Often benches are simply called after the place they are used, regardless whether this implies a specific design Garden benches are very similar to public park benches set outdoors, but the former offer usually only two or three -, the latter mostly up to five persons sitting places. Picnic tables, or catering buffet tables have long benches as well as a table. These tables may have table legs which are collapsible, in order to expedite transport and storage. Church pews inside places of worship are equipped with an additional kneeling bench.

Various types of benches are specifically designed for and/or named after specific uses, such as a Bench (weight training) is used for fitness exercises, such as the bench press which is named after its use of a bench a Communion bench is not used as a seat Piano benches offer usually one person seating and are height adjustable. a spanking bench, such as a caning bench, is specifically designed for a spankee to lie upon, possibly strapped down, while submitting to paining of the posterior Swing seats are independently movable, suspended benches, used for play or as a relaxing porch swing. a courting bench (or kissing bench, or tête-à-tête): a two-seater with the seats pointing in opposite directions, thus almost facing each other. A friendship bench in a school playground is where a child can go when they want someone to talk to. The bench in a courtroom, behind which the judge is seated.

Garden Chairs

JERUSALEM – The Israeli government will remove references to what the Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the country's education minister said Wednesday.
The reference to "al-naqba" or catastrophe, what the Palestinian's call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948 creation, was controversially inserted by a dovish education minister for the first time in 2007.
The phrase remains contentious six decades after Israel was founded.
"No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel's parliament on Wednesday.
"What will you do to a teacher who addresses the class and begins to explain what happened to the family of a child who asks?" Ahmad Tibi, an Arab Israeli lawmaker, asked Saar in parliament.
Teachers will be free to discuss the personal and national tragedies that befell Palestinians during the war, said Saar, who represents the hardline governing Likud Party. But textbooks will be revised to remove the term, he added.
The decision applied to a third-grade textbook for Arab schoolchildren. Jewish textbooks make no mention of the term.
When former education minister Yuli Tamir introduced the term, some hardline Israelis accused her of making Israel look like it was apologizing for its own existence.
Tamir "is expressing a sort of political masochist spirit and ... a total lack of national pride," Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at the time. Lieberman is now Israel's foreign minister.
Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said Saar's decision showed insecurity.
"Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident. We need not be afraid of a word," Sarid said.
The 1948 war saw Arab nations invade the newly founded Jewish country after a United Nations decision to partition the British-controlled territory of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish forces won, seizing territories beyond what the U.N. had alloted to it, while Egypt and Jordan took what was left of the territories the U.N. intended for a Palestinian state for themselves.
More than 700,000 Palestinians are thought to have fled or been expelled from areas that came under Israeli control.
Official Israeli histories of the country's establishment, especially those written for schoolchildren, have typically focused on the heroism of Israeli forces and glossed over the Palestinian flight, attributing the mass exile to voluntary escape if mentioning it at all.
In recent years, several Israeli historians have published books claiming that while many Palestinians did flee of their own accord, many others were forced from their homes as fighting raged and then never allowed back because the nascent Jewish state feared it would be swamped by refugees.
Palestinians demand the right to repatriate the surviving refugees and more than 4 million descendants to their original homes in Israel.
Israel rejects the demand, saying the refugees should receive compensation and be resettled where they now live or in a Palestinian state.
The Arabs who remained inside Israel now make up about 20 percent of the country's population of 7.3 million.

