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.

Furthermore, U. S. appellate courts are usually restricted to hearing appeals based on matters that were originally brought up before the trial court.

In most U. S. states, and in U. S. federal courts, parties before the court are allowed one appeal as of right.

This form of guilty plea has been frequently used in local and state courts in the United States, though it consists of a small percentage of all plea bargains in the U. S. The form of plea is not allowed in courts of the United States military.

It was not until 1963 that the U. S. Supreme Court declared that legal counsel must be provided at the expense of the state for indigent felony defendants, under the federal Sixth Amendment, in state courts.

For most purposes, most jurisdictions, including the U. S. federal system and most states, have merged the two courts.

Most of the U. S. federal courts of appeal have adopted a rule under which, in the event of any conflict in decisions of panels ( most of the courts of appeal almost always sit in panels of three ), the earlier panel decision is controlling, and a panel decision may only be overruled by the court of appeals sitting en banc ( that is, all active judges of the court ) or by a higher court.

Since the 12th century, courts have had parallel and co-equal authority to make law -- " legislating from the bench " is a traditional and essential function of courts, which was carried over into the U. S. system as an essential component of the " judicial power " specified by Article III of the U. S. constitution.

Before 1938, the federal courts, like almost all other common law courts, decided the law on any issue where the relevant legislature ( either the U. S. Congress or state legislature, depending on the issue ), had not acted, by looking to courts in the same system, that is, other federal courts, even on issues of state law, and even where there was no express grant of authority from Congress or the Constitution.

In 1938, the U. S. Supreme Court in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins 304 U. S. 64, 78 ( 1938 ), overruled earlier precedent, and held " There is no federal general common law ," thus confining the federal courts to act only as interpreters of law originating elsewhere.

See, e. g., Clearfield Trust Co. v. United States, ( giving federal courts the authority to fashion common law rules with respect to issues of federal power, in this case negotiable instruments backed by the federal government ); see also International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U. S. 215 ( 1918 ) ( creating a cause of action for misappropriation of " hot news " that lacks any statutory grounding, but that is one of the handful of federal common law actions that survives today ); National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F. 3d 841, 843-44, 853 ( 2d Cir.

Examples of common law being replaced by statute or codified rule in the United States include criminal law ( since 1812, U. S. courts have held that criminal law must be embodied in statute if the public is to have fair notice ), commercial law ( the Uniform Commercial Code in the early 1960s ) and procedure ( the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the 1930s and the Federal Rules of Evidence in the 1970s ).

In the United States federal courts, class actions are governed by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 23 and 28 U. S. C. A.

He continued representing clients in federal courts until the U. S. Supreme Court ruled against him on March 21, 1988.

Similarly, section 7482 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that the U. S. Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeals may impose penalties where the taxpayer's appeal of a U. S. Tax Court decision was " maintained primarily for delay " or where " the taxpayer's position in the appeal is frivolous or groundless.