviation Administration under President Kennedy. A graduate of Princeton University’s School of Architecture, she met Jordan’s King Hussein while working on a redesign of facilities for Jordan’s national airline.
In 1978, they married and she became the first American-born queen of an Arab country. She has since sensitively balanced Arab and Western cultures in her work for development, education, women’s rights, and the land mine ban with her Noor Al Hussein Foundation (NHF). King Hussein died of cancer in 1999.
Noor Al Hussein Foundation, www.nhf.org.jo