NEW YORK – Evil kids: Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em.
Well, actually, you can. Unless they kill you first.
Ever since Patty McCormack's sickeningly sweet murderess Rhoda Penmark in "The Bad Seed" in the mid-'50s, the horror movie subgenre featuring inherently wicked children has been scaring people no matter their age.
Now along comes "Orphan," starring Isabelle Fuhrman as Esther, who would be a formidable foe for Damien from "The Omen" movies, those shiny-eyed towheads from "Village of the Damned" or glowering little Billy from "The Twilight Zone," who controls everyone with his telepathic wishes.
Esther comes across as the near perfect child, with her politeness, painting and piano playing — until she smashes a bird's head with a rock and forces a nun to drive off a snowy road, just for starters.
The most recent film in the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," invokes the evil-child theme as well. It features flashbacks to the childhood of young Tom Riddle, who would go on to become the dark Lord Voldemort; even when Tom was a student at Hogwarts, it was obvious to his professors that he was powerful in a potentially dangerous way.
Evil-kid movies are revered enough that they've received the highest form of flattery: being sent up by other movies and TV shows, including "The Simpsons." And "Family Guy" offers up a regular character: matricidal little Stewie, who wanted to kill Lois for the longest time.
Besides their imitators, such films have their antecedents as well, Seton Hall University film professor Christopher Sharrett points out. All of them build on the "increasing disbelief in the idea of innocence," he says.
"You see the idea in `Angels with Dirty Faces,' the Dead End Kids, and in the postwar years, the teenpic or `juvenile delinquent' film of the Cold War that poses the teenager as internal threat to adult values," Sharrett explains.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, a University of Nebraska film professor who's written about evil children in film, says the enduring appeal of demon children in horror films is the fear of the unknown.
"Children are seen as `blank slates' to a degree, and also as essentially `unknowable,' because they live in a world very different from the adult world, in which fantasy and reality intermingle," he says. "Parents wonder what their children will become, and while they wish the best for them, they often feel as if they have no control over them. It is this essential lack of knowledge, and the fear that the children have a secret world which adults can't enter, which drives our fear of childhood as a separate domain."
Josh Heuman of Texas A&M University suggests that the movies play "on the dirty little secret that kids aren't sweet and innocent, and the anxiety that it provokes."
"They're little monsters, and not necessarily in the affectionate sense," Heuman says. "I'm thinking of my wonderful 2-year-old's outlandish force of will, and then the `It's a Good Life' episode of `The Twilight Zone.' Billy is hyperbole, but not unrealism or irony!"
Yes, even in real life, the little dickens can frighten you.
Dixon notes that Rhoda in "The Bad Seed" was the first mainstream demon child, but the trope really took off with the 1960 British science fiction film "Village of the Damned" and the sequel "Children of the Damned," in which a mysterious force impregnates all the women villagers simultaneously.
"They simply want to dominate adults, and destroy them if they thwart their plans," he says. "In a way, this can be seen as a reaction to the nascent rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s — when American youth culture was first firmly established, along with the rise of rock 'n' roll, as a perceived threat to then normative postwar values."
Children were easier to control before the advent of television, which exposed them to "the secret playbook of the adult world," says Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication at Purdue University, citing a 1986 analysis by Joshua Meyrowitz in the book "No Sense of Place."
Before television, society was relatively well-defined by widely shared social boundaries, Meyrowitz argued. But when TV took hold in the 1950s, one of the medium's most profound effects was to break down those well-established boundaries.

The playbook was no longer effective.

"Orphan" screenwriter David Leslie Johnson says he loved the evil-child horror subgenre ever since he saw "The Bad Seed" — which did seem like a revelation in the mid-20th century.

"If you look at the other movies that were coming out at that time, it's like the movie came from outer space. There was nothing out there like it."

And it was so horrifying, that the filmmakers — forced somewhat by the Hollywood code that crime should never pay — gave it a deus ex machina ending so Rhoda doesn't get away with murder. (In the original book and Broadway play, she does.)

In many of these films, the father is absent or bamboozled by his precious prince or princess; it's left to the mother to come to the slow, horrifying realization about her offspring.

"Orphan" is similar: Vera Farmiga's character — troubled by alcoholism, a miscarriage and guilt over the near death of her deaf daughter — figures out there's something wrong with Esther. Peter Sarsgaard as the father doubts his wife because of her past unreliability and is quite taken in by his newly adopted child.

"There's just something really primal in that mother-child relationship," Johnson says, "so I felt like that was really the best relationship to exploit and corrupt, to take what should be the most natural bond in the world and turn them into enemies."

Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, has an explanation. Invoking "Rosemary's Baby," and the "Alien" franchise, she says: "In our culture, women in films are sexual or maternal. I wish we had moved beyond this dichotomy, but I can't say we have."

And then, Pramaggiore says, there's the "child as replica issue."

"They are born having inherited things from others and yet they are their own people," she says.

