The appointment of U Thant of Burma as the U.N.'s Acting Secretary General -- at this writing, the choice appears to be certain -- offers further proof that in politics it is more important to have no influential enemies than to have influential friends.

With the neutralists maintaining pressure for one of their own to succeed Mr. Hammarskjold, U Thant emerged as the only possible candidate unlikely to be waylaid by a veto.

U Thant of course, will hold office until the spring of 1963, when Mr. Hammarskjold's term would have come to an end.

the West may or not remain satisfied with the kind of neutralism that U Thant represents.

If Af are the projections associated with the primary decomposition of T, then each Af is a polynomial in T, and accordingly if a linear operator U commutes with T then U commutes with each of the Af, i.e., each subspace Af is invariant under U.

Near Q, both curves can be represented by analytic functions of U.

In a neighborhood of Q the difference between these functions is also a single-valued, analytic function of U.

The restrained gyro-stabilized platform with reasonable response characteristics operates with an approximate equation of motion, neglecting transient effects, as follows: Af where U is a torque applied about the output axis of the controlling gyro.

Lincoln's assassination was the first assassination of a U. S. president and sent the nation into mourning.

Lincoln has been consistently ranked by scholars and the public as one of the three greatest U. S. presidents.

In 1846, Lincoln was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives, where he served one two-year term.

Lincoln also supported the Wilmot Proviso, which, if it had been adopted, would have banned slavery in any U. S. territory won from Mexico.

Lincoln disapproved of slavery, and the spread of slavery to new U. S. territory in the west.

Douglas ' provision, which Lincoln opposed, specified settlers had the right to determine locally whether to allow slavery in new U. S. territory, rather than have such a decision restricted by the national Congress.

In late 1854, Lincoln ran as a Whig for the U. S. Senate seat from Illinois.

After the state Republican party convention nominated him for the U. S. Senate in 1858, Lincoln delivered his House Divided Speech, drawing on: " A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The stage was then set for the campaign for statewide election of the Illinois legislature which would, in turn, select Lincoln or Douglas as its U. S. senator.

Douglas said that Lincoln was defying the authority of the U. S. Supreme Court and the Dred Scott decision.

The U. S. Navy illegally intercepted a British merchant ship the Trent on the high seas and seized two Confederate envoys ; Britain protested vehemently while the U. S. cheered.

He argued before and during his election that the eventual extinction of slavery would result from preventing its expansion into new U. S. territory.

Anthropologists ' involvement with the U. S. government, in particular, has caused bitter controversy within the discipline.

Austin is the capital of the U. S. state of Texas.

The world's smallest known vertebrate, Paedophryne amauensis, sitting on a Dime ( United States coin ) | U. S. dime, 17. 91mm, for scale

The land went through several administrative changes before becoming an organized ( or incorporated ) territory on May 11, 1912, and the 49th state of the U. S. on January 3, 1959.

Alaska has a longer coastline than all the other U. S. states combined .< ref >

* U. S. House Committee on Agriculture – Glossary of agricultural terms, programs and laws

* Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, U. S. law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability

* Anti-Deficiency Act, U. S. law that prohibits the federal government from incurring debts not authorized by Congress

In the U. S. federal court system, criminal defendants must file a notice of appeal within 10 days of the entry of either the judgment or the order being appealed, or the right to appeal is forfeited.

Many U. S. jurisdictions title their appellate court a court of appeal or court of appeals.

Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired on a U. S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

* 1918 – Battle of Ambos Nogales: U. S. Army forces skirmish against Mexican Carrancistas and their German advisors in the only battle of World War I fought on American soil.

* 1964 – Vietnam War: the U. S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving U. S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.

On occasion SPAAGs have been used as very effective direct fire weapons against infantry, for example by American forces during late World War II, in Korea against mass infantry assault, and extensively during the Vietnam War, where for example the U. S. M42 Duster SPAAG ( based on a light tank ) was employed purely for this purpose.

* 1918 – The Battle of Ambos Nogales takes place between U. S. forces and Mexican Carrancistas aided by German military advisors.

* 1901 – New York becomes the first U. S. state to require automobile license plates. Anzac Beach – Australian and New Zealand forces invade Turkey

Ansbach hosts several units of the U. S. armed forces, associated with German units under NATO.

In response, U. S. forces were withdrawn from Somalia and later conflicts were approached with fewer soldiers on the ground.

Brunei's armed forces engage in joint exercises, training programs, and other military cooperation with the U. S. A memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation was signed on November 29, 1994.

* Brewster Buffalo, or Brewster F2A, a U. S. fighter plane which saw extensive service with both Allied and Axis air forces during World War II

Thus, a number of Allied soldiers received the Bronze Star Medal in World War II, as well as U. N. soldiers in the Korean War, Vietnamese and allied forces in the Vietnam War, and coalition forces in recent military operations such as the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom and the Iraq War.

In early 1950, the U. S. took its first efforts to oppose communist forces in Vietnam ; planned to form a West German army, and prepared proposals for a peace treaty with Japan that would guarantee long-term U. S. military bases there.

Fearing that communist Korea under a Kim Il Sung dictatorship could threaten Japan and foster other communist movements in Asia, Truman committed U. S. forces and obtained help from the United Nations to counter the North Korean invasion.

" When Congress, in the summer of 1973, legislated an end to U. S. military action in, over, or off the shores of Indochina, the only U. S. military activity then going on was air support of a friendly Cambodian government and army desperately defending their country against a North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge onslaught ... What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam's occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards for use as military bases from which to launch attacks on U. S. and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

Next came a North Vietnamese attempt to overrun the entire country in March – April 1970, to which U. S. and South Vietnamese forces responded by a limited ground incursion at the end of April ... The outcome in Indochina was not foreordained.

The authors of the U. S. Army's Area Handbook series said at the time that '.. the Army and Gendarmery ( sic ) were effective forces in being, but the Navy and Air Force were token forces primarily for prestige and with little actual defense value.

He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U. S. Eighth Army in the Korean War.

On July 19 1979, as Sandinista forces entered the capital, a U. S. plane disguised with Red Cross markings had evacuated remaining members of the National Guard to Miami.

The U. S. sent weapons and CIA personnel to aid forces allied with Kasavubu and combat the Soviet presence.