February New Month Quotes

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

MR. BONES KNEW THAT WILLY WASN'T LONG FOR THIS WORLD. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn't a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorably, without once taking a turn for the better, the thing had assumed a life of its own, advancing from a faint, phlegm-filled rattle in the lungs on February third to the wheezy sputum-jigs and gobby convulsions of high summer. All that was bad enough, but in the past two weeks a new tonality had crept into the bronchial music - something tight and flinty and percussive - and the attacks came now so often as to be almost constant. Every time one of them started, Mr. Bones half expected Willy's body to explode from the rockets of pressure bursting agaisnt his rib cage. He figured that blood would be the next step and when that fatal moment finally occurred on Saturday afternoon, it was as if all the angels in heaven had opened their mouths and started to sing. Mr. Bones saw it happen with his own eyes, standing by the edge of the road between Washington and Baltimore as Willy hawked up a few miserable clots of red matter into his handkerchief, and right then and there he knew that every ounce of hope was gone. The smell of death had settled upon Willy G. Christmas, and as surely as the sun was a lamp in the clouds that went off and on everyday, the end was drawing near. What was a poor dog to do? Mr. Bones had been with Willy since his earliest days as a pup, and by now it was next to impossible to imagine a world that did not have his master in it. Every thought, every memory, every particle of the earth and air was saturated with Willy's presence. Habits die hard, and no doubt there's some truth to the adage about old dogs and new tricks, but it was more than just love or devotion that caused Mr. Bones to dread what was coming. It was pure ontological terror. Substract Willy from the world, and the odds were that the world itself would cease to exist.

Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance. Your politics were the same, most of the books you cared about were the same books, and you had familiar attitudes about what you wanted out of life: love, work, and children- with money and possessions far down on the list. Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was wormer than you were, and yet, all the way down at the bottom, at the nethermost point where you were joined together, you felt that you had met another version of yourself- but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being. You adored her, and for the first time in your life, the person you adored adored you back. You came from entirely different worlds, a young Lutheran girl from Minnesota and a not so young Jew from New York, but just two and a half months after your chance encounter on February twenty-third thirty years ago, you decided to move in together. Until then, every decision you had made about women had been a wrong decision- but not this one.

Wedding Superstitions The Bridal Gown White - You have chosen right. Grey - You'll go far away. Black - You'll wish yourself back. Red - You'll wish yourself dead. Green - Ashamed to be seen. Blue - You'll always be true. Pearl - You'll live in a whirl. Peach - A love out of reach. Yellow - Ashamed of your fellow. Pink - Your Spirits will sink. The Wedding Day Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday for no luck at all. The Wedding Month Marry in May, and you'll rue the day, Marry in Lent, you'll live to repent. Married when the year is new, He'll be loving, kind and true. When February birds do mate, You wed nor dread your fate. If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you'll know. Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and the man. Marry in the month of May, And you'll surely rue the day. Marry when the June roses grow, Over land and sea you'll go. Those who in July do wed, Must labour for their daily bread. Whoever wed in August be, Many a change is sure to see. Marry in September's shine, Your living will be rich and fine. If in October you do marry, Love will come, but riches tarry. If you wed in bleak November, Only joys will come, remember, When December's snows fall fast, Marry and true love will last. Married in January's roar and rime, Widowed you'll be before your prime. Married in February's sleepy weather, Life you'll tread in time together. Married when March winds shrill and roar, Your home will lie on a distant shore. Married 'neath April's changeful skies, A checkered path before you lies. Married when bees o'er May blossoms flit, Strangers around your board will sit. Married in month of roses June, Life will be one long honeymoon. Married in July with flowers ablaze, Bitter-sweet memories in after days. Married in August's heat and drowse, Lover and friend in your chosen spouse. Married in September's golden glow, Smooth and serene your life will go. Married when leaves in October thin, Toil and hardships for you begin. Married in veils of November mist, Fortune your wedding ring has kissed. Married in days of December's cheer, Love's star shines brighter from year to year

former minister of the interior, Pyotr Durnovo. Dated February 1914, five months before Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s assassination, it presciently warned of what might happen if Russia found itself dragged into a general war and lost. In that case, Durnovo wrote, “a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable for Russia.

