"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"Leap year Leap" year`
Bissextile; a year containing 366 days; every fourth year which leaps over a day more than a common year, giving to February twenty-nine days. See Bissextile.

Note: Every year whose number is divisible by four without a remainder is a leap year, excepting the full centuries, which, to be leap years, must be divisible by 400 without a remainder. If not so divisible they are common years. 1900, therefore, is not a leap year.

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)" Year Year, n. OE. yer, yeer, yogher, AS. ge'ar; akin to OFries. i?r, g?r, D. jaar, OHG. j=ar, G. jahr, Icel. =ar,
Dan. aar, Sw. *ar, Goth. j?r, Gr. ? a season of the year, springtime, a part of the day, an hour, ? a year, Zend y=are year. root4, 279. Cf. Hour, Yore.

1. The time of the apparent revolution of the sun trough the ecliptic; the period occupied by the earth in making its revolution around the sun, called the astronomical year; also, a period more or less nearly agreeing with this,
adopted by various nations as a measure of time, and called the civil year; as, the common lunar year of 354 days, still in use among the Mohammedans; the year of 360 days, etc. In common usage, the year consists of 365 days,
and every fourth year (called bissextile, or leap year) of 366 days, a day being added to February on that year, on account of the excess above 365 days (see Bissextile). Of twenty year of age he was, I guess. --Chaucer.

Note: The civil, or legal, year, in England, formerly commenced on the 25th of March. This practice continued throughout the British dominions till the year 1752.

2. The time in which any planet completes a revolution about the sun; as, the year of Jupiter or of Saturn.

3. pl. Age, or old age; as, a man in years. --Shak.

Anomalistic year, the time of the earth's revolution from perihelion to perihelion again, which is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds.

A year's mind (Eccl.), a commemoration of a deceased person, as by a Mass, a year after his death. Cf. A month's mind, under Month.

Bissextile year. See Bissextile.

Canicular year. See under Canicular.

Civil year, the year adopted by any nation for the computation of time.

Common lunar year, the period of 12 lunar months, or 354 days.

Common year, each year of 365 days, as distinguished from leap year.

Embolismic year, or Intercalary lunar year, the period of 13 lunar months, or 384 days.

Fiscal year (Com.), the year by which accounts are reckoned, or the year between one annual time of settlement, or balancing of accounts, and another.

Great year. See Platonic year, under Platonic.

Gregorian year, Julian year. See under Gregorian, and Julian.

Leap year. See Leap year, in the Vocabulary.

Lunar astronomical year, the period of 12 lunar synodical months, or 354 days, 8 hours, 48 minutes, 36 seconds.

Lunisolar year. See under Lunisolar.

Periodical year. See Anomalistic year, above.

Platonic year, Sabbatical year. See under Platonic, and Sabbatical.

Sidereal year, the time in which the sun, departing from any fixed star, returns to the same. This is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.3 seconds.

Tropical year. See under Tropical.

Year and a day (O. Eng. Law), a time to be allowed for an act or an event, in order that an entire year might be secured beyond all question. --Abbott.

Year of grace, any year of the Christian era; Anno Domini; A. D. or a. d.

Everyone who enters the Kingdom should have a valid passport with at least 6 months validity and the appropriate visa.

Unless you are a visitor from a GCC country or in transit, all other nationalities require a visa to enter the Kingdom. Visas can be for business, tourist, transit, residency, family, Hajj, or conference attendance.

Visas can be obtained from the visa department in the Saudi Embassy of the visitor's home country or from Saudi Consulates available in all main cities around the world.

The cost of a visa is generally 200 Saudi Riyals however visitors should ensure that they
check with the Saudi Embassy or Consulate.

Visas will not be issued for the following groups of people:

An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp.

Those who don't abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors. Those under the influence of alcohol will not be permitted into the Kingdom.

There are certain regulations for pilgrims and you should contact the consulate for more information.

Jewish People

Important Instructions:

If a woman is arriving in the Kingdom alone, the sponsor or her husband must receive her
at the airport.

Every woman must have confirmed accommodation for the duration of her stay in the
Kingdom.

