My best BBC World news anchor..

MISHAL HUSAIN - BIOGRAPHY

Mishal Husain anchors the 6 and 7 pm/et newscasts, seen by a worldwide audience of over 256 million and across the United States through cable and satellite on BBC America and public television. Mishal is also a Washington correspondent for BBC News.

Mishal's family is from Pakistan but she was born in 1973 in England and grew up in the Middle East before going to boarding school at Cobham Hall in England at the age of 12. After leaving school in 1991 she had her first taste of journalism - interning at 'The News', one of Pakistan's English-language daily papers. Here she reached the dizzy heights of the 'city pages' for Islamabad - covering events in the capital and even investigating whether a 'silver' garnish on sweetmeats could cause lead poisoning. She also spent six months living in Russia - having studied Russian at school, she taught English in Moscow and had the chance to travel all over the former Soviet Union, including Uzbekistan and Georgia.

Mishal studied law at Cambridge University, graduating in 1995, and then completed a Master's in Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her thesis was human rights issues arising from the 'temporary protection' status of Bosnian refugees in Europe. She retains a keen interest in international law and human rights.

Mishal's first job was at Bloomberg Television in London, where she spent two years and had the opportunity of on-camera work for the first time. She joined the BBC in 1988 as a producer at BBC World and then moved to the BBC's specialist Economics and Business Unit. Here she began reporting, covering anything from the markets to house prices to share options for internet entrepreneurs.

She first tried her hand at anchoring in May 2000, including a stint in Singapore as the first anchor of the new 'Asia Business Report' on BBC World. She later returned to London to co-anchor BBC World's flagship 'World Business Report', with Patrick O'Connell. On the day the New York markets re-opened after September 11th 2001, Mishal was live in Times Square, charting reaction to the terrorist attacks. A year later she would cover commemorations at the Pentagon for the one-year anniversary.

Mishal moved to the main news on BBC World in November 2001 - her first day on the job coincided with the Queens plane crash in New York and that first week also saw the fall of Kabul. Since then she's interviewed a host of high-profile figures, including the Deputy US Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy US Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, Israel's former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Afghanistan's foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and the NATO Secretary-General George Robertson.

More about her at: http://www.anycities.com/andyhifi/news/mishalhusain.htm