Thursday, January 31, 2008

Arena at Gwinnett Center
The Arena at Gwinnett Center is an indoor arena located in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, Georgia. The Arena was an expansion to the already existing Gwinnett Center, which also includes a Performing Arts Center, and a Convention Center. The arena seats 11,500 for hockey, 12,750 for basketball, and 13,100 for major concerts.

Arena at Gwinnett Center Tenants

Gwinnett Gladiators - ECHL (Ice Hockey)
Georgia Force - Arena Football League (Arena Football)

Wednesday, January 30, 2008


Balderdash and Piffle is a British television programme made by Takeaway Media for the BBC. Presented by Victoria Coren, it is a companion to the Oxford English Dictionary's Wordhunt, in which the writers of the dictionary asked the public for help in finding the origins and first known citations of a number of words and phrases.
The OED panel consists of John Simpson, the Chief Editor of the OED., Peter Gilliver, who was also the captain of the Oxford University Press team in University Challenge - the Professionals, and Tania Styles, who has also appeared in "dictionary corner" in Countdown.

Balderdash and Piffle Series two
Balderdash and Piffle is also the name given to two books written by Alex Games. The first, titled Balderdash and Piffle was published by BBC Books in 2006. A second book, also by Alex Games and published by BBC Books, is titled Balderdash and Piffle: One sandwich short of a dog's dinner and accompanies the second series of the show.
The two books explore the origins of a number of words in the English language, including randy, shampoo and bouncy castle.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

George S. Boutwell
George Sewall Boutwell (January 28, 1818February 27, 1905) was an American statesman who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Ulysses S. Grant, Governor of Massachusetts, a Senator and Representative from Massachusetts and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue under President Abraham Lincoln.
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Boutwell was raised on his family's farm and attended the public schools as a child. He worked as a schoolteacher in Shirley, Massachusetts and as a clerk and shopkeeper in Groton, Massachusetts. Entering politics as a Democrat and supporter of Martin Van Buren, he was appointed postmaster of Groton in 1841 and served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1842 to 1844 and from 1847 to 1850. He made three unsuccessful runs for the United States House of Representatives in 1844, 1846 and 1848 and two unsuccessful runs for the governorship in 1849 and 1850. He served as state bank commissioner from 1849 to 1851, was a member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers from 1850 to 1860 and was elected twice Governor of Massachusetts in 1851 and 1852, serving from 1851 to 1853. He was a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853, helped in founding the Republican Party in 1854 and was secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1855 to 1861.
Boutwell attended the Peace Conference of 1861 in Washington, D.C. which attempted to devise means to prevent the impending American Civil War. He switched party affiliations to the Republican Party and served on the military commission in the Department of War in 1862 before being appointed the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue by President Abraham Lincoln the same year. He served as commissioner until his election to the United States House of Representatives where he served from 1863 to 1869. In 1868, as a congressman, he served as one of the special prosecutors in the impeachment trials of President Andrew Johnson.
Boutwell resigned from the House in 1869 to except the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. As Treasury Secretary, his primary achievements were reorganizing the Treasury Department, improving bookkeeping by customs houses, incorporating the United States Mint into the Treasury and reducing the national debt. He also managed the Black Friday crisis of September 23, 1869, warding off gold speculators by flooding the market with Treasury gold.
In 1873, when Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson was elected to the vice presidency, Boutwell was elected to Wilson's Senate seat and resigned as Treasury Secretary. In the Senate, he served as chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Laws in the 44th Congress. After leaving the Senate, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him commissioner to codify and edit the Revised Statutes of the United States in 1877 and was the United States counsel before the French and American Claims Commission in 1880.
Boutwell practiced law in Washington, D.C. and turned down the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury from President Chester A. Arthur in 1884.
He opposed the acquisition by the United States of the Philippines, became president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, and was a presidential elector on the William Jennings Bryan ticket in 1900.
He published several books on education, taxation and political economy. His book The Constitution of the United States at the End of the First Century was considered particularly significant.
Boutwell died in Groton, Massachusetts, and is buried at Groton Cemetery. His house in the center of Groton is now headquarters of the Groton Historical Society.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Charlene Barshefsky
Charlene Barshefsky served as United States Trade Representative, the country's top trade negotiator, from 1997 to 2001. Prior to that, she was the Deputy USTR from 1993 to 1997. Under Bill Clinton in 1999, she was the primary negotiator with China's Zhu Rongji, laying out the terms for China's eventual entry into the World Trade Organization. She is a now a partner at the Washington, DC law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and is also a member of multiple corporate boards, including Intel, American Express, and Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
She comes from a Jewish family [1] and received a J.D. from The Catholic University of America

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Names of the treaty
Another treaty was signed the same day establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), which came into effect on the same day as the Treaty of Rome, 1 January 1958.
Both treaties, in conjunction with the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (the Treaty of Paris, which expired in 2001-2002), have become known as the Treaties of Rome.
To date, the original Treaty of Rome has been amended by all subsequent treaties of the European Union. The Treaty of Nice consolidated all treaties into one document, but within this the EC Treaty (the amended form of the Treaty of Rome) remains a single section with its own article numbering.
Despite subsequent treaties, especially the Treaty of Maastricht, the EC Treaty is still the legal basis for most decisions taken by the institutions of the European Union and it remains the main source of communitary legislation.