A woman is not allowed to drive a car and can therefore only travel by car if she is accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.

All visitors to the Kingdom must have a return ticket.

Pilgrims must also have all valid documentation and a passport that is valid for 6 months.

My wife had rotator cuff surgery earlier this year, and the recovery is terribly painful. Then, she developed a staph-epi infection, and they had to cut the same scar open and operate on her again. Just thinking about the pain and anxiety of facing that painful surgery a second time in the same wound, makes me cringe. That experience, however pales in comparison to what I am going through right now, in my heart.

The old hurts are surfacing and the feelings of betrayal by fellow citizens, and their leader stirring them up, are breaking my heart again. I am being cut in the same scar. How did we who served in Vietnam suddenly become cold-blooded killers, torturers, and rapists, of the ilk of the Nazi SS or the Taliban? Most of us were American soldiers who grew up idolizing John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and all the other heroes. That was why I volunteered. But for political expediency, John Kerry has rewritten history, again. After spending only four months in the country of Vietnam, John Kerry testified before Congress in 1971 with these exact words about incidents he supposedly witnessed or heard about from other vets: “They personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

I was a green beret officer who volunteered for duty in Vietnam and fought in the thick of it in 1968 and 1969 on a Special Forces A-team on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, just for starters. We were the elite. We saw the most action. Everybody in the world knows that. But we did not just kill people, we built a church, a school, treated illnesses, passed out soap, food, and clothing, and had fun and loving interaction with the indigenous people of Vietnam, just like our boys did in Normandy, Baghdad, Saigon, and everywhere American soldiers ever served. We all gave away our candy bars and rations to kids. Our hearts to oppressed people all over the globe.

My children and grandchildren could read your words, and think those horrendous things about me, Mr. Kerry. You are a bold-faced, unprincipled liar, and a disgrace, and you have dishonored me and all my fellow Vietnam veterans. Sure, there were a couple bad-apples, but I saw none, and I saw it all, and if I did, as an army officer, it was my obligation to stop it, or at the very least report it. Why is there not a single record anywhere of you ever reporting any incidents like this or having the perpetrators arrested? The answer is simple. You are a liar. Your medals and mine are not a free pass for lifetime, Senator Kerry, to bypass character, integrity, and morality. I earn my green beret over and over daily in all aspects of my life.

Eight National Guard green berets, and other National Guard soldiers, have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you totally dishonored their widows and families by lumping National Guard service in with being a draft-dodger, conscientious objector, and deserter, just so you can try to sabotage the patriotism of our President who proudly served as an Air National Guard jet pilot. I have a son earning his green beret at Fort Bragg right now, and his wife serves honorably in the Air National Guard, just like President Bush did, and I am as proud of her as I am my son. I volunteered for Vietnam and have no problem whatsoever with President Bush being our Commander-In-Chief. In fact, I am proud of him as our leader.

John Kerry, you personally derailed the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, HR2883, in 2001, after it had passed the House by a 411 to 1 vote, and thousands of pro-American Montagnard tribespeople in Vietnam died since then who could have been saved, by you. Earlier, as Chair of the Senate Select Committee on MIA/POW Affairs, you personally quashed the efforts of any and all veterans to report sightings of living POW’s, when you held those reins in Congress. You have fought tooth and nail to push for the US to normalize relations with Vietnam for years. Why, Mr. Kerry? Simple, your first cousin C. Stewart Forbes, CEO, of Colliers International, recently signed a contract with Hanoi, worth BILLIONS of dollars for Collier’s International to become the exclusive real estate representative for the country of Vietnam.

“Hanoi John,” now that it works for you, you beat your chest about your Vietnam service, but to me, you are a phony, opportunistic, hypocrite. You are one of those politicians that is like a fertilizer machine: all that comes out of you is horse manure, and you are spreading it everywhere.

Medals do not make a man. Morals do.

Don Bendell
Canon City, Colorado

Don Bendell served as an officer in four Special Forces Groups, is a best-selling author with over 1,500,000 copies of his books in print worldwide, a 1995 inductee into the International Karate Hall of Fame, and owns karate schools in southern Colorado.

