The Houston Main Building (HMB) formerly the Prudential Building, was a skyscraper in the Texas Medical Center, Houston, Texas. It originally housed offices of the Prudential Insurance Company, before becoming a part of the MD Anderson Cancer Center. The building was demolished on January 8, 2012. The building was built in 1952. The building was the first corporate high rise building established outside of Downtown Houston. The 18 story, 500,000-square-foot (46,000 m2) building was designed by Kenneth Franzheim. The offices in the building served the states of Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. The MD Anderson Cancer Center bought the building in 1974. In 2002 MD Anderson announced that it planned to demolish the building and replace it with a four story medical campus. Area preservationists opposed the plan. William Daigneau, the vice president of operations and facilities, said that renovating the buildings would be too costly. In 2008 Daigneau said that the building was slowly disintegrating. A fresco, titled "The Future Belongs To Those Who Prepare For It," was located in the Prudential Building. The fresco, 16 feet (4.9 m) by 47 feet (14 m), depicts life on a farm in West Texas. The Prudential Life Insurance Company commissioned the mural from the artist Peter Hurd. The company wanted to evoke its motto, which was used as the painting's title. To create the mural, Hurd used construction workers as his models. Hurd himself appears as a soil conservation agent in the work. The vice president of MD Anderson, Bill Daigneau, said in 2008 the structural problems in the building are cracking the mural. Daigneau also said that the fresco "does not reflect the values of M.D. Anderson. ... There's the issue of who's running the farm, and who's working on it." In 2010 a benefactor from Artesia, New Mexico agreed to have the mural removed. The mural will become a part of the public library of Artesia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Main_Building
PETER HURD (1904-1984) arrived in Chadds Ford in 1923, with a click of his heels and a salute. He had recently left West Point after struggling through a personal conflict of interests: the military or painting. Hurd's respect for the work of N. C. Wyeth, and his own perseverance gave him the opportunity to meet Wyeth at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The meeting went well, and soon Hurd moved to Chadds Ford, and became a student of the renowned illustrator. Peter Hurd later commented that West Point was tough on its students, but N. C. Wyeth was tougher. For the next ten years, he lived and painted under the strict guidance of his teacher. All of the Wyeths were quite taken by this handsome, energetic young man in cowboy boots and hat, but none so much as N. C.’s eldest daughter, Henriette, who married Peter Hurd in 1929. Peter Hurd was born in Roswell, New Mexico, and his longing to return to New Mexico determined the course of his life and his art. Peter Hurd is best known for his watercolors, luminous egg temperas and lithographs depicting the New Mexican landscape he loved. Hurd was an early pioneer of the Italian renaissance medium of egg tempera in the US. In 1932, he introduced his young brother-in-law, Andrew Wyeth, to egg tempera. Eventually, N. C. Wyeth adopted the medium, as did son-in-law John W. McCoy.
http://www.wyethhurd.com/family.html

Hiccups are caused by involuntary contractions of your diaphragm — the muscle that separates your chest from your abdomen and plays an important role in breathing. This involuntary contraction causes your vocal cords to close very briefly, which produces the characteristic sound of a hiccup. There is no one proven cure for the hiccups. Different things may work at different times and for different people. The following hiccup remedies may be effective:
Holding your breath
Slowly drinking a cold glass of water
Breathing into a paper bag
Eating a spoonful of sugar
If your hiccups last longer than 48 hours, consult your doctor.
http://www.riversideonline.com/health_reference/Questions-Answers/AN01249.cfm

A legal battle between HarperCollins Publishers Inc. and a company run by one of its former chief executives is putting the spotlight on a key issue in book publishing today: Who owns the e-book rights to decades-old titles? Two days before Christmas, HarperCollins filed a copyright-infringement suit against Open Road Integrated Media Inc. in federal court in New York, seeking to block Open Road from selling an e-book edition of Jean Craighead George's 1972 children's novel "Julie of the Wolves." The lawsuit appears likely to reopen a critical issue relating to e-book rights that was thought to be resolved about a decade ago. That is, whether book contracts written before the digital age granted publishers digital rights, or whether those rights were retained by the author and could be sold to an e-publisher. JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203436904577153142705735660.html

Chief Justice John Roberts starts out his analysis in Jan. 11’s unanimous ruling on a religious-freedom case by drawing on the biggest and oldest of them all, the Magna Carta or Great Charter of 1215. That’s when the chief’s namesake, King John, agreed that “the English church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired.” Skipping lightly through Henry II, Henry VIII, the 1662 Act of Uniformity and Hamilton James Eckenrode’s 1910 review of 17th century Virginia colonial law, the chief justice finds that the Constitution prevents the government both from appointing ministers in a church and from “interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.” All this is in service of resolving the complaint by Cheryl Perich, a kindergarten teacher at a Lutheran school who also held a diploma designating her as a commissioned minister. The school fired her after a disability leave, and Ms. Perich sued, claiming a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Chief Justice Roberts found that religious groups are entitled to an exception from federal employment laws because of their special constitutional status. Specifically, he wrote: “Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so … infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.” And, to complete the case, the opinion found that Ms. Perich qualifies as a minister because of her credentials, although her actual job was as a schoolteacher.
Here’s the opinion http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-553.pdf and, if you share the reading habits of the chief, you can peruse that entire 1910 work, “Separation of Church and State in Virginia,” online at: http://books.google.com/books?id=2gwVAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falseonline PETER LANDERS http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/01/11/justices-turn-to-english-law-in-religious-freedom-ruling/