1.
Office of the United States Trade Representative
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Established as the Office of the Special Trade Representative under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the USTR is part of the Executive Office of the President. With over 200 employees, the USTR has offices in Geneva, Switzerland, the Obama administrations last U. S. Trade Representative was Michael Froman, who assumed the office on June 21,2013. To fill the post, the President nominates someone for the position, the United States Trade Representative and Deputy United States Trade Representatives carry the title of Ambassador. Michael Froman served as the US Trade Representative until 2017, with Michael Punke, Ambassador Punke also concurrently serves as the U. S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization. On May 2,2013, President Obama nominated Michael Froman to succeed Ambassador Ron Kirk as the U. S. Trade Representative, the Senate confirmed Froman on June 19,2013, and he was sworn into office on June 21,2013. The USTR participates in the World Trade Organization, which is currently in the Doha Development Round and this is partially managed by the USTR Office of WTO and Multilateral Affairs. Relevant WTO agreements include the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers is an annual series that surveys prepared by the USTR, which reports significant foreign barriers to U. S. exports. Since 1986, the NTE provides, where feasible, quantitative estimates of the impact of foreign practices on the value of U. S. exports. Information is also included on actions taken to eliminate barriers and it is based on information provided by USTR, the U. S. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, and other agencies and sources, the Special 301 Report is prepared annually by the USTR under Section 182 as amended of the Trade Act of 1974. In 2006, along with the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the USTR published a list of places where large-scale copyright infringement takes place in the Special 301 Report, since 2010, the notorious markets report has been published as a separate report
2.
Bill Clinton
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William Jefferson Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Prior to the Presidency he was the 40th Governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981, before that, he served as Arkansas Attorney General from 1977 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, Clinton was ideogically a New Democrat, Clinton is married to Hillary Clinton, who served as United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 and U. S. Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and served the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham both earned degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the states education system, Clinton was elected President of the United States in 1992, defeating incumbent George H. W. Bush. At age 46, he was the third-youngest president and the first from the Baby Boomer generation, Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history and signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement. After failing to pass health care reform, the Democratic House was ousted when the Republican Party won control of the Congress in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to a second term, Clinton passed welfare reform and the State Childrens Health Insurance Program, providing health coverage for millions of children. Clinton was acquitted by the U. S. Senate in 1999, the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clintons presidency. In foreign policy, Clinton ordered U. S. Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U. S. President since World War II, since then, Clinton has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. He created the William J. Clinton Foundation to address international causes, such as the prevention of AIDS, in 2004, Clinton published his autobiography, My Life. In 2009, Clinton was named the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti, since leaving office, Clinton has been rated highly in public opinion polls of U. S. Presidents. Clinton was born on August 19,1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas and he was the son of William Jefferson Blythe Jr. a traveling salesman who had died in an automobile accident three months before his birth, and Virginia Dell Cassidy. His parents had married on September 4,1943, but this later proved to be bigamous. Soon after their son was born, his mother traveled to New Orleans to study nursing, leaving her son in Hope with her parents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and ran a small grocery store. At a time when the Southern United States was segregated racially, in 1950, Bills mother returned from nursing school and married Roger Clinton Sr. who owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his brother and Earl T. Ricks. The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950, although he immediately assumed use of his stepfathers surname, it was not until Clinton turned fifteen that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather. In Hot Springs, Clinton attended St. Johns Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School—where he was a student leader, avid reader
3.
Robert Zoellick
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Robert Bruce Zoellick is an American banker who was the eleventh president of the World Bank, a position he held from July 1,2007 to June 30,2012. He was previously a director of Goldman Sachs, United States Deputy Secretary of State and U. S. Trade Representative. Zoellick has been a fellow at his alma mater Harvard Kennedy School since retirement from the World Bank in July 1,2012. Robert Bruce Zoellick was born in Naperville, Illinois, the son of Gladys and his family is of German origin and he was raised Lutheran. Upon graduation from Harvard Law School Zoellick served as a law clerk for Judge Patricia Wald on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Zoellick served in various positions at the Department of the Treasury from 1985 to 1988. He held positions including Counselor to Secretary James Baker, Executive Secretary of the Department, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy. During George H. W. Bushs presidency, Zoellick served with Baker, by then Secretary of State, as Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs, in August 1992, Zoellick was appointed White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President. Zoellick was also appointed Bushs personal representative for the G7 Economic Summits in 1991 and 1992, after leaving government service, Zoellick served from 1993 to 1997 as an Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae. Zoellick signed the January 26,1998 letter to President Bill Clinton from Project for a New American Century that advocated war against Iraq, during 1999 Zoellick was, for a short period, the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Also during 1999, Zoellick served on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. In the 2000 presidential election campaign, Zoellick served as a policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group, led by Condoleezza Rice. James Baker designated him as his second-in-command—a sort of chief operating officer or chief of staff—in the 36-day battle over recounting the vote in Florida. Zoellick was named U. S. Trade Representative in Bushs first term, he was a member of the Executive Office and he also heavily promoted the Central American Free Trade Agreement over the objections of labor, environmental, and human rights groups. Zoellick played a key role in the U. S. -WTO dispute against the European Union over genetically modified foods. U, on January 7,2005, Bush nominated Zoellick to be Deputy Secretary of State. Zoellick assumed the office on February 22,2005, the New York Times reported on May 25,2006 that Zoellick could soon announce his departure. Zoellick agreed to serve as Deputy Secretary of State for not less than one year and he was seen as a major architect of the Bush administration’s policies regarding China. On September 21,2005, Zoellick created a stir on both sides of the Pacific by giving a remarkably candid speech to the National Committee on U. S. -China Relations. In the speech, he not only introduced the notion of China as a stakeholder in the international community
4.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
5.
Illinois
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Illinois is a state in the midwestern region of the United States, achieving statehood in 1818. It is the 6th most populous state and 25th largest state in terms of land area, the word Illinois comes from a French rendering of a native Algonquin word. For decades, OHare International Airport has been ranked as one of the worlds busiest airports, Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and politics. With the War of 1812 Illinois growth slowed as both Native Americans and Canadian forces often raided the American Frontier, mineral finds and timber stands also had spurred immigration—by the 1810s, the Eastern U. S. Railroads arose and matured in the 1840s, and soon carried immigrants to new homes in Illinois, as well as being a resource to ship their commodity crops out to markets. Railroads freed most of the land of Illinois and other states from the tyranny of water transport. By 1900, the growth of jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted a new group of immigrants. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars, the Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans in Chicago, who created the citys famous jazz and blues cultures. Three U. S. presidents have been elected while living in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, additionally, Ronald Reagan, whose political career was based in California, was the only U. S. president born and raised in Illinois. Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official slogan, Land of Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is located in the capital of Springfield. Illinois is the spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers name for the Illinois Native Americans. American scholars previously thought the name Illinois meant man or men in the Miami-Illinois language and this etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for man is ireniwa and plural men is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has also said to mean tribe of superior men. The name Illinois derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa he speaks the regular way and this was taken into the Ojibwe language, perhaps in the Ottawa dialect, and modified into ilinwe·. The French borrowed these forms, changing the ending to spell it as -ois. The current spelling form, Illinois, began to appear in the early 1670s, the Illinois name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms. American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, the Koster Site has been excavated and demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation
6.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