February 25, 2004, 8:34 AM EST

NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio -- One visitor to Home Depot has been hunting for more than home improvement items.

A Cooper's hawk has been flying above the stocked shelves at a suburban Cleveland store for more than a week while feeding on pigeons that live in the rafters.

The brown bird's three-foot wing span casts a moving shadow across the concrete floor, causing customers and workers to duck and cock their heads toward the 25-foot ceiling.

The hawk entered the store through an open door while chasing a pigeon last Saturday. It caught its prey above the electrical aisle, worker Craig Warth said. Witnesses saw the hawk rip the pigeon apart and feed until nothing was left but feathers and claws.

"It wasn't a pretty sight," said Terry McGuire, assistant manager. "Some of the customers were upset. Some said it was the neatest thing they had ever seen."

Workers said about 15 pigeons were living in the store, but since the hawk arrived, few are left. Cooper's hawks are a protected species, so the bird can't be harmed or killed.

Local wildlife experts say the hawk will likely leave when the pigeons are gone.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

Brooklyn essayist John Lee was a swashbuckling computer hacker nicknamed "Corrupt" when Wired magazine put him on its cover a decade ago.

The 29-year-old Lee has cleaned up his act since the Wired story headlined "Gang War in Cyberspace."

But now he's shaking up cyberspace again with his claim that two popular "bloggers" - Choire Sicha of Gawker.com and Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette.com - are guilty of subtle racism.

"These sites have decided that one way to telegraph their supreme coolness is to continually joke about non-whites as marginalized second-class citizens," Lee, who is African American, wrote about the Web logs owned by British Internet entrepreneur Nick Denton.

"It's this casual, damaging disregard that is hard to quantify, and yet, Gawker and Wonkette exemplify the growing phenomenon of white hipsters adopting a casual racism," Lee continued. "Is it any wonder so many still feel blogging's a white man's sport?"

Since Lee leveled his charge this week on Africana.com, a chorus of bloggers have weighed in pro and con, and Sicha and Cox have been at pains to defend themselves.

"I would applaud John Lee for making me feel guilty, but I am a white liberal - it's just not that hard," Cox wrote. "My intent ... is to mock the powerful and to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the true believers. If Lee didn't understand that's what I was trying to do [in her facetious commentary on rap mogul Russell Simmons recently disrupting a celeb-studded Democratic strategy session on the upper West Side], I don't think it's my job to explain the joke to him."

Sicha, meanwhile, E-mailed me: "My interns are busily drafting Mr. Lee a lengthy memo on the meaning of sarcasm."

Lee, for his part, sounded greatly amused.

"Who knew this firestorm du jour would inspire a response like Dean losing a primary?" he told me. "When Gawker and Wonkette are confronted with their own brand of sarcasm and subjective inspection they react like a comedian bombing onstage, saying, 'You don't get it!'

"We do get it. It's just funnier to see how thin-skinned they are."

Here's the Link

(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable job. But that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated only along the coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong). The rough stuff in the hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller, faster PBRs.

(2) Three Purple Hearts but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.

(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50, Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retrieves the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong.

(a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic integrity of a Frisbee after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's.

(b) Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a .50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no danger to you just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and you wanted some daring do in your after-action report). And we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.

(c) Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless. It couldn't run and it couldn' t return fire. It was stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during or after a firefight.

Something is fishy.

Here we have a JFK wannabe (the guy Halsey wanted to court martial for carelessly losing his boat and getting a couple people killed by running across the bow of a Jap destroyer) who is hardly in Vietnam long enough to get good tan, collects medals faster than Audie Murphy in a job where lots of medals weren't common, gets sent home eight months early, requests separation from active duty a few months after that so he can run for Congress, finds out war heroes don't sell well in Massachusetts in 1970 so reinvents himself as Jane Fonda, throws his ribbons in the dirt with the cameras running to jump start his political career, gets Stillborn Pell to invite him to address Congress and Bobby Kennedy's speechwriter to do the heavy lifting, winds up in the Senate himself a
few years later, votes against every major defense bill, says the CIA is
irrelevant after the Wall came down, votes against the Gulf War, a big mistake since that turned out well, decides not to make the same mistake twice so votes for invading Iraq, but oops, that didn't turn out so well so he now says he really didn't mean for Bush to go to war when he voted to allow him to go to war.

