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Monday 24 April 2017

President

A president is the leader of a country. The president of a country is not the same thing as a prime minister. A prime minister is part of a parliament, but a president is not.

The first usage of the word president to denote the highest official in a government was during the Commonwealth of England. After the abolition of the monarchy the English Council of State, whose members were elected by the House of Commons, became the executive government of the Commonwealth. The Council of State was headed by a Lord President, the first of which was John Bradshaw. However, the Lord President alone was not head of state, because that office was vested in the council as a whole.

John Bradshaw (July 15, 1602 – October 31, 1659) 

The modern usage of the term president to designate a single person who is the head of state of a republic can be traced directly to the United States Constitution of 1787, which created the office of President of the United States.

Mexico had its first black president 180 years before the United States: Vicente Guerrero, who was one of the leading fighters for independence from Spain, was of half-African descent and later became the second president of Mexico, abolishing slavery during his brief presidency in 1829.

The meeting of presidents President Taft and Díaz in Mexico in 1909 was the first between a president of the United States and a president of Mexico. Because both presidents were bilingual there was no need for interpreters. No one else attended the meeting where they spent 20 minutes alone

Pedro Lascuráin was President of Mexico for 45 minutes in 1913; this is the shortest term to date of any person as president of any country.

When Argentine president Juan Perón died on July 1, 1974, he was succeeded by his wife and vice president, Isabel, who became the first female president of any country in the world. She served as president of Argentina until March 24, 1976.

Isabel Martínez de Perón

When Eamon De Valera reached the end of his second term as President of Ireland in 1973 at the age of 91, he was the oldest head of state of any country in the world.

When Shimon Peres stepped down as Israel’s president in July 2014, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (born February 21, 1924) assumed the mantle of the world’s oldest head of state.

Robert Mugabe in May 2015 By Kremlin.ru, Wikipedia

Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the president of Madagascar from January 2014 to September 2018  held the world record of the head of state with the longest family name.

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