Rudolph William Louis Giuliani is an American politician and public speaker who served as the 107th Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He acts as an attorney to President Donald Trump. Politically first a Democrat an Independent in the 1970s, a Republican since the 1980s, Giuliani served as United States Associate Attorney General from 1981 to 1983; that year he became the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, holding the position until 1989. When Giuliani took office as Mayor of New York City, he appointed a new police commissioner, William Bratton, who applied the broken windows theory of urban decay, which holds that minor disorders and violations create a permissive atmosphere which leads to further and more serious crimes which can threaten the safety of a city. Within several years, Giuliani was credited for making major improvements in the city's quality of life and lowering the rate of violent crimes. While Giuliani was still Mayor, he ran for the United States Senate in 2000.

Giuliani was named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2001, was given an honorary knighthood in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II for his leadership in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In 2002, Giuliani founded Giuliani Partners and sold Giuliani Capital Advisors, joined a Texas firm while opening a Manhattan office for the firm renamed Bracewell & Giuliani. Giuliani sought the Republican Party's 2008 presidential nomination, was considered the early front runner in the race, before withdrawing from the race to endorse the eventual nominee, John McCain. Giuliani was considered a potential candidate for New York Governor in 2010 and for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Both times, he declined to run, instead remained in the business sector. In April 2018, Giuliani became one of President Trump's personal lawyers. Since he has appeared in the media in defense of Trump; as of October 1, 2019, Giuliani hired former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale to represent him in the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment investigation.

The committee issued a subpoena to Giuliani asking him to release documents related to the Ukraine scandal. The New York Times reported on October 11, 2019, that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani had once led, was investigating him for violating lobbying laws related to his activities in Ukraine; the following month, Bloomberg News reported that the investigation could extend to bribery of foreign officials or conspiracy, The Wall Street Journal reported Giuliani was being investigated for a possible profit motive in a Ukrainian natural gas venture. The Journal reported the investigation may include numerous other charges, including money laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government and mail/wire fraud. Giuliani has denied having any interest in a Ukrainian natural gas venture. U. S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified that Trump delegated American foreign policy on Ukraine to Giuliani.

The late 2019 impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump centered around Giuliani's actions in and with respect to Ukraine. Giuliani's name was mentioned more than any other apart from Trump in the testimony of dozens of public servants as well as the December reports of the House Intelligence Committee; some legal commentators and former prosecutors have suggested Giuliani's actions in Ukraine and elsewhere may have violated the Logan Act. Giuliani was born in an Italian-American enclave in East Flatbush in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the only child of working-class parents, Harold Angelo Giuliani and Helen Giuliani, both children of Italian immigrants. Giuliani is of Tuscan origins from his father side, as his paternal grandparents were born in Montecatini Terme, Italy, he was raised a Roman Catholic. Harold Giuliani, a plumber and a bartender, had trouble holding a job, was convicted of felony assault and robbery, serving time in Sing Sing. After his release he worked as an enforcer for his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who ran an organized crime operation involved in loan sharking and gambling at a restaurant in Brooklyn.

The family lived in East Flatbush, Brooklyn until Harold died of prostate cancer in 1981, after which Helen moved to Manhattan's Upper East Side. When Giuliani was seven years old in 1951, his family moved from Brooklyn to Garden City South, where he attended the local Catholic school, St. Anne's, he commuted back to Brooklyn to attend Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, graduating in 1961. Giuliani attended Manhattan College in Riverdale, where he majored in political science with a minor in philosophy and considered becoming a priest. Giuliani was elected president of his class in his sophomore year, but was not re-elected in his junior year, he joined the Phi Rho Pi fraternity. He graduated in 1965. Giuliani decided to forgo the priesthood and instead attended the New York University School of Law in Manhattan, where he made the NYU Law Review and graduated cum laude with a Juris Doctor degree in 1968. Giuliani started his political life as a Democrat, he volunteered for Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968.

He worked as a Democratic Party committeeman on Long Island in the mid-1960s a

Umberslade Hall is a 17th-century mansion converted into residential apartments situated near Tanworth in Arden, Warwickshire. It is a Grade II* listed building; the Archer family were granted the manor of Umberslade by Henry II in the 12th century and retained possession for some 600 years. The old manor house was replaced between 1695 and 1700 when Smith of Warwick built the new mansion for Andrew Archer, Member of Parliament for Warwickshire; the estate passed to his son Andrew Archer, 2nd Baron Archer, after whose death in 1778 it was settled on his daughter Sarah, Countess of Plymouth. The estate was sold in 1826 and from 1850 was leased by George Frederic Muntz, Member of Parliament for Birmingham. After his death in 1857 his son George Frederick bought the estate and much enlarged and improved the Hall. During this time Muntz junior had a church built on the estate, Umberslade Baptist Church, which exists to this day separately to the Hall. In 1881 the household comprised thirty including thirteen resident servants.

