1. Sylvana Foa was the first woman to serve as the foreign editor of a major international news organisation, the first woman to serve as a news director of an American television network and the first woman to serve as spokesperson for the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Sylvana Foa's family moved to Troy, New York when she was seven.
Sylvana Foa graduated from Columbia University in 1967, having studied Political Science at Barnard College and Chinese at the East Asia Institute.
Sylvana Foa graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1969, where she was a special Carnegie Fellow.
Sylvana Foa's reporting brought Richard Moose and James G Lowenstein, Indo-China investigators for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to Phnom Penh.
When US Embassy officials told them that Sylvana Foa's stories were ridiculous, they went to her office to ask about the source of her reports.
Sylvana Foa was one of the first American reporters allowed to visit China, which was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.
From Hong Kong, Sylvana Foa had reporting stints in New Delhi, Rome, Vienna and Bangkok before being sent to Hong Kong as UPI's Asia Pacific news editor in 1982.
Sylvana Foa thus became the first woman to serve as a news director of a major US television network.
From 1991 to March 1995, Sylvana Foa served as the spokesperson and Chief of Public Information for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.
Sylvana Foa is widely credited with turning the agency into one of the most respected of all UN organisations.
Sylvana Foa often covered refugee situations, speaking on behalf of displaced Kurds in Iraq, Banyarwanda in Rwanda and Bosnians.
When Serb troops moved against the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, Sylvana Foa urged the international community to speed up the deployment of peacekeepers to the region.
Sylvana Foa urged the international community to act before they saw appalling TV images of slaughter.
Sylvana Foa succeeded Joe B Sills who was appointed as the director of the UN office in Washington DC Sylvana Foa became the first woman to serve as a spokesperson for the Secretary-General.
Sylvana Foa accused the Clinton administration of resorting to bully tactics akin to McCarthyism.
Sylvana Foa carried a blue beret, like the ones worn by UN Peacekeeping forces around the world, to her daily briefing.
Sylvana Foa encouraged Americans to send $4.40, the share of each American, to finance the UN, and people responded with tens of thousands of dollars in donations.