I'm real glad you or I never had this guy covering our flanks in Vietnam. I sure don't want him as Commander in Chief. I hope that somebody from CTF-115 shows up with some facts challenging Kerry's Vietnam record. I know in my gut it's wildly inflated. And fishy.

Keep smiling,

Mike

"While the Statue of Liberty remains shuttered for lack of $5 million in post-Sept. 11 upgrades, Congress in January mandated $10.7 billion in "earmarked" projects (also known as home-state "pork"), including: $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa, $50 million to make sure a Florida beach resort bridge remains toll-free, $450,000 to decipher the gene structure of rainbow trout, $225,000 to repair a public swimming pool whose drain U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada clogged with tadpoles when he was a kid, $200,000 to introduce golf to youngsters, $90,000 for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and, ironically, $500,000 for a University of Akron program that analyzes how Congress makes difficult budget decisions. [CBS News, 12-11-03; Associated Press, 12-6-03; Taxpayers for Common Sense press release, 12-8-03; New York Times, 12-20-03; Houston Chronicle, 1-26-03; Washington Post, 1-28-03]"

Source: Chuck Shepherd, msnbc, February 8, 2004

And now he's running for president as a populist. His first wife came from a Philadelphia Main Line family worth $300 million. His second wife is a pickle-and-ketchup heiress.

Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest.

The Kerrys ski at a spa the widow Heinz owns in Aspen, and they summer on Nantucket in a sprawling seaside "cottage" on Hurlbert Avenue, which is so well-appointed that at a recent fund-raiser, they imported porta-toilets onto the front lawn so the donors wouldn't use the inside bathrooms. (They later claimed the decision was made on septic, not social, considerations).

It's a wonderful life these days for John Kerry. He sails Nantucket Sound in "the Scaramouche," a 42-foot Hinckley powerboat. Martha Stewart has a similar boat; the no-frills model reportedly starts at $695,000.

Sen. Kerry bought it new, for cash.

Every Tuesday night, the local politicians here that Kerry elbowed out of his way on his march to the top watch, fascinated, as he claims victory in more primaries and denounces the special interests, the "millionaires" and "the overprivileged."

"His initials are JFK," longtime state Senate President William M. Bulger used to muse on St. Patrick's Day, "Just for Kerry. He's only Irish every sixth year." And now it turns out that he's not Irish at all.

But in the parochial world of Bay State politics, he was never really seen as Irish, even when he was claiming to be (although now, of course, he says that any references to his alleged Hibernian heritage were mistakenly put into the Congressional Record by an aide who apparently didn't know that on his paternal side he is, in fact, part-Jewish).

Kerry is, in fact, a Brahmin - his mother was a Forbes, from one of Massachusetts' oldest WASP families. The ancestor who wed Ralph Waldo
Emerson's daughter was marrying down.

At the risk of engaging in ethnic stereotyping, Yankees have a reputation for, shall we say, frugality. And Kerry tosses around quarters like they were manhole covers. In 1993, for instance, living on a senator's salary of about $100,000, he managed to give a total of $135 to charity.

Yet that same year, he was somehow able to scrape together $8,600 for a brand-new, imported Italian motorcycle, a Ducati Paso 907 IE. He kept it for years, until he decided to run for president, at which time he traded it in for a Harley-Davidson like the one he rode onto "The Tonight Show" set a couple of months ago as Jay Leno applauded his fellow Bay Stater.

Of course, in 1993 he was between his first and second heiresses - a time he now calls "the wandering years," although an equally apt description might be "the freeloading years."

For some of the time, he was, for all practical purposes, homeless. His friends allowed him into a real-estate deal in which he flipped a condo for quick resale, netting a $21,000 profit on a cash investment of exactly nothing. For months he rode around in a new car supplied by a shady local Buick dealer. When the dealer's ties to a congressman who was later indicted for racketeering were exposed, Kerry quickly explained that the non-payment was a mere oversight, and wrote out a check.

