He was born in Palmares, Alajuela Province. Monge died of cardiac arrest on 29 November 2016 in San José, aged 90.
Rachid Solh
Rachid Solh (1 January 1926 – 27 June 2014) was a Lebanese politician. He served as the Prime Minister. He was part of one of the most powerful Sunni Muslim families in the country.
Solh was elected as a member of the Lebanese Parliament for the first time in 1960. He was appointed prime minister by president Suleiman Franjieh in 1974.
Solh resigned from office on 15 May 1975, a few weeks after the start of the Lebanese Civil War.
He died on 27 June 2014, aged 88.
Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardebili
Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardebili (; January 28, 1926 - November 23, 2016) was an Iranian politician and Muslim leader. He served as the head of legal system of Iran for about 8 years after terror of Dr. Beheshti until death of Khomeini. He was a marja of the Twelver branch of Shia Islam.
He was born in Ardabil. He died in Tehran on 23 November 2016.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing (, , ; 2 February 19262 December 2020), also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician and writer. He was the 20th President of France from 1974 to 1981 during the Fifth Republic.
Born in Koblenz, Germany, Giscard d'Estaing began his political career as a Gaullist and slowly began to change his political thinking around the time he was the Minister of Finance when Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Pierre Messmer were prime ministers.
He won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party. His presidency was seen as liberal for his focus on divorce, contraception and abortion. His presidency helped modernise the country through his creation and growth of TGV and support of nuclear power as France's main energy source. However, he became unpopular because of a bad economy and the 1973 energy crisis, which many felt that it was the end of the "Trente Glorieuses". In 1981, he lost his re-election campaign to Mitterrand, with 48.2% of the vote.
After his presidency, he was a member of the Constitutional Council. He also was President of the Regional Council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004. Giscard d'Estaing focused on the European Union after his presidency. He was in charge of the Convention on the Future of Europe that created the unsuccessful treaty that would have created a constitution for Europe. In 2003, he was elected to the Académie française.
At the time of his death at age 94 years and 304 days, Giscard d'Estaing was the longest-lived French president in history. He died in December 2020 from COVID-19.
Giscard d'Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, Germany, during the French occupation of the Rhineland. He was the oldest son of Jean Edmond Lucien Giscard d'Estaing and his wife Marthe Clémence Jacqueline Marie (May) Bardoux.
Giscard d'Estaing had an older sister, Sylvie and younger siblings Olivier, Isabelle, and Marie-Laure.
He joined the French Resistance and was part of the Liberation of Paris where he protected Alexandre Parodi. He then joined the French First Army. He was later awarded the "Croix de guerre" for his military service.
He studied at Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, École Gerson and Lycées Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He graduated from the École polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration. He later joined the Inspection des finances. He worked in the Tax and Revenue Service, then joined the staff of Prime Minister Edgar Faure from 1955 to 1956.
In 1956, Giscard d'Estaing was elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Puy-de-Dôme "département". He joined the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), a conservative group. After the creation of the Fifth Republic, the CNIP leader Antoine Pinay became Minister of Economy and Finance and chose him as Secretary of State for Finances from 1959 to 1962.
In 1962, when Giscard d'Estaing was nominated as Minister of Economy and Finance, his party split up with the Gaullists and left the majority coalition. At first, Giscard d'Estaing was a supporter of French president Charles de Gaulle. He did not support this and founded the Independent Republicans (RI). During this time, he supported the United States dollar as a form of international payments.
In 1966, Giscard d'Estaing was removed from the cabinet. He made the RI into a political party, the National Federation of the Independent Republicans (FNRI), and founded the Perspectives and Realities Clubs. In 1969, Giscard d'Estaing supported a "no" vote in the constitutional referendum which focused on the regions and the Senate. De Gaulle had said that he would resign if the "no" won. After De Gaulle resigned, many of his supporters blamed Giscard d'Estaing for being responsible for De Gaulle's resignation. From 1967 to 1974, he was Mayor of Chamalières.
During the 1969 presidential campaign, he supported the winning candidate Georges Pompidou, after which he became the Minister of Economy and Finance again.
In 1974, after the death of President Georges Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing announced his candidacy for the presidency. His two main challengers were François Mitterrand for the left and Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a former Gaullist Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac explained that Giscard d'Estaing was the best candidate to stop Mitterrand from being elected. In the election, Giscard d'Estaing beat Mitterrand by a small number of votes, winning 50.7% of the vote which was 425,000 votes. At 48, he was the third youngest president in French history at the time, after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Jean Casimir-Perier.
When Giscard d'Estaing made it easier for people to get political asylum, he expanded health insurance, lowered the voting age to 18, and modernised the divorce law. He supported the creation of the TGV high speed train network and the Minitel telephone upgrade. He supported nuclear power.
Economically, Giscard d'Estaing's presidency increased personal incomes, as employment went up 29% and pensions by 65%.
Giscard d'Estaing tried to make the presidency look less like a monarchy. He rode the Métro, ate monthly dinners with citizens, and even invited garbage men from Paris to have breakfast with him in the Élysée Palace. Many of his critics believed that Giscard was not formal enough to be president.
Many conservatives that supported him slowly began to criticise him because he helped legalise abortion. Even though he was against the death penalty, Giscard d'Estaing said in his 1974 campaign that he would support the death penalty for some criminals. He did not remove three death sentences that happened during his presidency, making France the last country in the Europe to take part of death penalty.
Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who resigned in 1976, began to criticise Giscard d'Estaing's leadership and later became political enemies with him.
Giscard d'Estaing was a close friend of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and together they helped create the European Monetary System. They also helped make the Soviet Union support the Helsinki Accords.
He supported creation of the European Council at the Paris Summit in December 1974.
In 1975, Giscard d'Estaing made the King of Spain Juan Carlos I to ban Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from his coronation by saying that if Pinochet went, he would not. Although France accepted many Chilean political refugees, Giscard d'Estaing's government secretly worked with Pinochet's and Argentina's Jorge Rafael Videla's dictatorship governments.
Giscard d'Estaing supported de Gaulle's African policy where supported delivering oil supplies to and from Africa. In 1977, in the Opération Lamantin, he ordered the French military to go to Mauritania and stop the Polisario guerrillas fighting against Mauritania.