Bono named as Time's People of the Year

Time editor Jim Kelly says the three were selected for “being shrewd about doing good, for re-wiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow. There is a different kind of ongoing calamity in poverty and nobody is doing a better job in addressing it in different ways than Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono.”
The world’s largest charity with a $29 billion endowment, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is credited with saving more than 700,000 lives in poor countries by investing in vaccination programmes.
Known affectionately in the White House as “The Pest”, Bono was a key-player this year in persuading first-world countries to cough up $40 billion in debt relief.
He’s also continued to fly the flag for Greenpeace, Amnesty International and AIDS Awareness.
Although undeniably prestigious, Time’s choice of ‘Person of the Year’ has at times been misjudged, with Adolf Hitler winning in 1938 and Stalin getting the nod in 1942.