As well as Ban Ki-moon, we also have David Cameron, Bill Gates, Queen Rania of Jordan, Unilever's Paul Pulman...GW 5.24pm GMT Ban Ki-Moon calls for action in Syria and Mali UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has called for world leaders to act now on Syria, in a rather moving and sobering speech at Davos tonight.
For the candidates, it was a rare chance to rise above party politics by delivering sober speeches about the value of cities as laboratories for innovation.
Periodically during the campaign, rivals accused him of offering more style than substance; Mr. Obama responded with such sober speeches that supporters started to worry he was dull.
For viewers, the sudden gush of quality time with the nation's president and vice president and their families can come as a bit of a shock: it is so starkly different from the sober speeches, stern warnings and terse nightly news sound bites that usually prevail on the screen.
About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory.
In short, this was a deliberately sober speech: Osborne's mission was to sell the message that pain now will mean gain later.
But Mr Cameron's soundbite pleased the floor and, in an otherwise sober speech, he might have been forgiven his populist one-liner.
A7 Bush Visits Swing States President Bush gave a sober speech in downtown Tampa, Fla., condemning human trafficking as a form of slavery, and later spoke in the mountains of West Virginia.
In a sober speech laced with bitter words, Mr. Hastert, of Illinois, stood before his hushed colleagues and defended his initial decision to select a Protestant minister over a Catholic priest.
A half-hour or so later, Mr. Lazio appeared at the Latino voters forum, delivering a more sober speech in a more reserved tone, one heard more often on the campaign trail.