In the Senate, his record of his constituent services has been lackluster, and most of his colleagues, despite their public support, are hard-pressed to list an accomplishment. Just last fall, a Boston TV reporter ambushed three congressmen with the question, name something John Kerry has accomplished in Congress. After a few nervous giggles, two could think of nothing, and a third mentioned a baseball field, and then misidentified Kerry as "Sen. Kennedy."

Many of his constituents see him in person only when he is cutting them in line at an airport, a clam shack or the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

One talk-show caller a few weeks back recalled standing behind a police barricade in 2002 as the Rolling Stones played the Orpheum Theater, a short limousine ride from Kerry's Louisburg Square mansion.

The caller, Jay, said he began heckling Kerry and his wife as they attempted to enter the theater. Finally, he said, the senator turned to him and asked him the eternal question.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Yeah," said Jay. "You're a gold-digger."

John Kerry. First he looks at the purse.

Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and syndicated talk-radio host, has been covering John Kerry for 25 years.

As Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, [consolidates his]...bid for the White House, Americans should know a few things about him that he might prefer go unmentioned - and I don't mean his $75 haircuts.

When Mr. Kerry pontificated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day, a group of veterans turned their backs on him and walked away. They remembered Mr. Kerry as the anti-war activist who testified before Congress during the war, accusing veterans of being war criminals. The dust jacket of Mr. Kerry's pro-Hanoi book, "The New Soldier," features a photograph of his ragged band of radicals mocking the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, which depicts the flag raising on Iwo Jima, with an upside-down American flag.

Retired Gen. George S. Patton III charged that Mr. Kerry's actions as an anti-war activist had "given aid and comfort to the enemy," as had the actions of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. Also, Mr. Kerry lied when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the White House fence; he later admitted they weren't his. [The ones he received are] now...displayed on his office wall.

Long after he changed sides in congressional hearings, Mr. Kerry lobbied for renewed trade relations with Hanoi. [Interestingly] at the same time, his cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for Colliers International, assisted in brokering a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port at Vung Tau, Vietnam - an odd coincidence.

As noted in the Inside Politics column of Nov. 14 (Nation), historian Douglas Brinkley is writing Mr. Kerry's biography. Hopefully, he'll include the senator's latest ignominious feat: preventing the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR 2833) from coming to a vote in the Senate, claiming human rights would deteriorate as a result. His actions sent a clear signal to Hanoi that Congress cares little about the human rights for which so many Americans fought and died. [Of note], the State Department ranked Vietnam among the 10 regimes worldwide least tolerant of religious freedom.

Recently, 354 churches of the Montagnards, a Christian ethnic minority, were forcibly disbanded, and by mid-October, more than 50 Christian pastors and elders had been arrested in Dak Lak province alone. On Oct. 29, the secret police executed three Montagnards by lethal injection simply for protesting religious repression. The communists are conducting a pogrom against the Montagnards, forcing Christians to drink a mixture of goat's blood and alcohol and renounce Christianity. Thousands have been killed or imprisoned or have just "disappeared." [During the vietnam war] the Montagnards lost one-half of their adult male population fighting for the United States; and without them, there might be thousands more American names on that somber black granite wall at the Vietnam memorial.

As Mr. Kerry...[makes his] run for the presidency, people must remember that he has fought harder for Hanoi as an anti-war activist and a senator than he did against the Vietnamese communists while serving in the Navy in Vietnam.

MICHAEL BENGE, Foreign Service officer and former Vietnam POW (1968 to 1973); Washington

Two Sides of the Wrong Coin

It wasn't his pride that got in the way
It was those silk panties
She wouldn't give it up

So he rode down the road
His headlight disengaged
He was flippin' two sides of the wrong coin
The man's losin' either way

Later down the highway
He dreams of three phase drunkenness
He plans on starting out evil handsome
Then turning into the charming Romeo of the west

Becoming distinctively invisible
Makes him a happy man
Bulletproof is the passion of his crime

When he gets that coin out the next time
I hope he gets lucky

egf 4/10/82