In February 1957, Hoffa contacted a New York lawyer named John Cye Cheasty. Cheasty had been in the Navy and the Secret Service. His law practice had a subspecialty in conducting investigations. Hoffa told Cheasty that the committee was hiring investigators. If Cheasty would take a job with the committee and report on its activities to Hoffa there was $24,000 in cash in the deal for Cheasty at the rate of $2,000 a month for a year. Hoffa gave Cheasty a down payment of $1,000 for his expenses in getting the job. However, in his impatience, Hoffa had not sufficiently checked Cheasty out. This was an honest New York investigator and a patriot. Cheasty reported the bribery scheme straightaway. Bobby

One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order.

Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes’s northern Republican supporters. At Wormley’s Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new “redeemer” governments would be tolerated and “home rule” restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence of the so-called Wormley Conference has been greatly overstated, for it merely culminated months of bargaining and confirmed what was already clear: that Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction.

On Saturday, 28 February 1953, Josef Stalin invited four of his senior associates to the Kremlin: Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin.1 During the final six months of his life, Stalin and these four men constituted what was known as the “ruling group” or simply the “Five.” They met regularly in Stalin’s home. The leader’s other old friends—Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Kliment Voroshilov—were in disgrace, and he did not wish to see them.2 Assembling a small group of supporters to act as his right hand in ruling the country was a key element of Stalin’s modus operandi. He liked to name these groups according to the number of members: the Five (Piaterka), the Six (Shesterka), the Seven (Semerka), the Eight (Vos’merka), the Nine (Deviatka).

The humiliation and the sleepless nights. When I couldn’t breathe, because he didn’t reply. How I cried when I typed. I wrote to him when my puppy died, about the bully and the stalker. It was like a storm that took away January, February, and March. And when months were gone, I was all alone, trying to fix new and old scars. I was trying so hard to hide the stains, but they just got blue and dark. The letters I wrote and the messages I sent. I’m glad his reply never came. I wish he loses me without even having me. I wish he loses all of me, the clingy me, the needy me, the broken me, and also the happy me…and I suppose when he’ll lose all of me, I’ll forget him too. There’s one thing that is sadder than losing someone you’ve been waiting for all your life…it’s losing them, and not even realizing you had them. I wish, Siddhartha never reads the book and the songs and the letters…he doesn’t deserve them.

If you live in New York City, for example, chances are you will not be going outside for a leisurely stroll down Fifth Avenue in shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops in the month of February. Why is that? Because, if you’ve lived there for a while and experienced the local seasons, you’ve already identified that in February it will be pretty darn cold. To appropriately adapt, you will want to wear a heavy winter coat and maybe gloves and a scarf and earmuffs. It’s the same with the markets. You need to have “lived there for a while” and experienced a variety of market cycles so you know what “to wear,” or rather how to adapt, so that you are financially comfortable. Instead of knowing to wear a winter coat in February, you will know that in a choppy, sideways, bracketed market you need to adapt your system and rules so that you do not get whipsawed and stopped out a lot. Or you may need to recognize a bull market changing to a bear market so that you can exit your position in a timely fashion to lock in profits.

The problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself. Anything can be used. Télémaque. Or a prayer or a song that the child or the ignorant one knows by heart. There is always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of comparison, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related. The locksmith who opens his eyes wide when told he can read bears witness to this. He doesn’t even know the alphabet. Let him take the time to glance at the calendar. Doesn’t he know the order of the months and can’t he thus figure out January, February, March. He knows how to count a little. And what’s to prevent him from counting softly while following the lines in order to recognize in written form what he already knows? He knows he is called William and that his birthday is January 16th. He will soon know how to find the word. He knows that February has only twenty-eight days. He sees that one column is shorter than the others and he will recognize “28.” And so on. There is always something that the master can ask him to find, something about which he can question him and thus verify the work of his intelligence.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at the University of Central Missouri, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990 and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks. Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sports and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 percent to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team. Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear. Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

Nearly three years later, on February 8, 2011, a confidential letter came to light. It was from EPA Administrator Johnson to President Bush himself. Dated January 31, 2008 (a month after the Bali conference ended), the letter urged action to find endangerment, arguing: [T]he Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision still requires a response. That case combined with the latest science of climate change requires the Agency to propose a positive endangerment finding…. [T]he state of the latest climate change science does not permit a negative finding, nor does it permit a credible finding that we need to wait for more research.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

On Thursday, February 19, 2015, two months after the United States and Cuba announced a willingness to re-establish normal diplomacy, after over 5 decades of hostile relations, the United States House Minority leader and eight fellow Democratic Party lawmakers went to Havana to meet with the Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel. On February 27th, Cuban Foreign Ministry Director for North America, Josefina Vidal, and her delegation met at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Although most Cubans and many Americans have a positive view towards improving diplomatic relations, there are conservative legislators in both the U.S. House and Senate that have not joined in the promotion and necessary détente and good will in easing the normalization of relations between the two countries. On May 29, 2015, by Executive Order, President Obama took a first step by removing Cuba from the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” Since then President Trump has been determined to overturn most of what has been passed by the former administration. On June 16, 2017 President Trump moved to reverse many of President Obama’s policies towards Cuba. According to the CATO Institute the alleged justification for this reversal is that it will pressure the Cuban government to make concessions on human rights and political policies towards the Island Nation. Apparently Trump’s new restrictions will impose limits on travel and how U.S. Companies will be able to do business in Cuba. Although the final say regarding the normalization between the two countries is in the hands of politicians representing their various constituencies. The United States has long worked and traded with other Communist nations. Recently additional pressure has been applied by corporations that, quite frankly, are fed up with the slowness of the process. The idea that everything hinges on the fact Cuba is a Communist country, run by a dictatorship, does not take into account the plight of the individual Cuban citizens. The United States may wish for a different government; however it is up to Cuba to decide what form of government they will eventually have.

On February 1, 1906, Leavenworth received its first inmate, John Grindstone, a Native American convicted of murder. He was paroled a few years later, but returned to the Hot House within months for killing another man. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the prison and achieved another first by being buried in the first plot of a new pauper cemetery on a hill a half mile from the penitentiary. Officially called Mount Hope, the prison’s cemetery is still used today, although it is better known as Peckerwood Hill, the tag given it by convicts and guards. By the early 1900s, the government had

In the evening, she took a sleeping pill. As the months passed, she became much kinder to me than she had been, but her new solicitude had an impersonal quality, as if she were tending a homeless man on the street rather than her husband. She stopped sleeping in Matt's bed and returned to ours, but I rarely joined her, choosing instead to sleep in my chair. One night in February, I woke up to find Erica covering me with a blanket. Rather than opening my eyes, I pretended that I was still asleep. When she put her lips to my head, I imagined pulling her toward me and kissing her neck and shoulders, but I didn't do it. At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish: I will not be comforted. As perverse as it was, this desire felt like a lifeline, the only shred of truth left to me. I feel quite sure that Erica knew what I felt, and in March she announced a change.

Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak. Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues. To save a lot of money, go against the grain. Mexico Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common. San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues. Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there. Chicago, Illinois Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza. Colombia Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee. The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD. In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable. Tennessee's Music City There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January. New York City, New York Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities. Canada Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway. In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling. The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

On the day the hulk was towed away from Asbury Park, George White Rogers opened a radio-repair shop in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was the first time he had worked in some months. Customers found Rogers a bombastic shopkeeper, fond of telling them how lucky they were to have their radio sets mended by him. His business dropped off. One day in February 1935, Rogers left the shop “to get a breath of air.” Shortly afterward it caught fire. Bayonne police files reveal: “An inventory made by Rogers disclosed equipment had suffered damage to the extent of $1200. Arson was suspected. But no proof existed to warrant an arrest. He collected from the insurance company.

new currency to replace the bankrupt Reichsmark in February 1948 led the following month to a dramatic walkout by the Soviet delegation at the Allied Control Council, which had governed Germany since the end of the war. The Russians had intentionally debased and over-circulated the Reichsmark by excessive printing, deliberately reducing the German population to penury, until bartering with cigarettes and the black market underpinned their economy. The introduction by the West of the new Deutschmark in June subsequently brought the hostility of the negotiating table out into the open. On June 16, Colonel Yelizarkov, the deputy to the commander of the Soviet Sector, withdrew from the Four Power Kommandatura [the governing body of Berlin].

two months before the release of MAP OF THE SOUL: PERSONA by ARMYPEDIAa, b a kind of treasure hunt hosted by Big Hit Entertainment as a special treat for ARMY. Jumbotron teasers were shown in Seoul, New York, LA, Tokyo, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, and ARMY around the world looked for 2,080 puzzle pieces scattered across the globe and the Internet to piece together. The number 2,080 refers to the 2,080 days from BTS’s debut on June 13, 2013, to February 21, 2019—when ARMYPEDIA was revealed—meaning each piece of the puzzle was a day in the life of BTS itself.

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them.

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them. One of the husband’s best friends abducted and tortured him and beat his wife. “[One] should have the freedom to choose the religion one wishes to follow,” lamented the husband.36

The yearly cycle of Sakha subsistence related to the natural environment is apparent in their calendar. The new year begins in May, or the month of fish spawning (Yam). June is Bes, or pine, July is Ot, or grass, August is Atyrd'akh, or rake, and September is Balagan, a style of Sakha house. Grass and rakes are, of course, references to grass cutting subsistence practices, while balagan are the traditional wooden houses that the Sakha use during the winter, as opposed to uraha, which are cone-shaped white birch houses used in summer. The names for October, November, December, January, and February are Altynn'y, Setinn'l, Akhsynn'y, Tokhsunn'u, and Olunn'u. These mean, respectively, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months counting from the new year in May. The spring months of March and April are called Kulun Tutar and Muus Ustar, or the months of foals and flowing ice, respectively. These are references to the rush of foal births and the thawing of the Lena River. In actuality, foals are not born until April and drift ice does not appear until May. Although these last two months show a slight delay between events and names, the calendar indicates how the Sakha engage in pastoralism, grass cutting, and fishing activities throughout the year. It is also interesting that the winter months between October and February are given simple numeric names.

It was Micky Newman, the 34-year-old son of Ben’s partner Jerome, who talked him out of it. Micky was more optimistic about the excess inventory P&R had piled up. Moreover, he saw an opportunity to apply some high finance to this industrial company. “Ben wanted to sell at a loss, but we persuaded him not to because I could see some big pluses,” Micky later said. “I could see a huge potential tax loss due to abandonment of deep mines, and in addition, P&R coal had piled up small and unusual amounts of coal.”157 In early 1955, P&R reported a $7.3 million loss for 1954, $5.3 million of which was attributable to write-offs related to the abandonments of mines.158 The big loss gave the Baltimore/Graham-Newman group a chance to increase its control over the company’s corporate governance: Hyland’s broker, Benjamin Palmer, joined the board in February, and Micky Newman joined him three months later. Along with Ben Graham himself, the Baltimore and Graham-Newman shareholder group now controlled three of nine board seats. As a sign of things to come, P&R changed its name and amended its charter to allow the organization to engage in activities other than coal mining. The company dropped the reference to coal from its name, transitioning from the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company to the Philadelphia and Reading Corporation.159 Micky took the initiative to transform the company. His plan was to use the cash P&R generated from liquidating its excess inventory to acquire profitable businesses, whose income would be shielded from future taxes by P&R’s existing tax loss position.

