Congratulations to Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Laureate, who was in Jamaica last year at Scotiabank's annual lecture series.

On Wednesday President Barack Obama presented the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Professor Yunus and others during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington DC.

Also among the distinguished group of recipients was Pedro Jose Greer Jr, the assistant dean of academic affairs at Florida International University School of Medicine.

Billie Jean King received a medal for winning the famous 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match and championing gender-equality issues.

Dr Janet Davison Rowley, MD, was awarded for discovering the first consistent chromosome translocation in a human cancer.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official from a major city in the United States. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 and encouraged lesbian and gay citizens to live their lives openly.

Broke barriers

Chita Rivera, a Puerto Rican-American, broke barriers as an actress, singer and dancer to become a Broadway star in West Side Story and was the first Hispanic woman to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award.

Rev. Joseph Lowery got his medal for being a leader of the civil rights movement since the 1950s, and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr; Nancy Goodman Brinker, the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world's leading breast cancer grassroots organisation named for Brinker's sister.

Former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor; Archbishop Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid campaigner; senator Edward Kennedy; former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson; Stephen Hawking, renowned theoretical physicist and Cambridge University professor; and Pedro Jose Greer Jr were also among the recipients.