Health News
2005-12-20
AIDS activists
named Time magazine's Persons of the Year
The richest man
in the world, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were
named Time magazine’s “Pers
The richest man
in the world, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were
named Time magazine’s “Persons of the
Year” along with Irish rocker Bono for being
“Good Samaritans” who made a difference
in different ways.
“For being
shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and
reengineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope
strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow,
Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are
Time’s Persons of the Year,” the
magazine said in its December 19 issue, made public on
Sunday.
Managing editor
James Kelly said the three had been chosen as the people
most effective at finding ways to eradicate such calamities
as malaria in Africa; HIV and AIDS; and the grinding
poverty that kills 8 million people a year.
Time also named former presidents George Bush
and Bill Clinton as “Partners of the Year” for
their humanitarian efforts after the Asian tsunami and
Hurricane Katrina, and the unlikely friendship that
developed from that work.
“Natural
disasters are terrible things, but what defines us is not
what happens to us but how we react to it,”
Kelly said. “When you look at the number of
people who die from the kind of diseases and poverty that
the Gateses and Bono are fighting, the death tolls are
far greater than what occurs in natural disasters or
wars,” he told Reuters.
The founder of
computer giant Microsoft, whose personal fortune of $46.5
billion topped Forbes magazine’s list of the
world’s richest again this year, and his wife were
named for their work in the Gates Foundation, the
world’s biggest charity with a $29 billion
endowment, while Bono was described as the “rocker
who has made debt reduction sexy.”
“The
rocker’s job is to be raucous, grab our attention.
The engineer’s job is to make things
work,” Time said, describing the
unlikely alliance that developed after the three met for
dinner in 2002. They were reunited to be photographed for
the cover on Friday in Omaha, Neb., where Bono was
performing with U2.
The Gates
Foundation funds hundreds of projects around the world that
are primarily focused on public health, such
as vaccinating children and developing new drugs.
The foundation also funds educational programs
and scholarships in the United States and abroad.
Bono and fellow
musician Bob Geldof spearheaded a popular campaign to
tackle poverty in Africa through canceling the debts of the
poorest countries in the world, raising global
awareness through the Live 8 concerts in July. Partly
due to popular pressure, the world's industrialized
nations agreed in July to double aid to poor countries by
2010—thus adding $50 billion a year—and to
cancel poor countries’ debt.
“Bono
charmed and bullied and morally blackmailed the leaders of
the world’s richest countries into forgiving
$40 billion in debt owed by the poorest,”
Time said.
Kelly said he
expected the choice to surprise some people, but the
unlikely alliance of the richest man in the world and a
“hell-raiser” like Bono was an inspiring
example of how different approaches could be
effective.
Kelly said the
“odd couple” of former presidents Bush and
Clinton had been among the contenders for
“Person of the Year,” which ranged from
talk-show host Oprah Winfrey (for her influential
campaigning for hurricane relief) to Mother Nature
(encompassing the tsunami, hurricanes, and
earthquakes).
Time has been naming its Person of the Year
since 1927, and the tradition has become not only the source
of speculation every year but of controversy, due
to unpopular choices such as Adolf Hitler in 1938
and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. The aim is to pick
“the person or persons who most affected the news and
our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was
important about the year, for better or for
worse,” according to the magazine.
Time’s 2004 Person of the Year was U.S.
President George W. Bush, while “The American
Soldier” graced the cover in 2003, the year
when U.S. troops invaded Iraq. “You want to make a
choice for the history books as well as one which is fresh
and interesting,” Kelly said. (Reuters)
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