February 8: Newcomb calls Rizzo to postpone the shoot. Marilyn was tired and planning to move into her new home soon, Newcomb explains. But another appointment is set for the next afternoon. Marilyn’s Brentwood home is purchased with a fifteen-year mortgage at 6.5 percent interest, with payments of $320 a month. Marilyn arranges to have a new kitchen built for $1,393.46.

In the intervening thirty years since Sadat’s death at the hands of Jihadists, thousands of terror attacks have occurred in nations across the globe. Two years after Sadat’s death the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was bombed, killing 63. Six were killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993. The next month, 250 civilians died in the attacks on Bombay, India.  A year later, three members of the Armed Islamic Group hijacked Air France flight 8969 in Algiers, killing seven. In 1996 the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force airmen living in the towers.

According to the Treaty of Versailles, the post World War I German Navy was only permitted to have six light cruisers. One of these was the Emden, with a length of over 508 feet and a draft of 17 feet 5 inches. She was launched on January 7, 1925 and commissioned over nine months later on October 15, 1925. The light cruiser had a standard displacement of 5,400 tons, and was the only ship ever constructed in her class. She was built by the Reichsmarine shipbuilding company in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. As a new ship the Emden became the German Navy’s training ship and conducted several world cruises to train future naval officers. In September of 1934, Kapitan Karl Dönitz, the future commander of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, took command of the ship and remained her master until the following year. The Emden visited Cape Town in December of 1934 and was there for the Christmas celebration at the Cape Town German Club, described on page 30 of “Suppressed I Rise.” It was then that Adeline danced with the renowned Captain Dönitz, who would later replace the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, as the head of state in Germany. The cruiser Emden was severely damaged by British bombers in February of 1945. On May 3, 1945, the Germans scuttled the ship, to prevent her from being captured by the Allies. Ultimately in 1949, the ship was taken for scrap. Her bow ornament is still on display at the popular Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?

Marcos explained that our bodies were designed to change and it isn't possible to be stagnant. He showed me a slide of himself at the beginning of the year and of the new lines on his face that had deepened since. He said our interaction with each other, with the outside world, and with intangible elements such as time made us different people every season. His conclusion was that the human body displayed physical evidence that we are not the same person we were when we were kids, or even a season before. He said we think we are the same person, but we aren't. 'People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't.' For instance, Marcos said, 'The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly ever cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February,' he told me. I thought about Marcos's conclusions and wondered [...] if he wasn't right, that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.

If I could be God for a day, I would instantly replace July and August with two Septembers so the twelve months of the new calendar year would consist of January, February, March, April, May, June, September, September, September, October, November, December. On second thought, I'd also replace December with another September, thus deleting the Mas season and ending the year with a fourth September. The Mas season, once known as Christmas until we took Christ out of it, leaving only mas, the Spanish word for more, is my least favorable month of the year because of the greed-mandated financial, emotional and spiritual stresses that the economy-dependent celebration of Mas imposes.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

By late February 1609, three months before the new charter was signed by King James I, Pedro de Zúñiga, a savvy Spanish spy on the lookout for unusual activity in the capital, knew of England’s plans to strengthen and resupply the Jamestown settlement. He sent a series of frantic warnings to his monarch, King Philip III.

