February 4, 2010

 

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Love him or hate him, it was this day in 1969 that Yasser Arafat took over the Palestine Liberation Organization.

 

Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini was born on 24 August 1929 in Cairo, his father a textile merchant who was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry, his mother from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of the British Mandate of Palestine. He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.

After four years in Jerusalem, his father brought him back to Cairo, where an older sister took care of him and his siblings. Arafat never mentions his father, who was not close to his children. Arafat did not attend his father's funeral in 1952.

In Cairo, before he was seventeen Arafat was smuggling arms to Palestine to be used against the British and the Jews. At nineteen, during the war between the Jews and the Arab states, Arafat left his studies at the University of Faud I (later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area. The defeat of the Arabs and the establishment of the state of Israel left him in such despair that he applied for a visa to study at the University of Texas. Recovering his spirits and retaining his dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he returned to Faud University to major in engineering but spent most of his time as leader of the Palestinian students.

He did manage to get his degree in 1956, worked briefly in Egypt, then resettled in Kuwait, first being employed in the department of public works, next successfully running his own contracting firm. He spent all his spare time in political activities, to which he contributed most of the profits. In 1958 he and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells, which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. At the end of 1964 Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organising Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan.

February 3, 2010

 

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Jean-Baptiste Biot was educated at the college of Louis-le-grand in Paris, then after graduating he joined the army in 1793. He was then a pupil at the École Polytechnique in Paris where Monge realised his potential. There was an attempted insurrection by the royalists against the Convention and Biot took part. He was captured by government forces and taken prisoner. Had it not been for Monge, who could not see someone with such talents remain in jail, or even die, pleading successfully for his release his promising career might have ended. He became Professor of Mathematics at the École Centrale at Beauvais in 1797. Three years later he became Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Collège de France, an appointment which was due to the influence of Laplace. 

In 1803 Biot was elected to the First Class of the Institute. Three years later he went with Arago to Spain to complete earlier work begun there on calculating the measure of the arc of the meridian. In 1809 Biot was appointed Professor of Physical Astronomy at the Faculty of Sciences. Biot studied a wide range of mathematical topics, mostly on the applied mathematics side. He made advances in astronomy, elasticity, electricity and magnetism, heat and optics on the applied side while, in pure mathematics, he also did important work in geometry. He collaborated with Arago on refractive properties of gases. 

Biot, together with Savart, discovered that the intensity of the magnetic field set up by a current flowing through a wire varies inversely with the distance from the wire. This is now known as Biot-Savart's Law and is fundamental to modern electromagnetic theory.For his work on the polarization of light passing through chemical solutions he was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. Another of his important works was Mémoire sur la figure de la terre (1827) which describes the shape of the Earth. 

He tried twice for the post of Secretary to the Académie des Sciences and to improve his chances for election to this post he wrote Essai sur l'Histoire Générale des Sciences pendant la Révolution. However he lost out in 1822 to Fourier for this post, then again when Fourier died he applied only to lose to Arago.

St Beuve says that Biot

was endowed to the highest degree with all the qualities of curiosity, finesse, penetration, precision, ingenious analysis, method, clarity, in short with all the essential and secondary qualities, bar one, genius, in the sense of originality and invention.

A contrasting comment by Olinthus Gregory in 1821 is:

With regard to M. Biot, I had an opportunity of pretty fully appreciating his character when we were together in the Zetland [= Shetland] Isles; and I do not hesitate to say that I never met so strange a compound of vanity, impetuosity, fickleness, and natural partiality, as is exhibited in his character.

 

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The First Court
The Supreme Court was first called to assemble on Feb. 1, 1790, in the Merchants Exchange Building in New York City, then the Nation's Capital. The first Supreme Court was made up of:

Chief Justice:
John Jay, from New York
Associate Justices:
John Rutledge, from South Carolina
William Cushing, from Massachusetts
James Wilson, from Pennsylvania
John Blair, from Virginia
James Iredell, from North Carolina

Other than establishing it, Article III of the U.S. Constitution spells out neither the specific duties, powers nor organization of the Supreme Court.

"[t]he judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."

Instead, the Constitution left it to Congress and to the Justices of the Court itself to develop the authorities and operations of the entire Judicial Branch of government.


The very first bill introduced in the United States Senate was the Judiciary Act of 1789. It divided the country in 13 judicial districts, which were further organized into the Eastern, Middle, and Southern "circuits." The 1789 Act called for the Supreme Court to consist of a Chief Justice and only five Associate Justices, and for the Court to meet, or "sit" in the Nation's Capital.

In 1791, the Court joined Congress and the President in Philadelphia; it heard discussions of lawyers' qualifications but little else. Still, other duties exhausted the Justices. The Judiciary Act of 1789 required them to journey twice a year to distant parts of the country and preside over circuit courts. For decades they would grumble, and hope Congress would change this system; but Congress meant to keep them aware of local opinion and state law.

Stagecoaches jolted the Justices from city to city. Sometimes they spent 19 hours a day on the road. North of Boston and in the South, roads turned into trails. Justice Iredell, struggling around the Carolinas and Georgia on circuit, and hurrying to Philadelphia twice a year as well, led the life of a traveling postboy. Finding his duties "in a degree intolerable," Jay almost resigned. Congress relented a little in 1793; one circuit trip a year would be enough.

February 1, 2010

 

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Born out of a need for a national police force to implement the law in Canada’s newly acquired western territories, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was established on February 1, 1920

The Roots of an Institution

In May 1873, the Parliament of Canada established a central police force. One hundred and fifty recruits were sent west to Manitoba. The new police force gradually acquired the name North-West Mounted Police (NWMP).

In July 1874, the 275 mounted police officers marched west, headed for southern Alberta, where American whisky traders were operating among the Aboriginal people. A permanent post was established at Fort Macleod, Alberta. Part of the remaining half of the Force was sent to Fort Edmonton and the rest returned east to Fort Pelly, Saskatchewan, which had been designated as headquarters.The following summer, Fort Calgary, on the Bow River in Alberta, and Fort Walsh, in Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills, were established.
By 1885, the Force had grown to 1,000 men, but in 1896 its future was threatened by the newly elected Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who decided to reduce and eventually disband the NWMP. Support for the Force in the west prevailed, and it gained new prominence policing the Klondike Gold Rush.
From 1905-16, the Force was contracted to police the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. These contracts ended due to the provinces’ desire to create their own police forces.

Building a Legacy

In 1919, Parliament voted to merge the Force with the Dominion Police, a federal police force with jurisdiction in eastern Canada. When the legislation took effect on February 1, 1920, the name became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and headquarters was moved to Ottawa from Regina.
The RCMP returned to provincial policing with a new contract with Saskatchewan in 1928.
From 1932-38, the size of the RCMP nearly doubled, to 2,350, as it took over provincial policing in Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
The years following World War II saw a continued expansion of the RCMP’s role as a provincial force. In 1950, it assumed responsibility for provincial policing in Newfoundland and absorbed the British Columbia provincial police.
Women were first accepted as uniformed members in 1974. The seventies also brought an expansion of responsibilities in areas such as airport policing, VIP security and drug enforcement.
Today, the RCMP’s scope of operations includes organized crime, terrorism, illicit drugs, economic crimes and offences that threaten the integrity of Canada’s national borders. The RCMP also protects VIPs, has jurisdiction in eight provinces and three territories and, through its National Police Services, offers resources to other Canadian law enforcement agencies.