Frederick Ernest Muntz who succeeded to the estate in 1898 served as High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1902 and as Deputy Lieutenant. The estate, much reduced, remains in the ownership of the Muntz family. From the 1960s the Hall was leased out to commercial tenants, including from 1967 BSA Motorcycles – Triumph Motorcycles, to merge their various design and development departments at a central point equi-distant from their manufacturing bases at Meriden and Small Heath; the site had been similarly-used by an industrial manufacturer of car components, Wilmot Breedon. In 1978 it was converted into two mews cottages. A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 5 pp 165-175 from British History Online Photos of Umberslade Hall and surrounding area on geograph

Research and Development Tax Credits are a UK tax incentive designed to encourage companies to invest in R&D. Companies can reduce their tax bill or claim payable cash credits as a proportion of their R&D expenditure; the scheme was introduced in 2000 for small and medium enterprises, with a separate scheme for large companies launched in 2002. Any company carrying out R&D is to qualify for the relief; the definitions of eligible R&D and eligible costs are reasonably broad, eligible R&D activities take place across the whole range of company operations. Many other countries worldwide operated schemes to promote corporate R&D investment by the time the UK scheme commenced; the UK government wanted to increase the UK R&D base by helping to reduce the cost of corporate R&D and thereby encourage companies to invest in R&D. In turn, this would increase wealth creation in the economy. There are two main types of R&D incentive structure: volume-based, where the credit is based on the absolute volume of R&D expenditure.

The UK scheme is volume-based because the incremental approach provides limited or no encouragement to businesses whose R&D spending fluctuates or remains at a steady level. The net benefit after tax of the relief ranges from 7.7 per cent to 32.63 per cent of eligible expenditure depending on whether the claimant is a large or small profitable or loss making company. The definitions of large and small company size are driven by the EU classifications including revenues, number of employees and balance sheet assets; the SME scheme works by allowing the SME to deduct an additional 130 per cent of its eligible R&D costs from its taxable income. If the company has made a loss the scheme goes further and allows the alternative of a cash payment of up to 32.63 per cent of the eligible R&D investment. The rate of the SME R&D tax credit enhancement has increased from 150 per cent when it was first introduced in 2000 to the rate of 225 per cent as at 2013; the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in his 2014 Autumn Statement that the super deduction rate for the SME relief regime has been increased from 225% to 230%, on expenditure incurred from 1 April 2015, providing a benefit of 26% of the qualifying expenditure.

The rate at which losses can be surrendered for a payable tax credit under the SME scheme remains at 14.5%, meaning loss making SME’s can receive a cash credit of 33.35 pence for every pound spent on qualifying R&D. A large company is able to claim an additional 30 per cent of its eligible R&D costs from its taxable income as a superdeduction, and with effect for qualifying expenditure incurred after 1 April 2013, the government introduced a new Research and Development Expenditure Credit which operates above the tax line, until 2016, alongside the existing superdeduction scheme. The RDEC scheme makes it possible for large companies to claim a payable tax credit at a rate of 10 per cent of qualifying expenditure; this was further increased to 12% from 1 January 2018. HMRC publish full details of the progression of the tax deduction and payable credit rates on their website; the steady state cost of the whole scheme is £1.3 billion per annum in terms of corporation tax revenues foregone by HM Treasury.

As at 2013, nearly 100,000 claims have been made and over £9.5 billion of relief has been claimed since the R&D tax credit scheme was launched. More than 28,000 different companies have made claims under the SME scheme, 7,500 under the large company schemeHMRC has published an evaluation study of the uptake and impact of the scheme as at 2010; the current EC recommendation of what constitutes a small or medium-sized enterprise was published in 2003 as 2003/361/EC. It replaced an older definition from 1996; the new recommendation was brought into effect for R&D tax relief purposes on 1 January 2005. The EC SME thresholds were extended by UK legislation at 1 August 2008; the existing SME thresholds for UK R&D Tax Relief are as follows: fewer than 500 staff, less than €100 million turnover or less than €86 million gross balance sheet assets In effect, to fall within the SME definition, the enterprise must stay below the staff headcount ceiling and fall below at least one of the turnover and balance sheet total ceilings.