But she could make one decision- to change her environment. And if she could change her environment, she would be subject to a whole different set of cues and unconscious cultural influences. It's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment and then let the new cues do the work. She spent the first part of eighth grade learning about the Academy, talking to students, asking her mother, and quizzing her teachers. One day in February, she heard that the board of the school had arrived for a meeting, and she decided in her own junior-warrior manner that she'd demand that they let her in. She snuck into the school when a group of kids came out the back door for gym class, and she made her way to the conference room. She knocked, and entered the room. There was a group of tables pushed toward the middle of the room, with about twenty-five adults sitting around the outside of them. The two Academy founders were sitting in the middle on the far side of the tables. "I would like to come to your school," she said loud enough for the whole room to hear. "How did you get in here?" somebody at the table barked. "May I please come to your school next year?" One of the founders smiled. "You see, we have a lottery system. If you enter your name, there is a drawing in April-" "I would like to come to your school," Erica interrupted, launching into the speech she had rehearsed in her head for months. "I tried to get into New Hope when I was ten, and they wouldn't let me. I went down to the agency and I told the lady, but she wouldn't let me. It took them three cops to get me out of there, but I'm thirteen now, and I've worked hard. I get good grades. I know appropriate behavior. I feel I deserve to go to your school. You can ask anyone. I have references." She held out a piece of binder paper with teachers' names on it. "What's your name?" the founder asked. "Erica." "You see, we have rules about this. Many people would like to come to the Academy, so we decided the fairest thing to do is to have a lottery each spring." "That's just a way of saying no." "You'll have as fair a chance as anyone." "That's just a way of saying no. I need to go to the Academy. I need to go to college." Erica had nothing more to say. She just stood there silently. She decided it would take some more cops to take her away. Sitting across from the founders was a great fat man. He was a hedge-fund manager who had made billions of dollars and largely funded the school. He was brilliant, but had the social graces of a gnat. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote something on a piece of paper. He looked at Erica one more time, folded the paper, and slid it across the table to the founders. They opened it up and read the note. It said, "Rig the fucking lottery." The founders were silent for a moment and looked at each other. Finally, one of them looked up and said in a low voice. "What did you say your name was?" "Erica." "Listen, Erica, at the Academy we have rules. We have one set of rules for everybody. Those rules we follow to the letter. We demand discipline. Total discipline. So I'm only going to say this to you once. If you ever tell anybody about bursting in here and talking to us like that, I will personally kick you out of our school. Are we clear about that?" "Yes, sir." "The write your name and address on a piece of paper. Put it on the table and I will see you in September".

LOW: Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC) In its simplest form, CAC is all the costs associated with landing new customers (e.g., marketing, advertising, sales) divided by the number of customers you acquired during that period. It’s sometimes tricky to calculate because getting a handle on your marketing costs can be tricky. If you’re focusing on SEO, you may be creating all the content yourself rather than paying a writer. You may be getting a lot of your early customers from forums you spend time on or by getting in front of other people’s audiences. In those cases, the cost is your time rather than an easy-to-calculate number. It’s a lot simpler to calculate CAC if you’re running ads. Then, you can see how much you’re paying per click and track how many people convert from each source. But if you’re not in that position, valuing your time at a certain rate (e.g., $150 an hour) and taking your best guess at time and money spent on marketing in a given month can get you to a good enough estimate of your CAC. How do you know if your CAC is too high? By calculating how long it’ll take to pay back the costs of acquiring each customer. As I was first getting into recurring revenue, I thought that if I was getting $1,000 in LTV from each customer, I could spend $700 to acquire every customer and make $300 a pop. Right? The problem is that you’re not getting $1,000 every time you sign a new customer. With a $50-a-month contract, you’re getting that $1,000 over the course of the next year and a half. If you spend $700 per new customer in January, you won’t break even on those customer acquisition costs until next February (assuming the customer doesn’t churn). With venture capital, the rule of thumb is that you should spend no more than one-third of your customer’s LTV or no more than one ACV. As bootstrappers, we don’t have enough cash to wait 12 months to recoup CAC from every customer. Most successful bootstrappers I know are in the two- to six-month payback period (depending on how much cash they have in the bank). There are times when that number can get more aggressive. For example, at our peak with Drip, we could afford to spend more on customer acquisition because we had the cash in the bank and I knew the numbers in the rest of our funnel by heart. Even at our peak, though, we were only running seven or eight months out—that’s the high end for bootstrapped companies.