Treaties of Rome Signatories

Berlin Declaration (2007)
Common Agricultural Policy
Four Freedoms (European Union)
History of the European Union

Friday, January 25, 2008


Fee tail or entail is an obsolete term of art in common law. It describes an estate of inheritance in real property which cannot be sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the owner, but which passes by operation of law to the owner's heirs upon his death. The term fee tail is derived from the Middle Latin feodum talliatum, which means "cut-short fee." The Statute of Westminster II, passed in 1285, created and stereotyped this form of estate. The new law was also formally called the statute De Donis Conditionalibus (Concerning Conditional Gifts).
Traditionally, a fee tail was created by words of grant in the deed: "to A and the heirs of his body." The crucial difference between the words of conveyance and the words that created a fee simple, "to A and his heirs," is that the heirs "in tail" must be the children begotten by the landowner. It was also possible to have "fee tail male," which only sons could inherit, and "fee tail female," which only daughters could inherit; and "fee tail special," which had a further condition of inheritance, usually restricting succession to certain "heirs of the body" and excluding others. Land subject to these conditions was said to be entailed or in tail. The restrictions themselves were entailments.
Fee tail was formerly used during feudal times by landed nobility in order to create family settlements and to make certain that the land stayed in the family. From the foregoing, attempting to mortgage land in fee tail would be risky and uncertain, since at the death of the owner the land passed by operation of law to children who had no obligation to the mortgage lender and whose interest was prior in right over the mortgage. Similarly, the largest estate an owner in fee tail could convey to someone else was a life estate, since the grantee's interest again terminates automatically when the original owner died. If all went as planned, it was impossible for the family to lose the land, which was the idea.
Things do not always go as planned, however. Owners of land in tail occasionally had "failure of issue" --- that is, they had no children surviving them at the time of their own deaths. In this situation, theoretically the entailed land went back up and through the family tree to descendants of former owners who were entitled to inherit, or to the last owner in fee simple. This situation produced complicated litigation.
Fee tail was a device tuned to the needs of family settlements in the thirteenth century, but it was never popular with the monarchy, the merchants, or many entailed holders themselves who wished to sell their land. In more mercantile eras, fee tail became rare. As early as the fifteenth century, lawyers devised an elaborate action called "Common Recovery," which used collaborative lawsuits and legal fictions to remove the conditions of fee tail from land and enable its free conveyance in fee simple.
Fee tail was abolished by statute in England (as a legal estate) in 1925 and has been in all but four states in the United States: Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. New York, for example, abolished it in 1782. In most states it is provided that an attempt to create a fee tail results in a fee simple. Even in those four states that still allow fee tail, the estate holder may convert his fee tail to a fee simple during his lifetime by executing a deed. Many other states never recognized the fee tail estate at all as most of the land in the United States of America was deemed allodial. In Louisiana, the sole civil law jurisdiction in the US, the doctrine of legitime restricts owners from willing property out of their family when they die with children.
An entail can still exist in England and Wales as an equitable interest, behind a strict settlement, but the legal estate is vested in the current 'tenant for life' or other person immediately entitled to the income, but on the basis that any capital money arising must be paid to the settlement trustees. A tenant in tail in possession can bar his entail by a simple disentailing deed, which does not now have to be enrolled. A tenant in tail in reversion (i.e. a future interest where the property is subject to prior life interest) needs the consent of the life tenant and any 'special protectors' to vest a reversionary fee simple in himself. Otherwise he can only create a base fee; a base fee only confers a right to the property on its owner, when its creator would have become entitled to it; if its creator dies before he would have received it, the owner of the base fee gets nothing.

Fee tailFee tail See also

Majorat
Ordynat
Rule in Wild's Case

Thursday, January 24, 2008


Harvey Logan, (1867 - June 17, 1904) also known as Kid Curry, was a notorious outlaw and gunman who ran with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's infamous Wild Bunch gang. Despite being less well known than his counterparts, he has since been referred to as "the wildest of the Wild Bunch". [1] He was responsible for the killing of at least nine law enforcement officers in five different shootings, and another two men in other instances, as well as several shootouts with posses and civilians during his outlaw days. Of all the American Old West gunmen, Curry is believed by many to have been one of the most dangerous.

Early life
The events that changed the course of his life began when his brother Hank, and friend Jim Thornhill, bought a ranch at Rock Creek, in Chouteau County, Montana. The ranch was near the site of a mine strike made by local miner Powell "Pike" Landusky. Landusky, according to some reports of the day, confronted Curry and attacked him, believing Curry was involved romantically with Landusky's daughter, Elfie. The two men fought, and Curry beat Landusky. Landusky then filed assault charges against Curry, who was arrested.
Two friends of Curry's, A.S. Lohman and Frank Plunkett, paid a $500 bond for Curry's release. Landusky's daughter, Elfie, later claimed it was Curry's brother, Lonny, with whom she had been involved. However, the confession came much too late. On December 27, 1894, Curry caught Landusky at a local saloon, and a fight between the two men followed. Landusky, again, was beaten badly, and barely able to stand. Curry, evidently believing the fight was over, began walking away. Landusky pulled his pistol and began threatening Curry, who was unarmed. Curry's friend and his brothers partner, Jim Thornhill, gave Curry his pistol. Landusky fired one shot, missing. Curry returned fire, killing him.
Curry was arrested and at an inquest was released when it was judged that he acted in self defense. However, a formal trial was set. Curry believed he would not get a fair trial, because the judge was close friends with Landusky. For this reason, Curry left town.

