Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was the United States Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and the White House chief of staff under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Prior to these cabinet-level positions, he retired as a general from the United States Army, having been Supreme Allied Commander Europe after serving as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Born in Bala Cynwyd, Haig served in the Korean War after graduating from the United States Military Academy. In the Korean War, he served as an aide to General Edward Almond. After the war, he served as an aide to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. During the Vietnam War, Haig commanded a battalion and a brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. For his service, Haig was a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster, the Purple Heart. In 1969 Haig became an assistant to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, he became vice chief of staff of the Army, the second-highest-ranking position in the Army, in 1972.

After the 1973 resignation of H. R. Haldeman, Haig became President Nixon's chief of staff. Serving in the wake of the Watergate scandal, he became influential in the final months of Nixon's tenure, played a role in persuading Nixon to resign in August 1974. Haig continued to serve as chief of staff for the first month of President Ford's tenure. From 1974 to 1979, Haig served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, commanding all NATO forces in Europe, he pursued a career in business. After Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, he nominated Haig to be his secretary of state. After the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, Haig asserted "I am in control here," suggesting that he served as acting president in Reagan's and Bush's absence iterating that he meant that he was functionally in control of the government. During the Falklands War, Haig sought to broker peace between Argentina, he resigned from Reagan's cabinet in July 1982. After leaving office, he unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries.

He served as the head of a consulting firm and hosted the television program World Business Review. Haig was born in Bala Cynwyd, the middle of three children of Alexander Meigs Haig Sr. a Republican lawyer of Scottish descent, his wife, Regina Anne. When Haig was 9, his father, aged 41, died of cancer, his Irish American mother raised her children in the Catholic faith. Haig attended Saint Joseph's Preparatory School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on scholarship. Unable to secure his desired appointment to the United States Military Academy, Haig studied at the University of Notre Dame for two years before securing a congressional appointment to the Academy in 1944 at the behest of his uncle, who served as the Philadelphia municipal government's director of public works. Enrolled in an accelerated wartime curriculum that deemphasized the humanities and social sciences, Haig graduated in the bottom third of his class in 1947. Although a West Point superintendent characterized Haig as "the last man in his class anyone expected to become the first general," other classmates acknowledged his "strong convictions and stronger ambitions."

Haig earned an M. B. A. from the Columbia Business School in 1955 and an M. A. in international relations from Georgetown University in 1961. His thesis for the latter degree examined the role of military officers in making national policy; as a young officer, Haig served as an aide to Lieutenant General Alonzo Patrick Fox, a deputy chief of staff to General Douglas MacArthur. In 1950 Haig married Patricia. In the early days of the Korean War, Haig was responsible for maintaining General MacArthur's situation map and briefing MacArthur each evening on the day's battlefield events. Haig served with the X Corps, as aide to MacArthur's chief of staff, General Edward Almond, who awarded Haig two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star with Valor device. Haig participated in four Korean War campaigns, including the Battle of Inchon, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, the evacuation of Hŭngnam, as Almond's aide. Haig served as a staff officer in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at the Pentagon, was appointed military assistant to Secretary of the Army Stephen Ailes in 1964.

He was appointed military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, continuing in that service until the end of 1965. In 1966, Haig graduated from the United States Army War College. In 1966 Haig took command of a battalion of the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. On May 22, 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Haig was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the U. S. Army's second highest medal for valor, by General William Westmoreland as a result of his actions during the Battle of Ap Gu in March 1967. During the battle, Haig's troops became pinned down by a Viet Cong force that outnumbered U. S. forces by three to one. In an attempt to survey the battlefield, Haig flew to the point of contact, his helicopter was subsequently shot down. Two days of bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued. An exc

Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez known as CAP and referred to as El Gocho, was a Venezuelan politician, President of Venezuela from 12 March 1974 to 12 March 1979 and again from 2 February 1989 to 21 May 1993. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to enormous income from petroleum exportation. However, his second period saw a continuation of the economic crisis of the 1980s, saw a series of social crises, a popular revolt and two coup attempts in 1992. In May 1993 he became the first Venezuelan president to be forced out of the office by the Supreme Court, for the embezzlement of 250 million bolívars belonging to a presidential discretionary fund. Carlos Andrés Pérez was born at the hacienda La Argentina, on the Venezuelan-Colombian border near the town of Rubio, Táchira state, the 11th of 12 children in a middle-class family, his father, Antonio Pérez Lemus, was a Colombian-born coffee planter and pharmacist of Spanish Peninsular and Canary Islander ancestry who emigrated to Venezuela during the last years of the 19th century.