Biden went along. “You and I have spent a substantial amount of time together, and that’s fairly rare in modern diplomacy,” he told Xi in Los Angeles a few days later. Biden, by his own estimate, had spent some twenty hours in the previous six months conversing with Xi directly—both in the United States that February and in Beijing and Chengdu the summer before. Those long, private, frank conversations, Biden would say, were the highlight of his trip.

President Clinton's ‘Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill’ was introduced into Congress in February of 1995, two months BEFORE the bombing, and was having difficulty passing as what was in it was a throwback to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany. This is when the real

JD was born in Poland in 1894. When he was eighteen years old, he immigrated to the United States, where he worked in a ball-bearing factory. In August 1940, a severe form of lymphoma invaded the entire right side of his neck. He could barely open his mouth, turn his head, swallow, or sleep. In February 1941, he was referred to the Yale Medical Center for radiation therapy. After two weeks of daily radiation, he improved. But the improvement was short-lived. By August 1942, he had trouble breathing, couldn’t eat, and had lost a substantial amount of weight. On August 27 at 10 a.m., JD became the first person in history to receive a medicine to treat cancer. Every day, for ten consecutive days, he received an injection of nitrogen mustard. After the fifth dose, his tumor regressed; finally, he was able to move his head and eat. One month later, however, his tumor came back, necessitating another three-day course of nitrogen mustard; again, the response was short-lived. So, he received a six-day course, without effect. On December 1, 1942, ninety-six days after he had received his first dose of nitrogen mustard, JD died. Because this was a covert operation run by the OSRD, the phrase “nitrogen mustard” never appeared in his medical chart. Instead, doctors referred to it as “substance X.” The first paper describing nitrogen mustard’s effects on cancer wasn’t published until 1946, four years after JD was treated. On October 6, 1946, the New York Times, under the headline “War Gases Tried in Cancer Therapy,” wrote, “The possibility that deadly blister gases prepared for wartime use may aid victims of cancer will be investigated by the Army Chemical Corps’ Medical Division.” Nitrogen mustard had provided the first ray of hope in the fight against cancer. The modern age of chemotherapy had begun.

On May 28, 1987, Judge Michael Tynan set September 30 for the trial, warning the Hernandezes to be ready. On September 11, the Hernandezes again requested a delay of a few months, citing the prosecution’s failure to turn over items the defense needed to plot strategy and plan defense. Tynan refused to give them six months and set trial for February 1, 1988, only to grant another delay before then because the Hernandezes appealed to the district court of appeals to get certain evidence the prosecution was refusing to give the defense—namely, crime-scene photographs. On January 19, Tynan announced that the state court had granted a last-minute request by the Hernandezes for the state to turn over the evidence the defense wanted. On the twenty-fifth, he set March 22 for the trial date because of the uncertainty surrounding the appellate ruling. On March 16, the defense asked for yet another delay to review the new material they’d gotten as a result of the appellate decision, which Tynan granted, making April 29 the date for trial. Again, on the twenty-ninth, the defense asked for a delay, citing the huge amount of work as reason they weren’t ready. Tynan then scheduled June 30 for trial, but on June 21, the defense filed a motion to exclude Tynan, citing him as being racially biased against the defense, a tactic expected to buy more time. On July 8, Orange County Superior Court presiding judge Philip E. Cox ruled that Tynan was not biased. Finally, on July 21, 1988, jury selection began, and the battle began in earnest.