If the enterprise fails to meet these targets, it is not considered an SME and must instead claim under the Large Company R&D Tax Relief scheme. The SME scheme is regarded as more generous as it offers up to 230% of R&D tax relief on qualifying costs, compared to around 130% relief on the Large Company Scheme. Where an enterprise is part of a group of companies, the rules require interpretation of the relationship between the various group enterprises under categories of autonomous and linked relationship. Various exemptions are possible in these circumstances: for instance, where the holding is held by a “specified investment enterprise”; the detailed rules governing the interpretation of these criteria are covered in three main sources: the EU User Guide and Model Declaration, based on EC recommendation 2003/361/EC HMRC’s Corporate Intangibles R&D Manual and various parts of UK statutory legislation Interpretation of the definition is straight forward, but is not always problem free. The Recommendatio

James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. Ensor's father, James Frederic Ensor, born in Brussels to English parents, was a cultivated man who studied engineering in England and Germany. Ensor's mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was Belgian. Ensor himself lacked interest in academic study and left school at the age of fifteen to begin his artistic training with two local painters. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where one of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor first exhibited his work in 1881. From 1880 until 1917, he had his studio in the attic of his parents' house, his travels were few: three brief trips to France and two to the Netherlands in the 1880s, a four-day trip to London in 1892. During the late 19th century much of his work was rejected as scandalous his painting Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889.

The Belgium art critic Octave Maus famously summed up the response from contemporaneous art critics to Ensor's innovative work: "Ensor is the leader of a clan. Ensor is the limelight. Ensor concentrates certain principles which are considered to be anarchistic. In short, Ensor is a dangerous person who has great changes.... He is marked for blows, it is at him. It is on his head that are dumped the most aromatic containers of the so-called serious critics." Some of Ensor's contemporaneous work reveals his defiant response to this criticism. For example, the 1887 etching "Le Pisseur" depicts the artist urinating on a graffitied wall declaring "Ensor est un fou" or "Ensor is a Madman."But his paintings continued to be exhibited, he won acceptance and acclaim. In 1895 his painting The Lamp Boy was acquired by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, he had his first solo exhibition in Brussels. By 1920 he was the subject of major exhibitions. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after considering Ensor's 1887 painting Tribulations of Saint Anthony, declared Ensor the boldest painter working at that time.

In the first decade of the 20th century, his production of new works was diminishing, he concentrated on music—although he had no musical training, he was a gifted improviser on the harmonium, spent much time performing for visitors. Against the advice of friends, he remained in Ostend during World War II despite the risk of bombardment. In his old age he was an honored figure among Belgians, his daily walk made him a familiar sight in Ostend, he died there after a short illness, on 19 November 1949. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music and The Drunkards, depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favored bizarre subject matter; such paintings as The Scandalized Masks and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, puppetry and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colorful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes.

Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colors, potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. The four years between 1888 and 1892 mark a turning point in Ensor's work, he turned to religious themes the torments of Christ. Ensor interpreted religious themes as a personal disgust for the inhumanity of the world. In 1888 alone, he produced forty-five etchings as well as his most ambitious painting, the immense Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889. Known as Entry of Christ into Brussels, it is considered "a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism." In this composition, which elaborates a theme treated by Ensor in his drawing Les Aureoles du Christ of 1885, a vast carnival mob in grotesque masks advances toward the viewer. Identifiable within the crowd are Belgian politicians, historical figures, members of Ensor's family. Nearly lost amid the teeming throng is Christ on his donkey; the piece, which measures ​99 1⁄2 by ​169 1⁄2 inches, was rejected by Les XX and was not publicly displayed until 1929.

After its controversial export in the 1960s, the painting is now at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; as Ensor achieved belated recognition in the final years of the 19th century, his style softened and he painted less. Critics have seen Ensor's last fifty years as a long period of decline; the aggressive sarcasm and scatology that had characterized his work since the mid-1880s was less evident in his few new compositions, much of his output consisted of mild repetitions of earlier works. Significant works of Ensor's late period include The Artist's Mother in Death, a subdued painting of his mother's deathbed with prominent medicine bottles in the foreground, The Vile Vivisectors, a vehement attack on those responsible for the use of animals in medical experimentation. Ensor was a accomplished printmaker, he created 133 etchings and drypo

