Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at the age 100.
He served as America's top diplomat and national security adviser during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He died at his home in Connecticut. During his decades long career, Mr Kissinger played a key, and sometimes controversial, role in US foreign and security policy.
The statement from Kissinger Associates did not give a cause of death.
Born in Germany in 1973, Kissinger first came to the US in 1938 when his family fled Nazi Germany.
He became a US citizen in 1943 and went on to serve three years in the US Army and later in the Counter Intelligence Corps.
After earning bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees, he taught international relations at Harvard.
In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon appointed him National Security Adviser, a position which gave him enormous influence over US foreign policy.
As secretary of state during the Nixon administration - and later under President Gerald Ford - Mr Kissinger led diplomatic efforts towards China, helped negotiate an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its neighbours and was instrumental in the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War.
Over the years, however, Kissinger was also subject to scathing criticism from those who accused him of putting rivalry with the Soviet Union over human rights and supporting repressive regimes across the world, including Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile.
In 1973, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize alongside North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who refused to accept.
The controversial award led to two members of the Nobel committee resigning.
Speaking of icons in geopolitical legacy of the twentieth century, few would come close to Henry Kissinger because between him and Nixon with their fellow counterparts, Mao and Chou En-lai, these four individuals laid the stage for world events and the historical consequences of our current century to be played out.
To be sure and by most accounts, he was an extremely controversial figure. He was especially ruthless with regime changes, eg. the assassination of Salvador Allende of Chile, Vietnam, and the illegal and horrendous bombing of Laos and Cambodia, etc.
But in bringing China and US together in 1972, normalising and cooperating later, he would always be viewed positively by the Chinese people. Of course, that wasn't his intention,…
USA and the world lost 2 centurion icons on the same day- Kissinger(100) and Charlie Munger(99+)