Johnson can relate to Pramaggiore's point. The screenwriter's wife is pregnant with their first child, and he's reading various books to prepare. The tomes impart a sense of mortality, he says, adding:

"It's a little bit of `Body Snatchers.' They look somewhat like you and even act a bit like you and eventually, they come to replace you."

Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite near Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. The locals found that it was very useful for marking sheep. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. This was and remains the only large scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for "lead ore"). The black core of pencils is still referred to as "lead," even though it never contained the element lead.

As well as simply being distinctive, the colour may have been inspired by the Austro-Hungarian flag; it was also suggestive of the Orient, at a time when the best-quality graphite came from Siberia. Other companies then copied the yellow colour so that their pencils would be associated with this high-quality brand, and chose brand names with explicit Oriental references, such as Mikado (renamed Mirado) and Mongol.

http://www.logosurfing.com/promotional-items/pens-pencils-&-highlighters/pencils/

BANGKOK – On her second trip to Asia as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton is carrying a no-nonsense message about American intentions.
"The United States is back," she declared Tuesday upon arrival in the Thai capital.
By that she means the administration of President Barack Obama thinks it's time to show Asian nations that the United States is not distracted by its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and intends to broaden and deepen its partnerships in this region.
Clinton was trumpeting that line Wednesday in an appearance with a prominent TV personality before flying to a seaside resort at Phuket for two days of international meetings to discuss North Korea, Myanmar and a range of other regional issues.
Clinton says she would, as previously announced, sign ASEAN's seminal Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, a commitment to peacefully resolve regional disputes that has already been signed by more than a dozen countries outside the 10-nation bloc.
The U.S. signing will be by the executive authority of Obama and does not require congressional ratification, said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the move publicly.
The administration of President George W. Bush had declined to sign the document; Obama sees it as a symbolic underscoring of the U.S. commitment to Asia.
On her arrival here Tuesday, Clinton reiterated Obama administration concerns that North Korea, already a threat to the U.S. and its neighbors with its history of illicit sales of missiles and nuclear technology, is now developing ties to Myanmar's military dictatorship.
Clinton held out the possibility of offering North Korea a new set of incentives to return to negotiating a dismantling of its nuclear program if it shows a "willingness to take a different path." But she admitted there is little immediate chance of that.
A Clinton aide said the United States and its allies are looking for a commitment by North Korea that would irreversibly end its nuclear weapons program. The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. government deliberations, said there is no sign that North Korea intends to make such a move, keeping the U.S. focus on enforcing expanded U.N. sanctions.
In her remarks about a possible Myanmar-North Korea connection, Clinton did not refer explicitly to a nuclear link but made clear that the ties are disconcerting.
"We know there are also growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma which we take very seriously," she said at a news conference in the Thai capital.
"It would be destabilizing for the region, it would pose a direct threat to Burma's neighbors," she said, adding that as a treaty ally of Thailand, the United States takes the matter seriously.
Later, a senior administration official said that Washington is concerned about the possibility that North Korea could be cooperating with Myanmar on a nuclear weapons program, but he added that U.S. intelligence information on this is incomplete. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter.
The United States, in a joint effort with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, is attempting to use U.N. sanctions as leverage to compel North Korea to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. A major element of the international concern about North Korea is the prospect of nuclear proliferation, which could lead to a nuclear arms race in Asia and beyond.
Clinton spoke to reporters after meeting with Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva at the outset of a three-day visit to Thailand.
Clinton sharply criticized the military rulers of Myanmar for human rights abuses, "particularly violent actions that are attributed to the Burmese military concerning the mistreatment and abuse of young girls."
She said an Obama administration policy review on Myanmar is on hold pending the outcome of the trial of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is accused of violating the terms of her house arrest. The Noble Peace Prize laureate faces up to five years in prison if convicted, as expected.

In Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to renew sanctions aimed at penalizing the the country's ruling junta. The resolution approving the reauthorization of the sanctions now goes to the Senate for consideration.

The resolution renews sanctions targeting imports from Myanmar and also maintains a ban on importing jade and other gems from Myanmar. The legislation was first enacted in 2003.

