The word Monégasque means something of, from, or related to Monaco, a small sovereign city-state located in southwestern Europe. When American actress Grace Kelly retired from acting at age 26 in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco she retained her American roots and maintained dual U.S. and Monégasque citizenship.
Former Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean had triple citizenship on taking office: Haitian by birth, Canadian by naturalisation, and French by marriage. However, she surrendered her French citizenship because French citizens are not permitted to serve in another country’s military, and the Governor General is in the formal line of command for the Canadian Armed Forces.
80% of Haitians are Roman Catholic, 16% are Protestant, and 4% practice another religion.
Voodoo is often practiced alongside Christianity.
A leading American Protestant denomination, the Episcopal Church, just concluded its every-three-years general convention, this time in Salt Lake City. The church elected its presiding bishop for the next nine years, Michael Curry, who most recently has served as Bishop of North Carolina. He is the first black person to be elected presiding bishop.
In 2003 Gene Robinson was the first openly homosexual bishop elected in a major American Christian church. This was in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a long poem called “The Song of the Vermonters” about the time (around 1779) when New York and New Hampshire argued over which of them owned the land now known as Vermont. It’s final verse was:
Whittier later called the poem “a boy’s practical joke.”
The city of Whittier, California is about 10 miles southeast of Los Angeles. This city is named after the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier.
Also, Vermont was not one of the 13 original colonies.
Vermont’s lone minor league baseball franchise, Burlington’s Vermont Lake Monsters, take their name from Champ, a reputed giant serpent/reptile/dinosaur/whatever that lives in Lake Champlain. The Abenaki Indians called the creature “Tatoskok”, and Samuel de Champlain himself is supposed to have spotted the creature as he was fighting the Iroquois on the bank of the lake. Although no such sighting was recorded by Champlain, a member of his expedition did record a sighting in his diary.
The Vermont Lake Monsters are a Short-Season A class minor league baseball team affiliated with the MLB Oakland Athletics. They play their home games at Centennial Field, one of the oldest stadiums in minor league baseball. They originally began as an affiliate for the MLB Montreal Expos. As the then-Vermont Expos they played their first game in Burlington on June 16, 1994.
In September 2004 when the Montreal Expos announced they would move to Washington, D.C. for the 2005 season, they would rename themselves the Washington Nationals.
Minor League Baseball (MiLB; www.milb.com) gives clubs 60 days after the end of the season to change their names and logos. Vermont did not have enough time for an identity change, so they retained the Expos nickname for the 2005 season. The club’s last game as the Vermont Expos was on September 8, 2005.
They were the last professional ball club to carry the Expos name.
There have been two warships named USS *Vermont *to serve in the U.S. Navy; the third, a Virginia-class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, was named in September 2014 and is now under construction.
On 04 March 1791 Vermont became the 14th state of the Union, less than a year from when the 13th state, Rhode Island, ratified the Constitution.
Rhode Island’s full official name is The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Prior to its colonization, Rhode Island was populated by the Narragansett tribe, a tribe of the Algonquians. The Dutch originally claimed Rhode Island and other surrounding lands as the Colony of New Netherlands. An early Dutch name for Rhode Island was Roode Eysland.
Rhode Island was the only one of the colonies not to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the last of the original thirteen to ratify.
Only three large democracies in the world lack a written constitution: The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel.
The largest democracy in the world, India, is the seventh largest country by area and the second most populous country in the world. With about 1.25 billion people, India has roughly one-sixth of the world’s population.
India also has the most enslaved people in the world. About 14 million people are enslaved, according to the second edition of the Global Slavery Index.
In a British House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947, once and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill joked, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
The Hudson Bay town of Churchill, Manitoba is best known for its concentration of polar bears, who migrate from the shore inland every autumn. The large number of tourists can safely view them from specially modified buses known as tundra buggies. Local authorities maintain a so-called “polar bear jail” where bears (mostly adolescents) who persistently loiter in or close to town, are held after being tranquilized, pending release back into the wild when the bay freezes over.
It was in Fulton, Missouri at Westminster College where Chuchill gave his Iron Curtain speech on 05 March 1946:
The bathyscaphe Trieste, designed and built by Auguste Piccard and crewed by his son Jacques and US Navy Lt. Don Walsh, was the first vessel to reach the bottom of the deepest known part of the Earth’s oceans, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench. Once, in 1960, for about 20 minutes.