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.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 ( ADA ) is a law that was enacted by the U. S. Congress in 1990.

In terms of ultra vires actions in the broad sense, a reviewing court may set aside an administrative decision if it is unreasonable ( under Canadian law, following the rejection of the " Patently Unreasonable " standard by the Supreme Court in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick ), Wednesbury unreasonable ( under British law ), or arbitrary and capricious ( under U. S. Administrative Procedure Act and New York State law ).

Stephen Breyer, a U. S. Supreme Court Justice since 1994, divides the history of administrative law in the United States into six discrete periods, according to his book, Administrative Law & Regulatory Policy ( 3d Ed., 1992 ):

* 1938 – U. S. Supreme Court delivers its opinion in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins and overturns a century of federal common law.

Clinton's 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill made many changes to U. S. law, including the expansion of the death penalty to include crimes not resulting in death, such as running a large-scale drug enterprise.

On October 10, 2000, Clinton signed into law the U. S .– China Relations Act of 2000, which granted permanent normal trade relations ( PNTR ) trade status to People's Republic of China.

There is also a U. S. Supreme Court case that predates the dictionary, Jackson ex dem Bradford v. Huntington, that uses the phrase " black letter " in the same sense as black letter law: " It is seldom that a case in our time savors so much of the black letter, but the course of decisions in New York renders it unavailable.

Much like on the U. S., alcoholic beverages in Chile are not sold on Sunday mornings, while on election days their sale is prohibited by law during the entire day ( starting the Saturday before ).

In the early 1990s, she worked as an associate at the Washington, D. C .- based law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering where she did civil litigation for several years before becoming an Assistant U. S. Attorney.

Under current United States law, bio-agents which have been declared by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services or the U. S. Department of Agriculture to have the " potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety " are officially defined as " select agents ".

* Peter Jay's appointment as British Ambassador to the U. S. by his father in law, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.

In a bankruptcy, all assets of the debtor are liquidated under the administration of the creditors, although the law provides for debt restructuring options similar to those under Chapter 11 of the U. S. Bankruptcy code.

For example, in most U. S. states, the criminal statutes are primarily codification of pre-existing common law.

With the transition from English law, which had common law crimes, to the new legal system under the U. S. Constitution, which prohibited ex post facto laws at both the federal and state level, the question was raised whether there could be common law crimes in the United States.

In contrast, in non-common-law countries, and jurisdictions with very weak respect for precedent ( example, the U. S. Patent Office ), fine questions of law are redetermined anew each time they arise, making consistency and prediction more difficult, and procedures far more protracted than necessary because parties cannot rely on written statements of law as reliable guides.

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.