Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, born 1947 in Hong Kong, is the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO). Chan was elected by the Executive Board of the WHO on 8 November 2006, and was endorsed in a special meeting of the World Health Assembly on the following day.

Chan has previously served as Director of Health in the Hong Kong Government (1994-2003), representative of the WHO Director-General for Pandemic Influenza and WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases (2003-2006).

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The World’s Most Powerful Women 2009

Twenty years ago, Aicha Chenna founded the self-help organization "Solidarité Féminine" to assist single mothers and their children.

She received the International Women's Club's Elisabeth Norgall Award 2005 in Frankfurt for her work.

Under the auspices of Solidarité Féminine in Casablanca, unmarried mothers run a restaurant, receive further training and offer each other mutual support.

Not many people (particularly women!) think turning 40 is good news.

But for Ines Scotland it was cause for celebration. Hitting the "Big Four-O" made it easier for her to get permission to enter Saudi Arabia for business.

“I immediately applied for my multiple-entry visa,” she says, laughing. “It seems you’re considered ‘no longer desirable’, and I thought, well, OK, it doesn’t bother me.”

Ms Scotland is chief executive of Citadel Resources Group, a Melbourne mining company that is in partnership with the Saudi government to explore the kingdom’s newly opened mines; ones largely untouched since, it is said, the time of King Solomon.

Soft-spoken and just over five feet (1.5 metres) tall, in a pinstriped suit and black patent leather peep-toe heels, Ms Scotland seems an unlikely corporate conquistador. Then again, she bears a dossier marked by the unexpected: woman; miner; a beautiful baby contest winner who now wears steel-toed boots, searching the Arabian peninsula for copper and gold.

Click here to read the full story:
By Angela Shaha
The National, Abu Dhabi, UAE

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Shhhh...Susan's In Saudi

Susan notes: I've posted this short bio of Delaram Ali now to honour all the Iranian women (and men) who struggle today to make their country a better place in which to live. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and Women's Space.
I wonder if she has been amongst the demonstrators this past week.

The Women's Space blogger comments:

But nothing can stop these women really. Ultimately, the day will come when their dreams for human and civil rights are fulfilled. The youtube video below is of Delaram Ali, recounting the history of the women’s movement in Iran and her part in it.

What a courageous and inspiring visionary she is and so young, just in her early 20s. She calls her arrest and sentencing “blessed” because of the attention they have drawn to Iranian women’s plight and says even if authorities put her away, now another woman will come to take her place.

Kelly-Anne Lyons (who plays the role of Chelsey Pucks in the online video series called Chelsey OMG, two excellent segments of which AWR features here), grew up along the East Coast of the USA.

She spent the younger part of her childhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her adolescence and teenage years in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended University in New York City. Her parents, Ed and Kathleen, reside in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Her younger brother Jonathan attends University in Pennsylvania.
 
Lyons was a dancer from the age of three. She studied on scholarship at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then at the New Jersey School of Ballet. At 16, she became a member of the New Jersey Ballet Junior Company.

Alongside dance, she attended Ridge High School, where she maintained honor role status, was very active in sports (field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse), student council, and numerous clubs. Her favorite part of high school was performing in all the school musicals and plays.