Outlaw life
He started riding with outlaw "Black Jack" Ketchum. Pinkerton detectives began trailing Curry shortly after his departure from Montana. In January 1896, Curry received word that an old friend of Landusky's, rancher James Winters, had been spying on him, for the reward offered in his arrest. Curry and two of his brothers, Johnny and Lonny, went to Winters' ranch to confront him. However, a shootout erupted, resulting in Curry's brother Johnny being killed. Curry and Lonny escaped. Shortly after that incident, Curry and his brother Lonny argued with Black Jack Ketchum over the take in a train robbery. The two brothers left the gang.

Riding with the Black Jack Ketchum gang
They both received employment on a cattle ranch, arranged by their cousin, Bob Lee, near Sand Gulch, Colorado. Pinkerton agents trailing Curry gave up his trail briefly. Curry, his brother Lonny, Walt Putnam and George Curry formed their own gang around this time. He temporarily left Colorado, intending to scout good targets for potential robberies. Around April 1897, Curry was reportedly involved in the killing of Deputy Sheriff William Deane of Powder River, Wyoming, as he and his gang gathered fresh horses on a ranch in the Powder River Basin. After this, he returned to Colorado to the ranch where he was working.
By June 1897, the cowboy job had ended, and Curry ventured north with the rest of the gang. They robbed a bank in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and met resistance outside the bank from the townspeople. One of their friends, Tom O'Day, was captured when his horse spooked and ran away without him. The others escaped, but while planning a second robbery a posse from the town caught up with them in Fergus County, Montana. During a shootout, Curry was shot through the wrist, and his horse was shot from under him, resulting in his capture. George Curry and Walt Putnam were also captured. All three were held in the Deadwood, South Dakota jail, but only briefly since they took an opportunity and overpowered the jailer to escape. They headed back into Montana and robbed two Post Offices. [2] [3]

Forming his own gang
It was during this time that he began riding with the Wild Bunch gang, under Butch Cassidy. He did not become as well known as the Sundance Kid, who was considered "the fastest gun in the West", despite not being known to have been in more than two shootings, without any confirmation of killing anyone. On June 2, 1899, the gang robbed a Union Pacific Railroad overland flyer near Wilcox, Wyoming, a robbery that became famous. Many notable lawmen of the day took part in the hunt for the robbers, but they were not captured.
During one shootout with lawmen following that robbery, both Kid Curry and George Curry shot and killed Sheriff Joe Hazen. Noted killer for hire and contract employee of the Pinkerton Agency, Tom Horn, obtained information from explosives expert Bill Speck that revealed that George Curry and Kid Curry had shot Hazen, which Horn passed on to Pinkerton detective Charlie Siringo. The gang escaped into the Hole-in-the-Wall, an area that the gang used as its hideout. Siringo had been assigned the task of bringing the outlaw gang in. He became friends with Elfie Landusky, who was going by the last name Curry, alleging that Lonny Curry had gotten her pregnant. Through her, Siringo intended on locating the gang.
Siringo changed his name to Charles L. Carter, disguised himself as an on-the-run gunman, and began mingling with people that might know the Currys, becoming friends with Jim Thornhill. However, Kid Curry was in a place referred to as "Robbers Roost", in Utah. Curry then went to Alma, New Mexico, with Cassidy and others, intending to hide for a while. On July 11, 1899, while working at the "W.S. Ranch", Curry robbed a train near Folsom, New Mexico, with gang members Elzy Lay and Sam Ketchum. A posse led by Sheriff Ed Farr cornered the gang near an area called Turkey Creek, which resulted in two gun battles over a period of four days. Lay and Ketchum were both wounded and later captured, with Lay killing the sheriff and wounding deputy Henry Love in the process. He received a life sentence for the murders. Ketchum died from his wounds days later while in custody, and deputy Love died from wounds he received. Curry escaped, but he, Cassidy, and other members of the gang were forced to leave New Mexico. Sam Ketchum was the brother of Tom "Black Jack" Ketchum. Curry traveled to San Antonio, where he stayed briefly. While there he met prostitute Della Moore (also known as Annie Rogers or Maude Williams), with whom he became romantically involved. At the time of their meeting, she was working in Madame Fannie Porter's brothel, which was a regular hideout for the Wild Bunch gang.