CHICAGO – Carlos Pena's sacrifice fly off Bobby Jenks capped a two-run ninth, and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Chicago White Sox 3-2 Tuesday night.
Late rallies are becoming the norm for the Rays, who swept Kansas City with three come-from-behind wins before falling short in Monday's 4-3 loss to Chicago. They loaded the bases in the ninth inning of that game but did not score against Jenks.
This time, trailing 2-1, they came through.
They had the bases loaded with none out against Jenks (2-3) when Pat Burrell walked to force in Jason Bartlett with the tying run. Pena drove in Evan Longoria with a sacrifice fly to right, making it 3-2 and sending the Rays to their fourth win in five games.
J.P. Howell allowed a leadoff single to A.J. Pierzynski in the bottom half, but he struck out Carlos Quentin and Jayson Nix before retiring Gordon Beckham on a grounder to the mound for his 10th save in 15 chances.
The late rally made a winner of Jeff Niemann (9-4) and spoiled an outstanding start by Chicago's Clayton Richard, who allowed just four hits over a career-high eight innings.
Niemann, coming off a seven-hit shutout of Oakland, was impressive again. He scattered eight hits over eight innings but struck out seven and did not walk a batter. Even so, he was looking like a tough-luck loser until the Rays got to Jenks.
Bartlett, who struck out to end Monday's game, led off the ninth with a single to left and Jenks simply unraveled from there, blowing his third save in 25 opportunities. He hit Longoria and Ben Zobrist singled to load the bases before Burrell walked to tie it.
Burrell then got doubled off first on Pena's sacrifice fly, but pinch hitter Carl Crawford walked before Gabe Gross grounded out to end the inning.
Until that rally, the White Sox appeared to be on their way to their 14th win in 20 games.
Richard delivered his best outing after going 1-2 with a 10.80 ERA in his previous five starts and putting his spot in the rotation and on the roster in jeopardy.
The White Sox will have a move to make with John Danks missing Wednesday's start because of a blister on his left index finger. They planned to call up Carlos Torres from Triple-A Charlotte and have him start in Danks' place, meaning someone could be sent down.
NOTES: White Sox 1B Paul Konerko made a nice play in the second when he dived to his right to stab Pat Burrell's line drive. ... Rays manager Joe Maddon said LHP Scott Kazmir's throwing session on Tuesday went well, and he is expected to start Thursday. Kazmir left Saturday's game against Kansas City with a cramp in his left forearm. ... Maddon said he was planning to go with lefties against Danks, so his lineup won't change because of the White Sox's switch.

MIAMI – Marc Anthony is the latest celebrity musician to join forces with the Miami Dolphins.
The team scheduled a news conference to be held Tuesday in New York for a "major corporate announcement" with Anthony.
It was unclear whether Anthony will become a minority owner. That's what happened last month when singer Gloria Estefan and her husband, producer Emilio Estefan, bought a small stake in the team.
New Dolphins owner Stephen Ross also began a partnership in May with Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville enterprise, which includes Land Shark Lager. Buffett has yet to accept Ross' invitation to become a minority owner, but the Dolphins' stadium has been renamed Land Shark Stadium for this season. Buffett has also written a song for the team.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and ESPN president George Bodenheimer will attend the news conference, the Dolphins said. The team appears on ESPN's "Monday Night Football" on Oct. 12 against the New York Jets, and Anthony may perform at the game.
Officials with the Dolphins and ESPN didn't immediately return calls seeking further details. Anthony's publicist also did not return calls.
Anthony is married to singer-actress Jennifer Lopez. He has sold more than 10 million albums and is also an actor.
Ross, a New York real estate billionaire, completed his purchase of the Dolphins in January from Wayne Huizenga and quickly set out to rebrand the franchise. He has said he wants to fill up the stands with "a blend of entertainment and winning football."

Running a distance is the most basic form of racing, but races are often conducted in vehicles, such as boats, cars and aircraft, or with animals such as horses.

The first auto race in the United States took place in Evanston, Illinois on November 28, 1895 over an 87.48-km (54.36 mile) course, with Frank Duryea winning in 10 hours and 23 minutes, beating three petrol-fueled and two electric cars. The first trophy awarded was the Vanderbilt Cup.