His mother, Julia Rodríguez, was the daughter of a prominent landowner in the town of Rubio and the granddaughter of Venezuelan refugees who had fled to the Andes and Colombia in the wake of the civil war that ravaged Venezuela in the 1860s. Pérez was educated at the María Inmaculada School in Rubio, run by Dominican friars, his childhood was spent between the family home in town, a rambling Spanish colonial-style house, the coffee haciendas owned by his father and maternal grandfather. Influenced by his grandfather, an avid book collector, Pérez read voraciously from an early age, including French and Spanish classics by Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas; as he grew older, Pérez became politically aware and managed to read Voltaire and Marx without the knowledge of his conservative parents. The combination of falling coffee prices, business disputes, harassment orchestrated by henchmen allied to dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, led to the financial ruin and physical deterioration of Antonio Pérez, who died of a heart attack in 1936.

This episode would force the widow Julia and her sons to move to Venezuela's capital, Caracas, in 1939, where two of Pérez's eldest brothers had gone to attend university. The death of his father had a profound impact on the young Pérez, bolstering his convictions that democratic freedoms and rights were the only guarantees against the arbitrary, tyrannical, use of state power. In Caracas, Pérez enrolled in the renowned Liceo Andrés Bello, where he graduated in 1944 with a major in Philosophy and Letters. In 1944, he enrolled for three years in the Law School of the Central University of Venezuela and one year in the Law School of the Free University of Colombia. However, the intensification of his political activism would prevent Pérez from completing his law degree; the political life of Carlos Andrés Pérez began at the age of 15, when he became a founding member of the Venezuelan Youth Association and a member of the National Democratic Party, both of which were opposed to the repressive administration of General Eleazar López Contreras, who had succeeded the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez in 1935.

He co-operated with the first labour unions in his region. When he moved to Caracas, in 1939, he started an ascendant political career as a youth leader and founder of the Democratic Action party, in which he would play an important role during the 20th century, first as a close ally to party founder Rómulo Betancourt and as a political leader in his own right. In October 1945, a group of civilians and young army officers plotted the overthrow of the government run by General Isaías Medina Angarita. At the age of 23, Pérez was appointed Private Secretary to the Junta President, Rómulo Betancourt, became Cabinet Secretary in 1946. However, in 1948, when the military staged a coup against the democratically elected government of Rómulo Gallegos, Pérez was forced to go into exile for a decade, he temporarily returned to Venezuela secretly in 1952 to complete special missions in his fight against the new dictatorial government. He was spent more than two years in jail in total. In Costa Rica, he was active in Venezuelan political refugee circles, worked as Editor in Chief of the newspaper La República and kept in close contact with Betancourt and other AD leaders.

In 1958, after the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Pérez returned to Venezuela and participated in the reorganization of the AD Party. He served as Minister of Interior and Justice from 1959 to 1964 and made his mark as a tough minister and canny politician who worked to neutralize small and radical right-wing and left-wing insurrections, the latter Cuban-influenced and Cuban-financed, that were being staged around the country; this was an important step in the pacification of the country in the mid-to-late 1960s, the consolidation of democracy and the integration of radical parties into the political process. Pérez was accused, however, of flagrant violations of human rights related to the torture and extrajudicial killings of insurgents and political leaders. After the end of the Betancourt administration and the 1963 elections, Pérez left government temporarily and dedicated himself to consolidating his support in the party. During this time, he served as head of the AD in Congress and was elected to the position of Secretary General of AD, a role, crucial in laying the ground for his presidential ambitions.

In 1973, Carlos Andrés Pérez was nominated to run for the presidency for AD. Youthful and energetic, Pérez ran a vibran

The color phi phenomenon is the fact that, when apparent motion is induced between objects with different colors, the color of the moving object abruptly changes midway along the path. It a perceptual illusion described by psychologists Paul Kolers and Michael von Grünau in which a disembodied perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images; the color phi phenomenon is a more complex variation of the phi phenomenon. Kolers and von Grünau investigated the phenomenon in response to a question posed by the philosopher Nelson Goodman, who asked what the effect of the color change would have on the phi phenomenon; the classic color phi phenomenon experiment involves a viewer or audience watching a screen, upon which the experimenter projects two images in succession. The first image depicts a blue dot at the top of the frame; the second image depicts a red dot on the bottom of the frame. The images may be shown in rapid succession, or each frame may be given several seconds of viewing time.

Once both images have been projected, the experimenter asks the viewer or audience to describe what they saw. At certain combinations of spacing and timing of the two images, a viewer will report a sensation of motion in the space between the two dots; the first spot will begin to appear to be moving, will "change color abruptly in the middle of its illusory path". The existence of the color phi phenomenon poses an interesting philosophical problem; when asked to describe their experience, subjects report seeing the abrupt color change before the second dot is presented. However, it is impossible for a subject to experience the color change before the second dot has been presented. Philosopher Daniel Dennett utilizes the color phi phenomenon in his argument against a philosophy known as Cartesian materialism. Lilac chaser Optical illusion Persistence of vision Phi phenomenon An interactive demonstration of the color phi phenomenon