The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) is a result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), requiring all travelers to present a passport or other document that denotes identity and citizenship when entering the U.S. Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and the Caribbean region fall under WHTI.
See June 1, 2009 requirements for entering the U.S. http://travel.state.gov/travel/cbpmc/cbpmc_2223.html
Frequently asked questions on passports: http://www.travel.state.gov/passport/fri/faq/faq_1741.html
General passport information: http://www.travel.state.gov/

Just for Fun: USA.gov Word Cloud April 9th, 2009
From the Web Site: …75 most popular words on USA.gov, with the most frequently used words given greater prominence (larger font). The image was generated by Wordle after applying it to all the link titles on USA.gov. Below the image we show the same content as a list of the words in order of their frequency.
Source: USA.gov See Also: Create Your Own Word Clouds Using Wordlev

Cadmean victory (kad-MEE-uhn VIK-tuh-ree) noun
a victory won at as great a cost to the victor as to the vanquished
After Cadmus, a Phoenician prince in Greek mythology who introduced writing to the Greeks and founded the city of Thebes. Near the site where Cadmus was to build Thebes he encountered a dragon. Even though he managed to kill the dragon, only five of his comrades survived, with whom he founded the city. Other words coined after him are calamine (a pink powder used in skin lotions), from Latin calamina, from Greek kadmeia ge (Cadmean earth) and the name of the chemical element cadmium.
A similar eponym is Pyrrhic victory. A.Word.A.Day

Toledo’s banking disaster in 1931
“By the mid-1920s, Toledo had enjoyed three decades of booming growth. In the 1890s it was one of the only cities in the Midwest whose economy grew throughout the depression of 1893–1898. Buoyed by a welltimed oil strike in the region, a Gay-Nineties bicycle craze that set its wheel and metal shops humming with activity, and the relocation to the city of large eastern glass works, Toledo outpaced most other midsized cities in
industrial and population growth as the nineteenth century drew to a close…From 1930 through 1932, the largest single year’s loss of deposits for any of the twelve Federal Reserve districts was that which occurred in 1931 in the Fourth District, the area encompassing all of Ohio, the western half of Pennsylvania, and the eastern half of Kentucky, when over 11.3 percent of the total deposits in the region were lost. The Fourth District’s distinction as the worst-affected district in the country that year was due
largely to the contribution of Toledo, which alone accounted for three-quarters
of the district’s losses. Toledo’s banking disaster would have been significant had only one and not five of its banks gone belly up. During the whole of the Great Depression,
only nine banks with assets exceeding $50 million failed. One of these was the
Ohio Bank located in Toledo.”
http://www.ohiostatepress.org/books/Book%20PDFs/Messer-Kruse%20Banksters.pdf

Keepers (books I would read again)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
http://www.italianstudies.org/comedy/index.htm
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mays—more about food than house restoration—within the book finds two sections of recipes, one for winter and one for summer.

maudlin (MAWD-lin) adjective
overly sentimental
After Mary Magdalene, a Biblical character who was a follower of Jesus. In medieval art she was depicted as a penitent weeping for her sins (she washed the feet of Jesus with her tears) and her name became synonymous with tearful sentimentality. The name Magdalene means "of Magdala" in Greek and is derived after a town on the Sea of Galilee. The name Magdala, in turn, means tower in Aramaic. So here we have a word coined after a person, who was named after a place, which was named after a thing.
In an allusion to her earlier life, Mary Magdalene's name has sprouted another eponym, magdalene, meaning a reformed prostitute. A.Word.A.Day

Why are there two dates for Easter? They have existed for centuries, since the Great Schism of 1054 when a Roman legate and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other. The two churches developed separate traditions, with Orthodox Christians following the Julian calendar to calculate when to celebrate Easter, and Roman Catholics (and Protestants) adhering to the newer Gregorian calendar to do the same. The Julian calendar predates by centuries the more commonly used Gregorian calendar of today. http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/04/13/faith/z7669c2b6e5fcf5578825759000575202.txt

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. It was the first presidential assassination in American history.
Shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The ship was on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. More than 1,500 people drowned in the 30-degree water.
On April 14, 1939 John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath was published. (Books by this author.) He wrote the novel in five months, writing about 2,000 words a day. It became an immediate sensation, and was the best-selling book of 1939. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The Writer’s Almanac