Few could dispute Esther Ross’s claim that the Arizona was a cutting-edge weapon of its day. The behemoth was built to project American power and counter any aggressor on the high seas. Battleships made completely of steel were themselves relatively new. America’s earliest were the Texas and the Maine, commissioned within a month of each other in 1895. Barely over three hundred feet in length and displacing only sixty-seven hundred tons, they in retrospect have been termed coastal defense battleships or, in the case of the Maine, a mere armored cruiser. The Maine blew up under mysterious circumstances in Havana Harbor, Cuba, in February 1898, and its sinking became a rallying cry during the subsequent Spanish-American War. Short-lived though the war was, it underscored the importance of a battleship Navy. In one storied episode, the two-year-old battleship Oregon raced from the Pacific coast of California all the way around Cape Horn and into the Atlantic to take part in the Battle of Santiago off Cuba. It was a bold display of sea power, but the roundabout nature of the voyage set thirty-nine-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt to thinking about the need for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. By 1900, the United States Navy floated five battleships and had seven more under construction. Beginning with the Indiana (BB-1), commissioned at the end of 1895, they were each given the designation “BB” for battleship and a number, usually in chronological order from the date when their keels were laid down. Save for the anomaly of the Kearsarge (BB-5), all bore the names of states.

Agriculture determined this yearly cycle, which would make March an excellent choice for the start of a new year. The god Mars gave the month its name. This Mars, however, was not the god of war but the divine guardian of fields.9 Yet ancient sources also declare that January was, since earliest times, the year’s 1st month. The easiest explanation would be that a 12-month solar cycle was grafted onto a 10-month seasonal system, which itself might have replaced a lunar system of marking time.10 The 2 months that were introduced were January and February, by first assigning them to eleventh and twelfth position and later moving them to first and second place. The original introduction happened in the sixth century BCE when Rome was in Etruscan hands, and the later change occurred in 153 BCE at the latest, when the beginning of the new and civil year was moved from the Ides of March to the Kalends of January.

Bank Stolichny, which would become the core of Smolensky’s business for the next decade, was registered on February 14, 1989, eight months before the Berlin Wall fell.

England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May - that is, in every month when warmth matters.

Time ran out on Hamilton’s military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left him stranded in an awkward situation. Napoleon’s coup marked the end of the French Revolution and thereby weakened the case for military preparations against a country that the Federalists had identified with Jacobinism.52 Hamilton saw his vision of a brand-new army evaporate:

President Clinton's ‘Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill’ was introduced into Congress in February of 1995, two months BEFORE the bombing, and was having difficulty passing as what was in it was a throwback to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany. This is when the real New World Order Police State began to come out of the shadows.

example to view the destroyed parts of the city with his own eyes. As far as “retribution” was concerned, the Führer intended to resume massive air attacks on London after Christmas. He was more optimistic, however, about the potential effect of Germany’s new flying bombs and missiles, which would first be deployed in February and March 1944. After a certain time, he vowed, life in London would “no longer be possible.”141 But the German V-1 and V-2 rockets would take several months longer than that to be deployable, and when they were ready, they would not have anywhere near the destructive power the Nazi leadership had hoped.

For two thousand years, maybe more, the ceremonies had been celebrated every autumn in the small town of Eleusis near Athens, becoming more famous and elaborate with the passing years. By Roman times, the mystery temple at Eleusis was a huge building half the size of a foot- ball field, and people came there from the far corners of the ancient world. All new initiates had to go through preliminary ceremonies at the river Ilissos in the month of Anthesterion, our February, in which they offered sacrifices, cleansed them- selves in the water, and listened to instruction. A year and a half later, in Boedromion (our September), they marched to Eleusis, arriving at dusk. They entered the temple, and the ceremony of initiation was enacted. No one today knows what it was, but ancient writers agreed that those who passed through it had no fear of death afterward.

Dinnertime brought a big announcement from Mom and Dad. “How would you like to have a new baby brother or sister in six months?” I didn’t have to think twice. I got off my chair and started laughing and jumping up and down, dancing with my little sister, Linda, who didn’t understand, but it sure made me happy so that had to be a good thing. Janet Elise, (named for my Grandma whose name is Elisa), arrived on a cold day in February on the 25th, 1954. I had just turned six years old two days before Christmas and she was like a birthday present that arrived two months late. I was too young to remember Linda being born, so this was a brand new fantastic experience for a little girl who loved every one of her dolls and put them all to bed with great care every night.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.