NEW YORK, Dec. 18 (Xinhuanet) -- The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were named Time magazine's "Persons of the Year" along with Irish rocker Bono for their charitable work and contribution to reducing global poverty and improving world health.

Handout image courtesy of TIME shows rock star Bono (C) with Bill (L) and Melinda Gates on the cover of TIME's 2005 Person of the Year issue.

    "For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time's Persons of the Year," the magazine said in its December 19 issue, which hit newsstands Monday.

    Managing Editor James Kelly said the three had been chosen as the people most effective at finding ways to eradicate such calamities as malaria in Africa, HIV and AIDS and the grinding poverty that kills 8 million people a year.

    The founder of computer giant Microsoft Corp., whose personal fortune of 46.5 billion U.S. dollars topped Forbes magazine's list of the world's richest again this year, and his wife were named for their work in the Gates Foundation, the world's biggest charity with a 29-billion-US-dollar endowment.

    Time praised the Gates for building the Foundation charity and for "giving more money away faster than anyone ever has" in 2005.

    The foundation has saved at least 700,000 lives in poor countries by investing in vaccination programs, donated computers and Internet access to 11,000 libraries and sponsored the biggest scholarship fund in history, the magazine said.

    Partly due to popular pressure, the world's industrialized nations agreed in July to double aid to poor countries by 2010, adding 50 billion dollars a year, and to cancel poor countries' debt.

    Time said Bono's campaign to make rich countries address the debt of poorer ones has had an equally impressive impact on the world.

    "Bono charmed and bullied and morally blackmailed the leaders of the world's richest countries into forgiving 40 billion dollars in debt owed by the poorest," Time said.

    Kelly said he expected the choice to surprise some people, but the unlikely alliance of the richest man in the world and a "hell-raiser" like Bono was an inspiring example of how different approaches could be effective.

    Time has been naming its person of the year since 1927 and the tradition has become the source of speculation every year, as well as controversy over unpopular choices such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

    The aim is to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse."

    Time's 2004 Person of the Year was U.S. President George W. Bush while in 2003, the magazine honored "The American Soldier." Enditem