Racing Schools

BETHEL, N.Y. – Welcome to middle age, Woodstock Baby — if you're really out there.
The babies reportedly born at the Woodstock festival 40 years ago remain the most enduring mystery from that chaotic weekend that defined a generation. Depending on the source, there was one birth on that patch of upstate New York farmland between Aug. 15-17, 1969. Or two. Or three. Or none.
There is some tantalizing evidence. Singer John Sebastian is captured on film announcing that some cat's old lady just had a baby, a kid destined to be far out. A couple of surviving eyewitnesses say there were births. The concert's medical director told reporters at the scene there were two births: one at a local hospital after the mother was flown out by helicopter; the other in a car caught in the epic traffic jam outside the site crowded with more than 400,000 people.
But no one has come forward with a credible public claim of giving birth to a Woodstock baby or being born there. No one has produced proof that it happened. If babies were born at Woodstock, they have lived their lives ignoring — or unaware of — the fact that reporters and researchers have been on their trail for decades.
"I've searched, I've spoken to the doctors and nurses from the main hospitals that were there," said Myron Gittell, who wrote the new medical history, "Woodstock '69: Three Days of Peace, Music, and Medical Care."
Like many before him, he found nothing.
"Almost statistically, you'd think if there are a half-million people, and half of them were women, and 95 percent of them were of childbearing age, and fertile, and active. Just statistically, someone would have had to pop a baby."
Problem is: No one has been able to dig up a birth record.
Rita Sheehan, town clerk for Bethel, which hosted the concert, said there is no local birth certificate on record. Still, it's possible the birth was recorded in one of the surrounding towns. Gittell says there were births recorded in neighboring towns in that period, but the records are sealed under state privacy laws. There's no way to check whether the birth mothers were locals or out-of-towners (the likely pool of Woodstock Moms).
That leaves a few eyewitness accounts, like that of Gladys Devaney, who was a member of the volunteer ambulance corps in nearby Liberty. She answered an ambulance call to a tent at the festival and saw a young woman in labor. Her overriding concern then was that other medical workers took her stretcher as they rushed the woman away. But Devaney knew labor when she saw it.
"I heard her screaming," Devaney said. "I didn't get a good look at her, she was thrashing."
Devaney never found out whether they took the young woman to a waiting helicopter or somewhere else.
Elliot Tiber, the subject of Ang Lee's new movie, "Taking Woodstock," tops Devaney. He says he helped deliver a baby that weekend.
Tiber, who has a reputation for being a raconteur, said the woman gave birth at his parent's hotel near the site, which — like the entire area that weekend — was mobbed. The woman wore a leather jacket, came in on a motorcycle and just flopped down.
"I see she's starting to give birth," Tiber recalled. "It was like the quote from `Gone With the Wind': `I don't know nothing about birthing no babies, Miss Scarlet' ... I was screaming, just screaming. Everybody was standing around stoned saying, `Yeah, groovy!' They thought it was cool."
Tiber said the baby was taken away, though the mother came by in a cab a few weeks later with her baby in a blanket. He didn't get any names. He never heard from them again.
After four decades, the Woodstock baby trail has gotten colder. The young people who packed into Woodstock are retirement age now. A number of the emergency and medical workers involved, including the concert's medical director, Dr. William Abruzzi, are dead. And if a baby was born onsite, there are curious gaps in the record.
Press accounts at the time mentioning the births did not provide names. Abruzzi wrote an exhaustive account of the event in which he tallied six pages of medical incidents over the three days (11 rat bites, 16 peptic ulcers, 707 drug overdoses, among them). The paper, now in the collection of the Museum at Bethel Woods, the onsite museum, does not mention a single childbirth.

"It could be one of those myths that grow out of major events," said Bethel museum Director Wade Lawrence. "It could be like the story of the New York State Thruway being closed. It wasn't."

Maybe the best argument against a Woodstock baby is that no one in the past four decades has stepped forward to publicly and credibly claim they were born or gave birth at Woodstock. There is a theory that neither mother nor child particularly want Woodstock to define their lives, and have chosen to keep their distinction a private matter.