Harvey Logan Riding with Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch
On February 28, 1900, lawmen attempted to arrest Lonny Curry at his aunt's home. Lonny was killed in the shootout that followed, and his cousin Bob Lee was arrested for rustling and sent to prison in Wyoming. Kid Curry was now the last surviving brother. In March 1900, Curry was identified in St. Johns, Arizona as he was passing notes suspected of being from the Wilcox Robbery. Local Sheriff Edward Beeler gathered a posse and began tracking Curry, who was accompanied by Bill Carver. The posse came into contact with Curry and Carver on March 28, and during a shootout, Curry and Carver killed Deputy Andrew Gibbons and Deputy Frank LeSeuer. On May 26, Kid Curry rode into Utah and killed Grand County, Utah Sheriff John Tyler and Deputy Sam Jenkins in a brazen shootout in Moab. Both killings were in retaliation for them killing George Curry and his brother Lonny.
Curry then returned with the Wild Bunch, and they robbed a train near Tipton, Wyoming. Newspaper stories claimed the gang took more than $55,000 in that robbery. However, in fact they received $55.40, since that was all that the safe contained. The gang again split up, with Kid Curry and Ben Kilpatrick heading south to Fort Worth, Texas, while Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Bill Carver went back out and immediately pulled off another robbery in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Siringo, still working the case for the Pinkertons, was in Circleville, Utah, where Butch Cassidy had been raised. Curry rejoined the gang, and they hit another Union Pacific train near Wagner, Montana. This time, they took over $60,000 in cash. Gang member Will Carver was killed by Sheriff Elijah Briant during the pursuit of the robbers following that robbery.
Again the gang split up. In October 1901, Della Moore was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee for passing money tied to an earlier robbery involving Curry. On December 12, gang members Ben Kilpatrick and Laura Bullion were captured in Knoxville, Tennessee. On December 13, during a shootout with lawmen to avoid capture, Kid Curry killed Knoxville policemen Willian Dinwiddle and Robert Saylor, and escaped. Curry, despite being pursued by Pinkerton agents and other law enforcement officials, returned to Montana, where he shot and killed rancher James Winters, who was responsible for the killing of his brother Johnny years before. [4]

Wednesday, January 23, 2008


A Bond Girl is a character or actress portraying a love interest or sex object of James Bond in a film, novel or video game. They often (but not always) have names that are double entendres, such as "Pussy Galore", "Holly Goodhead" and "Xenia Onatopp."
Bond Girls are often victims rescued by Bond, fellow agents or allies, villainesses or members of an enemy organisation. Some are mere eye candy and have no direct involvement in Bond's mission; other Bond Girls play a pivotal role in the success of the mission. Other female characters such as Judi Dench's M and Miss Moneypenny are not typically thought of as Bond Girls.
The role of a Bond Girl is typically a high-profile part that can give a major boost to the career of unestablished actresses, although there have been a number of Bond girls that were well-established prior to gaining their role. For instance, Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman were both Bond Girls after becoming major stars for their roles in the television series, The Avengers. Additionally, Halle Berry won an Academy Award in 2002 - the award was presented to her while she was filming Die Another Day.
There is an urban legend of sorts that claims that appearing as a Bond Girl will damage an actress' subsequent career, often validated by retrospective reviews of such careers by past Bond Girls. Notable exceptions to this "curse" (actresses who went on to experience fulfilling careers) include Famke Janssen, Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg. In fact, casting for the female lead in Casino Royale was hindered by fears of this superstition by potential actresses.[1]

Bond girls History
Since the series began, Bond Girls have been criticized by feminists, and others, who feel that such characters objectify women as bimbos. Throughout the years, the Bond Girl has evolved from girl to woman, someone of strong character with the resourcefulness and skills Bond needs to complete the mission or, in some instances, rescue Bond. In Moonraker (1979), scientist Holly Goodhead is a trained space shuttle astronaut; in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Wai Lin is a People's Republic of China secret agent counterpart to Bond and is actually of a higher rank; in The World Is Not Enough (1999), Christmas Jones is a nuclear scientist; in Goldfinger (1964), Pussy Galore leads a women's stunt flying team; Thunderball (1965) features assassin Fiona Volpe, the first villain-Bond Girl; and You Only Live Twice (1967) features two Japanese SIS women agents 'Aki' and 'Kissy', and assassin Helga Brandt. Nevertheless, movie critics note that that none of these characters are realistic and comment that the Bond Girl, heroine or villainess, remains a sex object when compared with other portrayals of cinematic women.

Criticisms
In addition to those actresses mentioned above, the Bond films traditionally have groups of women in the background whose general purpose is nothing more than eye candy: they include the sunbathing Miami beauties in Goldfinger, the Thai girls at the kung fu school in The Man With the Golden Gun, Tiger Tananka's bathing beauties in You Only Live Twice, and Sheik Hossein's harem in The Spy Who Loved Me. However, in Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, and The Living Daylights these women were also referred to in the media as fully- fledged Bond girls to provide added publicity for the film through eye-catching magazine and newspaper appearances. In Moonraker this included members of Drax's "master race" and a group of women encountered by Bond in the jungles of Brazil In For Your Eyes Only, the women were seen frolicking around a villain's pool, while in Octopussy they served mainly as the title character's underlings. In A View to A Kill, they adorned Max Zorin's outdoor reception and in The Living Daylights, they served as decorations at the villain's swimming pool. One "Bond girl" in For Your Eyes Only was later revealed to be a post-operative transsexual (Tula). Although the Bond films have never stopped making use of feminine "eye candy", such large "Bond girl groups" were not featured after The Living Daylights.

Films
EON Productions call themselves the "official" producer of the James Bond film series, having produced 21 films between 1962 and 2006 as listed above. However, other James Bond productions have been made over the years by other producers and studios. These productions are described as "unofficial" by EON Productions and as such, so are the Bond girls featured therein.

