William McKinley (1843–1901) was the 25th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1897, until his death.  McKinley led the nation to victory in the Spanish–American War, raised protective tariffs to promote American industry, and maintained the nation on the gold standard in a rejection of inflationary proposals.  McKinley's administration ended with his assassination in September 1901, but his presidency marked the beginning of a period of dominance by the Republican Party that lasted for more than a third of a century.  McKinley served in the Civil War and rose from private to brevet major.  After the war, he settled in Canton, Ohio, where he practiced law and married Ida Saxton.  In 1876, he was elected to Congress, where he became the Republican Party's expert on the protective tariff, which he promised would bring prosperity.  His 1890 McKinley Tariff was highly controversial; which together with a Democratic redistricting aimed at gerrymandering him out of office, led to his defeat in the Democratic landslide of 1890.  He was elected Ohio's governor in 1891 and 1893, steering a moderate course between capital and labor interests.  With the aid of his close adviser Mark Hanna, he secured the Republican nomination for president in 1896, amid a deep economic depression.  He defeated his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, after a front-porch campaign in which he advocated "sound money" (the gold standard unless altered by international agreement) and promised that high tariffs would restore prosperity.  Rapid economic growth marked McKinley's presidency.  He promoted the 1897 Dingley Tariff to protect manufacturers and factory workers from foreign competition, and in 1900, he secured the passage of the Gold Standard Act.  McKinley hoped to persuade Spain to grant independence to rebellious Cuba without conflict, but when negotiation failed, he led the nation in the Spanish–American War of 1898; the U.S. victory was quick and decisive.  As part of the peace settlement Spain was required to turn over to the United States its main overseas colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; Cuba was promised independence but at that time remained under the control of the U.S. Army.  The United States annexed the independent Republic of Hawaii in 1898 and it became a U.S. territory.  McKinley defeated Bryan again in the 1900 presidential election, in a campaign focused on imperialism, prosperity, and free silver. President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in September 1901, and was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.  Historians regard McKinley's 1896 victory as a realigning election, in which the political stalemate of the post-Civil War era gave way to the Republican-dominated Fourth Party System, which began with the Progressive Era.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McKinley

The Fourth Party System is the term used in political science and history for the period in American political history from about 1896 to 1932 that was dominated by the Republican party, excepting the 1912 split in which Democrats held the White House for eight years.  History texts usually call it the Progressive Era.  The concept was introduced under the name "System of 1896" by E.E. Schattschneider in 1960, and the numbering scheme was added by political scientists in the mid 1960s.  The period featured a transformation from the issues of the Third Party System, which had focused on the American Civil War, Reconstruction, race and monetary issues.  The era began in the severe depression of 1893 and the extraordinarily intense election of 1896.  It included the Progressive Era, World War I, and the start of the Great Depression.  The Great Depression caused a realignment that produced the Fifth Party System, dominated by the Democratic New Deal Coalition until the 1960s.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Party_System 

The excellence and ambition of The Toledo Museum of Art's collections are not wholly unprecedented.  What's special is that the museum's impressive Old Master and 19th-century paintings are not simply astute selections made during a prosperous past.  A large family portrait by Frans Hals, from the early 1620s, was acquired in 2011; a splendid Guercino, "Lot and His Daughters" (1651-52), entered the collection in 2009: and a pair of delectable little genre scenes by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) came to Toledo in 2006.  That the Chardins are outstanding in a collection full of high points is testimony to their merit.  Small but potent, "The Washerwoman" and "The Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern" (both c. 1733-39), each less than 16 inches by 12½ inches, make their presence felt across a fairly large gallery.  In Chardin's lifetime, "The Washerwoman" and "The Woman Drawing Water at a Cistern"—among other of his works—were so admired and in demand that he made multiple versions of them, a common practice at the time.  Several variants of both paintings are known, most of them now in major European museums.  What's exciting about Toledo's pictures is not only their impeccable provenance and condition, but also that they are recent discoveries.  According to Toledo curator Lawrence Nichols, the paintings were found—not long before they were acquired—in a private collection in Lyon, France, where they had been since before the French Revolution.  That sort of thing understandably dazzles art historians and curators, as does the fact that the pair have never been relined, as evidenced by the fresh surface.  (Old-fashioned methods of relining, a process of adding a new layer of canvas to the backs of fragile paintings for support, can flatten brushstrokes.)  But it's Chardin's magic, the pure visual allure of the two little paintings, that draws us to them: a range of textures—copper, cloth, wood, stone, fur—conjured up by paint that remains paint, weighty forms, palpable light and, above all, the plain-spoken quality of it all.  Karen Wilkin   Read more and see pictures at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443866404577567002361534704.html

