| 1397 | John of Gaunt marries Katherine Rouet. | |
| 1846 | President James Polk dispatches General Zachary Taylor and 4,000 troops to the Texas Border as war with Mexico looms. | |
| 1862 | President Lincoln names Edwin M. Stanton Secretary of War. | |
| 1900 | To combat Czech nationalism, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary decrees German the official language of the Imperial Army. | |
| 1919 | California votes to ratify the prohibition amendment. | |
| 1923 | Hitler denounces the Weimar Republic as 5,000 storm troopers demonstrate in Germany. | |
| 1927 | A woman takes a seat on the NY Stock Exchange breaking the all-male tradition. | |
| 1931 | The bridge connecting New York and New Jersey is named the George Washington Memorial Bridge. | |
| 1937 | The United States bars Americans from serving in the Civil War in Spain. | |
| 1943 | General Leclerc's Free French forces merge with the British under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery in Libya. | |
| 1944 | Plants are destroyed and 64 U.S. aircraft are lost in an air attack in Germany. | |
| 1945 | The Red Army opens an offensive in South Poland, crashing 25 miles through the German lines. | |
| 1947 | British troops replace striking truck drivers. | |
| 1955 | Chase National and the Bank of Manhattan agree to merge resulting in the second largest U.S. bank. | |
| 1965 | Two U.S. planes are shot down in Laos while on a combat mission. | |
| 1968 | U.S. reports shifting most air targets from North Vietnam to Laos. | |
| 1976 | Argentina ousts a British envoy in dispute over the Falkland Islands. | |
| 1980 | The United States offers Pakistan a two-year aid plan to counter the Soviet threat in Afghanistan. |
"Earlier this week, the International Monetary Fund made a striking admission in its new World Economic Outlook. The IMF's chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, explained that recent efforts among wealthy countries to shrink their deficits - through tax hikes and spending cuts - have been causing far more economic damage than experts had assumed."
“And in Missouri, Todd Akin … was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, ‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.”Gingrey claims to “know these things” as an OB-GYN.
The scientific literature actually says the opposite. In fact, Robin Baker got lots of criticism for pointing out that the statistics suggest that rape is more likely to lead to pregnancy in his book Sperm Wars. I would rather trust scientists who do actual research studies, than the uninformed prejudice of a 75 year old man who might have been qualified to talk about what science believed a century ago.“And I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”
...the spellings for- and fore- aren’t completely arbitrary: there’s a logical reason for using one or the other, based on their meanings.Additional details at the link, especially re the pairs of words "forebear"/"forbear" and "forego"/"forgo."
Fore- (strictly speaking, it’s a combining form) comes from Old English and is related to the word before. Fore- is added to words to form words which have a group of meanings related to these main ideas:
For- also derives from Old English, but the meanings of the words that it forms are very different to those beginning with fore-. You’ll find it at the start of words which have meanings conveying these ideas:
- before or in advance of someone or something in time (so today’s weather forecast tells you what the future weather is likely to be; if you are foresighted, you’re able to think and plan ahead).
- in front or at the front of someone or something in terms of position (a forecourt is an area in front of a building; your forehead is at the front of your head).
- in front of someone or something in rank or order (a foreman was originally a person who literally led others from the front, developing into the later meaning of ‘a leader or supervisor of people’).
So if the word you want has one of the above meanings and has nothing to do with being before in time, place, or order, then it should begin with for-. ..
- banning someone or something (if you forbid something you refuse to allow it).
- giving up or doing without something (so to forfeit something is to give it up).
- failing to do something (when you forget something, you don’t remember something that you should have done).
No words have been formed from for- for many hundreds of years: in contrast to fore-, it’s a dead prefix. This means there’s only a small set of current English words that begin with for-: here are the most common ones:
forbear forfeit forgive forlorn forbearance forget forgiveness forsake forbid forgetful forgo forswear
Most European languages distinguish between a formal and an informal you. French has tu and vous, Spanish tú and usted, and Portuguese even has three gradations (tu, você and o senhor/a senhora). But each culture navigates the resulting ambiguities in its own way. And Germans seem particularly vulnerable...
Today’s Germans have been eagerly importing informality from America, crediting its prevailing casualness—in places such as Silicon Valley—with creativity, productivity and modernity generally. So the Germans, like the Swedes and Danes, are increasingly dispensing with the formal second person even among strangers...
In a self-consciously American environment such as Starbucks, the transition is all but complete; its baristas in Berlin use Du as naturally as though they were saying "have a great day" in Seattle. Other environments cling to a more Germanic, rules-based approach. At the front desk of a vacation resort in rural Mecklenburg, I received, along with our keys, a one-page form instructing us that we were to use Du throughout the grounds, with all guests and personnel. We promised to obey, and partially did.
The form may sound ridiculous, but it’s trickier when the protocol must be inferred spontaneously. A flow chart has been circulating on German Facebook pages that sets out to clarify in PowerPoint style who may initiate the Du with whom and when. In a nutshell: it’s still advisable that the junior should wait for the senior and the male for the female, and that all those confused avoid making any utterance. Dilbert types in the German corporate world share wrenching tales of already being at Du with a peer until one of them gets promoted.
[t]he rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.The reasons for the decline are discussed in the Slate article.
And then it will fall.This is a counterintuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and perhaps unavoidable threat to our future as a species. But population decline is a very familiar concept in the rest of the developed world, where fertility has long since fallen far below the 2.1 live births per woman required to maintain population equilibrium...
American media have largely ignored the issue of population decline for the simple reason that it hasn’t happened here yet. Unlike Europe, the United States has long been the beneficiary of robust immigration. This has helped us not only by directly bolstering the number of people calling the United States home but also by propping up the birthrate, since immigrant women tend to produce far more children than the native-born do...
Moreover, the poor, highly fertile countries that once churned out immigrants by the boatload are now experiencing birthrate declines of their own. From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s. This change in developing countries will affect not only the U.S. population, of course, but eventually the world’s...
According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. [it's currently 7 billion]
Whether
you’re sitting in a cubicle or running your butt off working retail all
day, your job no doubt has its fair share of stressful moments. These
daily annoyances may not be enough to pose a serious risk to your
health, but new research suggests the size of your paycheck is another
matter: A UC Davis study found that earning the lowest wages is directly tied to high blood pressure—especially in young women.
Hot springs or "onsen," dot volcanic Japan from tip to tip (dipping into a steaming onsen one of the great pleasures of visiting Japan), and a custom for cooking eggs at these springs evolved over the years -- toss them into the hot water, wait a bit, and the egg magically poaches. The secret is the onsen's water temperature, which causes the egg's yolk and albumen congeal into a nice sphere on the outside, and beautifully creamy and tasty on the inside.
The detailed changes in the structure of a virus as it infects an E. coli bacterium have been observed for ...
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is holding a
month-long "Python Challenge." Officials are offering cash prizes to
whoever brings in the longest python and whoever bags the most pythons.