Unofficial films

Novels
Mary Goodnight was a supporting character in several Bond novels before graduating to full Bond girl in The Man with the Golden Gun. The short stories "Quantum of Solace", "The Living Daylights" and "The Property of a Lady" feature female characters in prominent roles, but none of these women interact with Bond in a romantic way.

Kingsley Amis (also known as Robert Markham)

John Gardner
Playboy Playmate Lisa Dergan is, to date, the only real-life person to be featured as a Bond girl in any literary Bond story.

Bond girls Raymond Benson

Video games

In 2002, former Bond girl Maryam d'Abo co-wrote the book Bond Girls Are Forever: The Women of James Bond. This book later became a DVD exclusive documentary featuring d'Abo and other Bond girls, including Ursula Andress. In some locations, the documentary was released as a gift with the purchase of Die Another Day on DVD. The featurette was included on the DVD release of Casino Royale (2006) with an updated segment referencing the newest film.
Halle Berry and Kim Basinger are the only Oscar winners to play a Bond girl. Basinger won her Oscar a number of years after her Bond film appearance, while Berry received hers during production of Die Another Day.
After the release of Die Another Day, MGM and EON Productions considered creating a spinoff series featuring Halle Berry's Jinx character. Plans for this were cancelled in 2003.
Early drafts of Die Another Day included an appearance by Wai Lin, but Michelle Yeoh was unavailable.
Media reports for The World Is Not Enough indicated the producers planned to include cameo appearances by every surviving Bond girl actress, ranging from Ursula Andress to Michelle Yeoh, but that did not occur; however, one "eye-candy" Bond girl was played by Eunice Gayson's daughter.
Ursula Andress has the singular distinction among movie Bond Girls of having actually appeared in the narrative of a Fleming novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, written after Fleming was present during filming of Dr. No. She is pointed out to Bond by Irma Bunt while they are dining at Piz Gloria.
Maud Adams, who played Francisco Scaramanga's girlfriend in The Man With the Golden Gun also played the title character in Octopussy.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Early life
Jackson attended Sterling High School, a segregated high school in Greenville, where he was an outstanding student-athlete. Upon graduating in 1959, he rejected a contract from a professional baseball team to attend the racially integrated University of Illinois on a football scholarship. However, one year later, Jackson transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T) located in Greensboro. The change was based on the school's racial biases which included: Jackson being unable to play as a quarterback despite being a star quarterback at his high school and being demoted by his speech professor as an alternate in a public speaking competition team despite the support of his teammates who elected him a place on the team for his superior abilities.
Jackson is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Education
In 1965, Jesse Jackson participated in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s movement in Selma, Alabama. When Jackson returned from Selma, he threw himself into King's effort to establish a beachhead of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago. In 1966, King selected Jackson to be head of the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, and promoted him to be the national director in 1967. Following the example of Reverend Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia, a key goal of the new group was to foster "selective buying" (boycotts) as a means to pressure white businesses to hire blacks and purchase goods and services from black contractors. One of Sullivan's precursors was Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy South Side doctor and entrepreneur and key financial contributor to Operation Breadbasket. Before he moved to Chicago from Mississippi in 1956, Howard, as the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had successfully organized a boycott against service stations that refused to provide restrooms for blacks.
Jackson was present with King in Memphis when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the day after making his famous "I've been to the mountaintop" speech given to the Mason Temple, Church of God in Christ.
Beginning in 1968, Jackson increasingly clashed with Ralph Abernathy, King's successor as head of the national SCLC. In December, 1971, they had a complete falling out. Abernathy suspended Jackson for "administrative improprieties and repeated acts of violation of organizational policy." Jackson resigned, called together his allies, and Operation PUSH was born during the same month. The new group was organized in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard who also became a member of the board of directors and chair of the finance committee.
In 1984, Jackson organized the Rainbow Coalition, which later merged, in 1996, with Operation PUSH. The newly formed Rainbow PUSH organization brought the reverend's role as an important and effective organizer to the mainstream.

Civil rights leader
During the 1980s, he achieved wide fame as an African American leader and as a politician, as well as becoming a well-known spokesman for civil rights issues.

In 1983, Jackson traveled to Syria to secure the release of a captured American pilot, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman who was being held by the Syrian government. Goodman had been shot down over Lebanon while on a mission to bomb Syrian positions in that country. After a dramatic personal appeal that Jackson made to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Goodman was released. Initially, the Reagan administration was skeptical about Jackson's trip to Syria. However, after Jackson secured Goodman's release, United States President Ronald Reagan welcomed both Jackson and Goodman at the White House on January 4, 1984 International activities

Presidential candidate
In 1984, Jackson became the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for President of the United States, running as a Democrat.
In the primaries, Jackson, who had been written off by pundits as a fringe candidate with little chance at winning the nomination, surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Jackson garnered 3.5 million votes and won five primaries, including Michigan.
As he had gained 21% of the popular vote but only 8% of delegates, he afterwards complained that he had been handicapped by party rules. While Mondale (in the words of his aides) was determined to establish a precedent with his vice presidential candidate by picking a woman or visible minority, Jackson criticized the screening process as a "p.r. parade of personalities". He also mocked Mondale, saying that Hubert Humphrey was the "last significant politician out of the St. Paul–Minneapolis" area. [4]

