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Monday, September 13, 2010

Soros Giving $100 Million to Human Rights Watch

Soros Giving $100 Million to Human Rights Watch

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros will give Human Rights Watch $100 million to expand its work throughout the world.

The gift, announced Tuesday, is the largest ever by Soros and the largest received by Human Rights Watch, The New York Times reported.

Soros, 80, told the Times that the gift is the first of a series of large gifts that he plans to make.

Soros this year has donated some $700 million to several causes. He earned $3.3 billion from his hedge fund in 2009, the Times reported.

The gift is a challenge grant requesting that Human Rights Watch raise $10 million over the next decade from new, international sources. The organization will get the money even if it is not successful.

Human Rights Watch, which monitors human rights abuses worldwide, said it will add about 120 staff members to its current 300 posted in capitals around the world, open new offices and expand the translation of its approximately 100 reports a year, the Times reported.

Based in New York, the organization was founded in 1978. It is funded solely by private donations.

via www.jewishtimes.com
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George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. His father was taken prisoner during World War I and eventually fled from captivity in Russia to reunite with his family in Budapest. Soros was thirteen years old when Hitler's Wehrmacht seized Hungary and began deporting the country's Jews to extermination camps. In 1946, as the Soviet Union was taking control of the country, Soros attended a conference in the West and defected. He emigrated in 1947 to England, supported himself by working as a railroad porter and a restaurant waiter, graduated in 1952 from the London School of Economics, and obtained an entry-level position with an investment bank.

In 1956, Soros immigrated to the United States, working as a trader and analyst until 1963. During that time, he developed his own theory of markets called 'reflexivity', which he has laid out in his recent books THE ALCHEMY OF FINANCE and THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 2008 AND WHAT IT MEANS. In 1967 he helped establish an offshore investment fund; and in 1973 he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds, through which he accumulated a vast fortune.