But it bears saying as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock approaches. If you are a Woodstock baby or a Woodstock mother, please consider contacting The Associated Press at woodstockbaby"at"ap.org.

People have been looking for you.

BEAUFORT, N.C. – Having swapped his hip-holstered Blackberry for fishing pliers, the U.S. attorney for eastern North Carolina watches closely from the captain's chair aboard the 45-foot "Jolly Mon" as his crew prepares for a day on the water.
The team scans satellite images, examines water temperatures, sharpens hooks, packs reels and tests rods.
"If you get a big fish on here," George Holding says from his perch, "you don't want anything to go wrong."
He might as well be talking about his day job.
A Republican appointee left in charge for an unusually long time by a Democratic White House, Holding has planned investigations into some of the state's top political figures, including two-time presidential candidate John Edwards and former Gov. Mike Easley and his wife.
Holding won't confirm corruption investigations in his district, though subpoenas indicate his office is looking into Easley's travel and his wife's $170,000 job at North Carolina State University. And Edwards, a former U.S. senator, has acknowledged a federal probe into his presidential campaign funds.
Edwards and Easley, who both insist the investigations will turn up no wrongdoing, are two of the most prominent Democrats in North Carolina. That has complicated the replacement process for Holding, who ordinarily would have been on the way out with the change in administration.
Democrats are unwilling to criticize Holding's work, let alone take the politically charged step of unseating him while he's overseeing probes involving members of their party.
"If an investigation is going on, he ought to have the opportunity to complete that investigation," said Sen. Kay Hagan, who recommended that the White House not replace Holding until he completes the probes into Edwards and Easley.
The White House declined to comment. Holding is keeping mum, too.
Holding said in January that, at the request of the White House, he would stay in the office until a new U.S. attorney was appointed. Assuming that the process would only take a couple months, he planned a summer vacation for his wife and three daughters and began thinking about life after being a federal prosecutor, perhaps going into private practice while incorporating some pro bono work or university-level teaching.
Born in Raleigh, Holding is a member of the prominent Smithfield banking family that controls much of First Citizens BancShares Inc., the parent company of First Citizens Bank. He wanted to be a professor, studying topics such as Latin, Roman literature and structures of argument. He briefly studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland before living for a couple years in London where he traveled, visited museums and began his collection of all things Winston Churchill.
Holding, 41, quotes Confucius and the Bible with an accent that mixes eastern North Carolina twang with snatches of New England intonation he picked up during years of childhood boarding school. He cites Cicero as his inspiration for going to law school, which he did at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
Holding clerked for U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle and worked in private practice specializing in tax matters before getting a call from then-Sen. Jesse Helms. Holding had grown up around the corner from Helms and worked briefly for the senator in college. He worked on tax and agriculture matters under the famously conservative lawmaker.
Despite his boss' reputation, Holding never showed signs of joining the ranks of trunk-waving Republicans, said Jimmy Broughton, Helms' former chief of staff.
"One thing George is not is political," Broughton said.
Former U.S. attorney Frank Whitney recalled that the White House wanted a U.S. attorney in the eastern district of North Carolina who had experience as a prosecutor. Helms wanted Holding for the job.
In the end, a compromise put both Whitney and Holding on the job, with Holding serving as first assistant. Together, they guided investigations into North Carolina's political elite, including former Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, former U.S. Rep. Frank Ballance and former state House Speaker Jim Black.

The Democrats all were sentenced to prison. Holding has also prosecuted some Republicans, including former U.S. Attorney Sam Currin, another Helms protege who pleaded guilty to money laundering and received a sentence of nearly six years.

Whitney recalled that Holding quickly applied his deliberate personality to the job. He said it can be easy for prosecutors to get overly excited and overly aggressive while pursuing cases that are getting media attention, but he said Holding never got ahead of the evidence.

"He's very smart, very methodical and very thorough in everything he does," said Whitney, who became a federal judge in 2006, leaving Holding in charge. "He does not rush to judgment. He looks at a situation and analyzes it."