Showy moments are bursting out in a growing number of Major League Soccer stadiums in North America.  Such spectacles, called tifo, are a bit of soccer culture imported from Europe and Latin America, in which hundreds of fans put on choreographed displays in the stands.  In typical tifo, fans might unfurl massive banners, wave flags, throw confetti and sing lusty soccer songs.  The word tifo originates from the Italian tifosi, meaning fans, and the displays—often up for just a few minutes before a half or after a goal—have been fixtures in much of the world for decades.  Now U.S. and Canadian fan groups are spending thousands of dollars and countless hours designing, painting and orchestrating.  What was probably the most ambitious tifo ever in the U.S. was unveiled last season:  Before a game between the Seattle Sounders FC and Portland Timbers, hundreds of Seattle fans unfurled nine massive fabric sheets.  Festooned with the team's colors and covering nearly 26,000 square feet—an area larger than half a football field—the banners featured portraits of key Seattle players and the message: "Decades of Dominance."  But in the stands, tifo sometimes gets lost in translation.  "We've had people yelling at us," says Brian Spence, a member of the Screaming Eagles club, which cheers the D.C. United team in the nation's capital.  When his group tried to perform tifo in the past, he says fans groaned:  " 'Put that banner down. I paid good money to see the game, not to see this stupid thing.' "  "It's easier to do [tifo] somewhere where it's expected, it's part of the culture," says D.C. United fan Srdan Bastaic and a leader of the District Ultras supporters group.  But, in America, he says, "you have to explain the whole concept."   Brian Aguilar  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443696604577646143196168230.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Great Jones Street is a street in New York City's NoHo district in Manhattan, essentially another name for 3rd Street between Broadway and the Bowery.  The street was named for Samuel Jones, a lawyer who became known as "The Father of The New York Bar," due to his work on revising New York State's statutes in 1789 with Richard Varick, who also had a street named after him in SoHo.   Jones was a member of the New York State Assembly from 1796 to 1799, and also served as the state's first Comptroller.  Jones deeded the site of the street to the city with the stipulation that any street that ran through the property had to be named for him.  However, when the street was first created in 1789, the city already had a "Jones Street" in Greenwich Village, named for Doctor Gardner Jones, Samuel Jones' brother-in-law.  The confusion between two streets with the same name was broken when Samuel Jones suggested that his street be called "Great Jones Street".  An alternative theory suggests that the street was called "Great" because it was the wider of the two Jones Streets.   Great Jones Street is the title of a novel by the American author Don DeLillo.  Great Jones Street is the title of a song by the American band Luna, from their 1994 album Bewitched. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Jones_Street

Swiss chard is high in vitamin K and A.  One cup supplies 38 percent of your daily magnesium and 22 percent of iron as recommended by the US Department of Agriculture.  Besides being super-healthy, it’s a versatile vegetable.  It can be eaten raw, sautéed or steamed and is good as a substitute for spinach or other greens in soups, salads and cooked and baked dishes.  Find preparation tips at:  http://www.ehow.com/how_4523250_eat-swiss-chard.html  

September 16, 2012  Researchers on Guam, a 30-mile-long U.S. island about 3,800 miles west of Hawaii, found that arachnid populations grew as much as 40-fold in the wake of entire species of insect-eating birds eaten into oblivion by invasive brown treesnakes.  One biologist suspects spiders are multiplying also in other regions where birds are in decline.  Guam is the textbook study for what can happen to birds when an ecosystem is devastated by invasive species.  After brown treesnakes somehow made their way to island in the 1940s, it took less than half a century for them to extirpate all but two of the island’s dozen native bird species.  But as the birds slipped down the gullets of the insatiable nocturnal predators, spider populations proliferated. Did the fall of the birds lead to the rise of the spiders?  Biologists from Rice University, the University of Washington and the University of Guam found that Guam’s jungles have as many as 40 times more spiders than are found on nearby islands like Saipan, according to their research paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.  “You can’t walk through the jungles on Guam without a stick in your hand to knock down the spiderwebs,” says Haldre Rogers, a Huxley Fellow in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice and the lead author of the study published last week.  http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/16/spiders-take-control-as-birds-fade-from-guam/