Sean Higgins is a Scottish footballer who plays as a striker for Clydebank. He is signed as a player/coach. Higgins started his career with Hamilton Academical. Higgins moved to Ross County in 2002 where he spent seven years at Victoria Park, where he played in 173 league matches and scored 47 league goals. In 2009 Higgins joined fellow First Division club Dundee where he spent just under five years, where he played in 52 league matches and scored 14 league goals, he would be a part of the "Deefiant" squad that overcame administration and a 25-point deduction to survive in 2010–11, a season that included a club record-breaking 23-game unbeaten streak. Higgins would play a key role in that run in a game against Queen of the South where he netted an equaliser in an eventual 2–1 win to notch Dundee's twentieth consecutive undefeated game, breaking the legendary 1962 team's record. During this game, Higgins wore a raw beefsteak in his boot to aid a freak injury, would score his goal with the steak-filled boot.

In May 2011 Higgins signed for St Johnstone for the 2011–12 season, where he played in six league matches without scoring any goals. Higgins was loaned out to Ayr United during the season, where he played in one league match without scoring any goals. Higgins joined Falkirk on transfer deadline day in August 2012. After an up and down campaign, Higgins left the club at the end of the 2012–13 season, having played in 25 league matches and scoring four league goals. Higgins signed for Stenhousemuir in the summer of 2013, he was a main stay in the Stenny team, as they narrowly missed out on a play-off spot at the end of the season. Higgins will be remembered for scoring a double, including an equalising penalty, in a 3–3 draw against Rangers at Ibrox Stadium on 22 February 2014, he finished the campaign having played. After leaving Stenhousemuir at the end of the season, on 30 May 2014, it was confirmed that Higgins had agreed terms with Scottish Championship outfit Cowdenbeath for the 2014–15 season.

He scored seven goals in 37 games for the Blue Brazil. On 20 May 2015, Higgins agreed to sign for Clyde on a one-year deal. On the 29th of August 2015 Higgins scored a double against East Stirlingshire in a 3–1 win at Broadwood. After two seasons with Clyde, Higgins was released by the club in May 2017. Shortly after leaving Clyde, Higgins signed for Scottish League One club Albion Rovers on 2 June 2017. In June 2018, Sean signed for club Clydebank as player/coach Ross County – Challenge Cup Runners-Up 2004–05 Sean Higgins at Soccerbase

Guillaume Musso is a French novelist. Musso was born in 1974 in France. After finishing high school, he left for the United States at the age of 19, he spent several months in New York City, living with other young foreigners and earning money by selling ice-cream. He came back to France, earned a degree in economics, taught in high schools, his first published novel, Skidamarink, a thriller that opens with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Musée du Louvre, was published in 2001. After a car accident he became interested in near-death experiences and imagined a story about a man who returns to life after touching death; this became the novel Afterwards... published in 2004 by XO Editions, which sold more than 1 million copies in France and has been translated into 23 languages. Afterwards, the film directed by Gilles Bourdos starring John Malkovich and Evangeline Lilly was released in France in January 2009 and internationally. Musso wrote Save Me in 2005, A Mix-up in Heaven in 2006, Lost and Found in 2007, One Day, Perhaps in 2008, Where Would I Be Without You? in 2009,Girl on Paper in 2010 and Call from an Angel in 2011.

In 2009, Musso was the #2 bestselling author in France, according to a 2011 Edistat study he holds third place on the list of authors who have sold the most books in France since 2008, just after Stephenie Meyer and before Harlan Coben. Some 11 million copies of his novels have been sold worldwide and they have been translated into 34 languages. Skidamarink, Éditions Anne Carrière, 2001 Afterwards... XO Editions, 2004 A Mix-Up in Heaven XO Editions, 2005 Will You Be There? XO Editions, 2006 Lost and Found XO Editions, 2007 One Day, Perhaps XO Editions, 2008 Where Would I Be Without You? XO Editions, 2009 Girl on Paper XO Editions, 2010 Call from an Angel XO Editions, 2011 Seven years XO Editions, 2013 Tomorrow XO Editions, 2013 Central Park XO Editions, 2014 This instant XO Edition, 2015 Brooklyn Girl XO Edition, 2016 Un appartement à Paris, XO Edition, 2017 La Jeune Fille et la Nuit, Calmann-Levy, 2018 La vie secrète des écrivains, Calmann-Lévy, 2019 Italy, Award for the love novel Scrivere per Amore, Verone, 2005 France, Best adaptable novel for the cinema Prix du meilleur roman adaptable au cinéma, 2004 Personal Website Biography of Guillaume Musso on the Website VDS.fr