1984 election
Four years later, in 1988, Jackson once again offered himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. This time, his successes in the past made him a more credible candidate, and he was both better financed and better organized. Although most people did not seem to believe that he had a serious chance at winning, Jackson once again exceeded expectations as he more than doubled his previous results, capturing 6.9 million votes and winning eleven primaries. Briefly, after he won 55% of the vote in the Michigan Democrat caucus, he was considered the frontrunner for the nomination, as he surpassed all the other candidates in total number of pledged delegates.
Jackson's campaign, however, suffered a significant setback less than two weeks later when he was defeated handily in Wisconsin primary by Michael Dukakis. Jackson's showing among white voters in Wisconsin was significantly higher than in his 1984 run, but was also noticeably lower than pre-primary polling had indicated it would be. The discrepancy has been cited as an example of the so-called "Bradley effect".

1988 election
In both races, Jackson ran on what many considered to be a very liberal platform. Declaring that he wanted to create a "Rainbow Coalition" of various minority groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, the poor and working poor, and homosexuals, as well as white progressives who fit into none of those categories, Jackson ran on a platform that included:
With the exception of a resolution to implement sanctions against South Africa for its Apartheid policies, none of these positions made it into the party's platform in either 1984 or 1988.

creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America's infrastructure and provide jobs to all Americans,
reprioritizing the War on Drugs to focus less on mandatory minimum sentences for drug users (which he views as racially biased) and more on harsher punishments for money-laundering bankers and others who are part of the "supply" end of "supply and demand,"
reversing Reaganomics-inspired tax cuts for the richest ten percent of Americans and using the money to finance social welfare programs,
cutting the budget of the Department of Defense by as much as fifteen percent over the course of his administration,
declaring Apartheid-era South Africa to be a rogue nation,
instituting an immediate nuclear freeze and beginning disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union,
giving reparations to descendants of black slaves,
supporting family farmers by reviving many of Roosevelt's New Deal–era farm programs,
creating a single-payer system of universal health care,
ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment,
increasing federal funding for lower-level public education and providing free community college to all,
applying stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and
supporting the formation of a Palestinian state. Campaign platform
Although Jackson was one of the most liberal members of the Democratic Party, his views on abortion were originally more in line with pro-life views. Jackson once endorsed the pro-life Hyde Amendment and wrote an article in a 1977 National Right to Life Committee News report:
"There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life ... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.
"What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have twenty years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth."
However, since then, Rev. Jackson has adopted an openly pro-choice view, believing the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy is fundamental and should not be infringed in any way by the government.

Jesse Jackson Abortion
Jesse Jackson's most recent project related to presidential politics was gathering information and support to investigate the 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, particularly the voting results in Ohio and its recount. Jackson called for a congressional debate on the matter, asking for a fair count and national voting standards. He said that the elections in the United States are each run with different standards by different states with partisan tricks, racial bias, and widespread incompetence and are an open scandal.
Jackson said that he held some hope that the election could be overturned, although he admitted that that was very doubtful. Jackson compared the voting irregularities of Ohio to that of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, saying that if Ohio were Ukraine, the U.S. presidential election would not have been certified by the international community. Jackson has called Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell inappropriately partisan and said that Blackwell may have been pressured by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party.
Based on information obtained in hearings held by Rep. John Conyers (Detroit, Michigan) and discovered during a flawed recount of the Ohio presidential vote called for by Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik, Jackson suggested that the Ohio voting machines were "rigged" and that some African-Americans were forced to stand in line for six hours in the rain before voting. When asked for evidence, Jackson did not give facts, but replied, "Based on distrusting the system, lack of paper trails, the anomaly of the exit polls."
On January 6, 2005, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democrat staff released a 100 page report on the Ohio election. This challenge to the Ohio election was rejected by a vote of 74-1 by the United States Senate and 267-31 in the House. Many high-ranking Democrats chose to distance themselves from this debate, including John Kerry, despite Jesse Jackson personally asking Kerry for help. The call for election reform legislation and voting rights protection nonetheless continued from various citizen groups.

2004 presidential election
While Jesse Jackson was initially critical of the "Third Way" or more moderate policies of Bill Clinton, he became a key ally in gaining African American support for Clinton and eventually became a close advisor and friend of the Clinton family. Clinton awarded Jesse Jackson the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor bestowed on civilians. His son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., also emerged as a political figure, becoming a member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois. Jackson is also known as a passionate orator, in the tradition of Southern U.S. and African American Protestant preaching. In 2003, Jackson surprised many observers by declining to endorse the campaigns of either the Reverend Al Sharpton or former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the two African-American candidates, in the race for the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nomination. Instead, Jackson remained largely silent about his preference in the race until late in the primary season, when he allowed Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, another presidential candidate, to speak at a Rainbow/PUSH forum on March 31, 2004. Although he did not explicitly voice an endorsement of Rep. Kucinich, Jackson described Kucinich as "assuming the burden of saying 'you make the most sense, but you can't win.'"
Jackson has taken a key role in the scandal caused by comedic actor Michael Richards' racially charged comments in November 2006. Richards called Jackson a few days after the incident to apologize, to which Jackson accepted Richards' apology [5] and met with him publicly as a means of resolving the situation. Despite this, however, Jackson called for a ban on purchase of the newly released Season 7 DVD of Seinfeld, a TV show in which Richards starred. Many spectators considered this action both deceptive and irrelevant to the situation. Jackson also joined black leaders in a call for the elimination of the "N-word" throughout the entertainment industry. [6]
On June 23rd, 2007 Jackson was arrested in connection with a crowd protesting at a gun store in a poor suburb of Chicago, IL. Jackson was protesting the fact that the gun store (allegedly) had been selling firearms to local gang members and was contributing to the decay of the community. According to police reports, Jackson refused to stop blocking the front entrance of the store and let customers pass. He was charged with one count of criminal trespass to property. [7]