That's sort of the way Holding describes his approach to his favorite leisure activity, which includes excursions for big blue marlin and a 300-pound bigeye tuna he nearly landed last year. There's preparation, patience and, admittedly, some luck involved.

"In public corruption cases, you have to be really patient," Holding said. "You have to do your homework. You have to dot every 'i' and cross every 't.'"

WASHINGTON – The Chicago Cubs have signed former Toronto closer B.J. Ryan to a minor league deal.
Released by the Blue Jays earlier this month, the 33-year-old Ryan will first report to the Cubs' spring training complex in Mesa, Ariz. If all goes well, he'll join Triple-A Iowa.
The Cubs have only one left-handed reliever, Sean Marshall.
Ryan was in the fourth year of a five-year, $47 million contract. He was 1-1 with a 6.53 ERA, and gave up 22 hits and 17 walks in 20 2-3 innings.
Ryan had ligament replacement surgery on his left elbow in 2007. He had 32 saves last year for Toronto.

Artificial lighting is most commonly provided today by electric lights, but gas lighting, candles, or oil lamps were used in the past, and still are used in certain situations. Proper lighting can enhance task performance or aesthetics, while there can be energy wastage and adverse health effects of lighting. Indoor lighting is a form of fixture or furnishing, and a key part of interior design. Lighting can also be an intrinsic component of landscaping.

Lighting is the deliberate application of light to achieve some aesthetic or practical effect. Lighting includes use of both artificial light sources such as lamps and natural illumination of interiors from daylight. Daylighting (through windows, skylights, etc.) is often used as the main source of light during daytime in buildings given its low cost. Artificial lighting represents a major component of energy consumption, accounting for a significant part of all energy consumed worldwide.

Flexible LED Strips

As is the case with most other young children, infants are usually treated as special persons. Their social presence is different from that of adults, and they may be the focus of attention. Fees for transportation and entrance fees at locations such as amusement parks or museums are often waived. This special attention will wear out as the child grows older.

Teething has not been shown to cause fever. A slight rise of temperature may occur when the teeth come through the gum. But it does not make a baby ill.

Natural Baby

Insurers make money in two ways: (1) through underwriting, the process by which insurers select the risks to insure and decide how much in premiums to charge for accepting those risks and (2) by investing the premiums they collect from insureds.

What is often missing from the debate is that prohibiting the use of legitimate, actuarially sound factors means that an insufficient amount is being charged for a given risk, and there is thus a deficit in the system. The failure to address the deficit may mean insolvency and hardship for all of a company's insureds. The options for addressing the deficit seem to be the following: Charge the deficit to the other policyholders or charge it to the government (i.e., externalize outside of the company to society at large).

site

SEOUL, South Korea – Ailing former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, a Nobel laureate, has been put on a respirator because of complications from pneumonia but is not in "immediate danger," hospital officials said Thursday.
The 85-year-old ex-dissident served as president from 1998 to 2003 and had a "Sunshine Policy" of encouraging reconciliation with wartime foe North Korea, which culminated in a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in 2000.
Kim was admitted to Seoul's Severance Hospital on Monday with a fever and signs of a cold. He was transferred to intensive care with pneumonia two days later.
He was placed on a ventilator Thursday to help him breathe but is conscious and in stable condition, Severance Hospital chief Park Chang-il told reporters. He said Kim's blood pressure, temperature and pulse were normal.
"Though there is no immediate danger to his life, we will monitor (his conditions) as we continue treatment," Park said.
The 2000 summit led to a number of promising cross-border reconciliation projects, including the reunions of families separated for five decades and tours to North Korean landmarks long forbidden to South Koreans.
Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts to reconcile with the communist North.
Ties, however, turned sour when conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office linking aid to the impoverished North to denuclearization. Pyongyang, in retaliation, cut off most ties with South Korea and halted key joint projects.
Kim's illness comes amid speculation about the health of his North Korean summit counterpart. Kim Jong Il had promised during the summit in Pyongyang to pay a return trip to Seoul, but hasn't yet done so.
Kim Jong Il is believed to have suffered a stroke last August, and South Korean broadcaster YTN reported last week that he may be suffering from pancreatic cancer.