Current activities

Jesse Jackson Controversies
Jackson has been criticized for some of the remarks he has made about Jews and Jewish issues: that Nixon was less attentive to poverty in the U.S. because "four out of five [of Nixon's top advisors] are German Jews and their priorities are on Europe and Asia"; that he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust"; that there are "very few Jewish reporters that have the capacity to be objective about Arab affairs";

Remarks about Jews
In 2001, it was revealed that Jackson (married since 1962) had an affair with a staffer Karin Stanford that resulted in the birth of their daughter, Ashley. According to CNN, in August of 1999, The Rainbow Push Coalition had paid Stanford $15,000 in moving expenses and $21,000 in payment for contracting work.

Extra-marital affair

Wife: Jacqueline Lavinia (Brown) Jackson (m. 1962)

  • Son: Jesse Jackson, Jr. (b. March 11, 1965)
    Son: Yusef DuBois Jackson
    Son: Jonathan Jackson
    Daughter: Santita Jackson
    Daughter: Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson, Jr.
    Daughter: Ashley (b. May 1999) (with Karin Stanford) See also

    David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004 book), 68-95.
    David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. T.R.M. Howard M.D.: A Mississippi Doctor in Chicago Civil Rights, A.M.E. Church Review (July-September 2001), 50-59.

Monday, January 21, 2008


This article is part of the series: Politics and government of Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland Assembly
Acts: Acts Members: 1998 - 2003 - 2007 Elections: 1998 - 2003 - 2007 Presiding Officer
Northern Ireland Executive
First Minister: Ian Paisley Deputy First Minister: Martin McGuinness Departments and agencies
Local Government Courts of Northern Ireland
United Kingdom Parliament
Committees: Affairs - Grand Members: Commons - Lords Elections: 2005
United Kingdom Government
Northern Ireland Office Secretary of StateDirect Rule
British-Irish Council Electoral CommissionSecretary of State for Northern Ireland North/South Ministerial Council
Belfast Agreement (1998)Tamaqua St Andrews Agreement (2006)
Elections in Northern Ireland
ConstituenciesPolitical parties
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is the United Kingdom cabinet minister who has responsibility for government matters relating Northern Ireland. He or she is only responsible to the UK Parliament at Westminster, and not the Northern Ireland Assembly, even when it is sitting.
The role of the Secretary of State is to represent Northern Ireland interests at Westminster. He or she, along with the ministers of the Northern Ireland Office also perform many of the functions which would otherwise be carried out by the Northern Ireland Assembly if it is not in operation. Even when the assembly is sitting, the role of the Secretary of State still exists, although his role and that of his ministers is greatly diminished.
As neither the Labour nor Conservative parties has ever won a UK parliamentary election in Northern Ireland since its inception, no Northern Ireland Office minister has ever represented a Northern Ireland constituency.

Secretaries of State (1972- present)

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Solid state disk
A solid state drive (SSD), or solid state disk, is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. SSD emulates conventional hard disk drive, thus easily replacing it in any application.
With no moving parts, a solid state drive largely eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.
While an SSD is not technically a disk, the term solid state disk emphasises its typical use as an alternative to a disk drive.

Architecture and function
However, this is not always the case, as explained below. Flash memory is organised in blocks which can be erased, written or read, but only as whole blocks. The access time is the same for each block. If one or more blocks are used as Access Unit (AU), fragmentation has no harmful effect on access speed. However, for high capacity flash memories the AU would be too big, causing a lot of wasted bytes due to unused space within allocated AU's. Hence, in these cases each block is split up in a number of AU's. Initially AU's will be used sequentially within blocks. So a file with a size of N blocks will use no more than N+2 blocks, the first and last block only partially. However, after some time a situation will occur where no block is available of which all AU's are free, so that one or more extra blocks are needed The result is that said file will need more than N+2 blocks and accessing more blocks takes more time. In the worst case only one AE per block is free and said file will need S*N blocks, where S is the number of AE's per block. The conclusion is that, with bigger flash memory, fragmentation has a detoriating effect on access time.

Faster startup - Since no spin-up required.
Far faster than conventional disks on random I/O
Extremely low read and write latency (seek) times, roughly 15 times faster than the best current mechanical disks.
Faster boot and application launch time when hard disk seeks are the limiting factor. See Amdahl's law.
In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime - Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000-300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distibuted over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,192 blocks, this gives about 9,500 days before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time
Relatively deterministic performance [8] - unlike mechanical hard drives, performance of SSDs is almost constant and deterministic across the entire storage. "Seek" time can be constant, and performance does not deteriorate as the media fills up (See: Fragmentation).
For very low-capacity drives, lower weight and size. Size and weight per unit storage are still better for traditional hard drives, and microdrives allow up to 20GB storage in a CompactFlash 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in) form factor. Advantages
Flash based SSDs also have several disadvantages:

Price - As of early 2007, flash memory prices are still considerably higher per gigabyte than those of comparable conventional hard drives - around US$8 per GB compared to about US$0.25 for mechanical drives.
Lower recoverability - After mechanical failure the data is completely lost as the cell is destroyed, while if normal HDD suffers mechanical failure the data is often recoverable using expert help. Subsequent investigations in to this field, however, have found that data can be recovered from SSD memory.
Vulnerability to certain types of effects, including abrupt power loss (especially DRAM based SSDs), magnetic fields and electric/static charges compared to normal HDDs (which store the data inside a Faraday cage).
Somewhat slower than conventional disks on sequential I/O, the latest perpendicular hard disks doing about 150 MB/s read, with the latest SSDs doing about 120 MB/s read. History of the solid state drive

Commercialization of solid state drives
Until recently, solid state disks were too costly for mobile computing. As flash manufacturers transition from NOR flash to single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash and most recently to multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash to maximize silicon die usage and reduce associated costs, "solid state disks" are now being more accurately renamed "solid state drives" - they have no disks but function as drives - for mobile computing in the enterprise and consumer electronics space. This technology trend is accompanied by an annual 50% decline in raw flash material costs while capacities continue to double at the same rate. As a result, flash-based solid state drives are becoming increasingly popular in markets such as notebook PCs and sub-notebooks for enterprises, Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC), and Tablet PCs for the healthcare and consumer electronics sectors.

Availability

RAM disk
Computer storage
Disk drive
Flash drive
Hybrid drive
Non-volatile memory
Random access memory
Semiconductor memory
USB flash drive
Volatile memory

Saturday, January 19, 2008

NexTag History
NexTag's original business model was an online negotiation site allowing consumers to name their own price for computer and electronics products.
NexTag abandoned this model in 2000 and focused on comparison shopping. NexTag pioneered the concept of calculating total price by using a zip code to compute tax and shipping charges, in addition to the product price (what NexTag calls TruePrice).

Recent Changes
NexTag was the top advertiser with 8.56 million impressions generated, passing usual No. 1 Experian Group Limited at 7.4 million. http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_11302.asp

Friday, January 18, 2008

Mixed media
Mixed media, in visual art, refers to an artwork in the making of which more than one medium has been employed.
There is an important distinctions between "mixed media" artworks and "multimedia art". Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct visual art media. For example, a work on paper or canvas that combines paint, ink, and collage could properly be called a "mixed media" work - but not a work of "multimedia art." The term multimedia art implies a broader scope than mixed media, combining visual art with non-visual elements (such as recorded sound, for example) or with elements of the other arts (such as literature, drama, dance, motion graphics, music, or interactivity).
When creating a painted or drawn work using mixed media it is important to choose the layers carefully and allow enough drying time between the layers to ensure the final work will have integrity. If many different media are used it is equally important to choose a sturdy foundation upon which the different layers are imposed. An old rule good to remember is "Fat over lean." In other words, don't start with oil paints. Plan to make them the final layer.
Many interesting effects can be achieved by using mixed media. Often, found objects are used in conjunction with traditional artist mediums, such as paints and graphite, to express a meaning in the everyday life. In this manner, many different elements of art become more flexible than with traditional artist mediums.

Thursday, January 17, 2008


Australia has a sophisticated and well developed insurance market.

Types of insurance
Life insurance products sold in Australia include Term life insurance, Disability Income insurance. Australian insurers are unusual in providing a lump sum Total and Permanent Disability insurance. Life insurers also sell superannuation investment products.

Insurance in Australia Life insurance
General insurance products sold in the Australian include:
Each Australian state has its own form of motor vehicle Compulsory Third Party insurance.
Worker's compensation, while strictly speaking is life insurance, has traditionally been provided by general insurance companies. This compulsory type insurance is subject to extensive state based regulation (including premium rating and reinsurance rules).

Casualty insurance such as Motor Vehicle and Public Liability Insurance;
Property insurance such as Home and Contents insurance. General insurance
Due to the Australian Government provided universal health insurance, Medicare, health insurance in Australia is limited to those services not covered by Medicare or to services provided in private hospitals.

Health Insurance
Life Insurers were traditionally mutual companies, but in the 1980s and 1990's many of them demutualised and with a few large exceptions are owned by banks. The large remaining insurers have become "financial services" organisations and now derive the majority of their revenue from superannuation investment products.
General Insurers have a more diverse ownership structure, with more stand alone independent general insurers (although some life insurers do own general insurers).
Health insurers are still predominantly mutuals. The notable exception is Medibank Private largest private health insurer in Australia which is owned by the Australian Government.

Industry structure
see main article Australian insurance law
The prudential aspects of insurance (solvency etc) are regulated by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority. Matters relating to advice or disclosure of insurance products sold are regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
The primary legislation is:

Life Insurance Act 1995 (Life Insurance)
Insurance Act 1973 (General Insurance)
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