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Kirk Kerkorian, the father of the Las Vegas mega-resort, turned 90 yesterday. The Armenian-American billionaire Kerkorian is president of MGM and most intimately associated with the growth of Las Vegas. He was also responsible for building some of the biggest hotels on and off the strip. The Los Angeles based Kerkorian is the worldâs 31st richest man and made his billions in shares in US auto manufacturers as well as Vegas’s hotels. He is also one of the most secretive of the super-rich, never giving interviews, making speeches, or accepting awards.Kerkorian is the original self-made American starting from nothing and now the holder of a 5 billion fortune. He owns five percent of General Motors worth 70 million and his company MGM Mirage owns half of the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas strip. He bought Steve Wynn’s Mirage Resorts in .4 billion buyout in 2000, then snapped up Mandalay Bay Resorts for .9 billion in 2004.He was born Kerkor Kerkorian on 6 June 1917 in Fresno, California. He dropped out of school and became a professional boxer. He became the Pacific amateur welterweight champion fighting under the name of Rifle Right Kerkorian. At the start of World War II, Kerkorian took flying lessons and gained a commercial pilotâs licence six months later. He signed up with the Royal Air Force and flew Canadian built de Havilland Mosquitos combat aircraft across the dangerous Arctic Circle route for use in the European theatre of war.As the war came to an end, he spent his ,000 savings on a Cessna plane and became a general aviation pilot. He regularly flew into a dusty railroad town called Las Vegas where he became familiar with the small gambling operations that sprung out of the desert. In 1947, he paid 0,000 for a small airline called Los Angeles Air Service which ran chartered flights to take gamblers to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Cashed-up Californians were just starting to discover the allure of Las Vegas and Kerkorianâs renamed Transinternational Airlines shuttled celebrities, high rollers, elopers, and the occasional mobster to the 24-hour wedding chapels and casinos. Kerkorian was on the way up and so was Las Vegas. The name Las Vegas means âthe meadowsâ in Spanish. Its artesian wells were first used as a watering hole on the 1,200km Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. A small Mormons contingent settled the area in 1855 to convert the local Paiute Indians. It became established as a railroad town in 1905 but it was two events in the 1930s that changed the town forever. Nevada legalised gambling in 1931 and the Hoover Dam was opened in 1936. The dam attracted tourists to the desert area and it was the closest town in Nevada to Los Angeles.Mobster Benjamin âBugsyâ Siegel had fled New York to Los Angeles in 1937 and was attempting expand mob influence in Southern California. He was quick to understand the attraction between casinos and organised crime and saw his opportunity in Las Vegas. With the financial aid of fellow Murder Inc accomplice Meyer Lansky, he built his first casino, the Flamingo, which opened in 1946. It would be the first casino on what is now the 7.2km long Las Vegas Strip lined with mammoth casinos. The now wealthy Kerkorian bought his way on to the Strip by buying the Flamingo from the mob in 1967.By now Kerkorian had been in the airline business for twenty years and had built up a lot of capital. He was also a property player. His major break came in 1962 when he bought a 320,000 sq m property across the Strip from the Flamingo for 60,000. The property was actually separated from the Strip however by a narrow band of land belonging to another owner. It was landlocked, says Kerkorian, We traded the owners four or five acres for all of this thin strip that they could never build on. Caesars Palace contacted Kerkorian and rented it for million. He would eventually sell the land to Caesars Palace for another million in 1969.The Flamingo was just the start of his move into the hotel business. The same year he bought the Flamingo, he bought 33 hectares of land for million and built the International, the largest hotel in the world. Barbra Streisand was Kerkorian’s first headliner, but the hotel remains synonymous with another superstar. Elvis Presley was seen to be in decline and had been in exile from the stage for nine years. He flopped in Las Vegas back in 1956 but was now ready to return in triumph. He opened at the International on 31 July 1969. Over the next seven years, Presley gave 837 sold-out performances, playing Vegas for one month in the summer and another in midwinter while staying at a 30th floor suite at the hotel.Kerkorian bought the then unprofitable Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) for the first time in 1969. Kerkorian wasnât interested in the studio; what attracted him was twofold, the MGM trademark and its Culver City real estate which was where MGM made movies since the silent film days of Hal Roach. Kerkorian proceeded to strip the assets and run down the studio. In 1979, he declared that MGM was now primarily a hotel company. In 1985 he sold the movie business to Ted Turner but bought most of it back 74 days later when Turnerâs backers got cold feet (Turner retained the MGM film library which he used as the basis for his Turner Classic Movies channel). In 1990 Kerkorian sold MGM again to an Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti. But Parretti was unable to turn the movie studio around and was forced to sell up five years later. There was only one bidder: Kirk Kerkorian. But despite a new business plan the movie side of MGM continues to flounder. The endlessly lucrative James Bond franchise remains its only continued success. Meanwhile Kerkorian was also turning his attention and Midas touch to the automotive industry. Already a holder of 22 million shares, he paid 68 million in 2005 for 28 million GM shares. The deal netted him 9 per cent of the company and made his investment arm Tracinda Corporation (named for his daughters Tracy and Linda) the third largest shareholder of GM. Kerkorian is CEO, president, director and sole shareholder of Tracinda. Despite his advanced age, Kerkorian shows no sign of slowing down. In April this year, Tracinda made a .5 billion cash offer to buy the struggling Chrysler Group from Daimler. Kerkorian also reaches back into his Armenian heritage with his Lincy Foundation. It helped rebuild Armenia after the earthquake of 1988, with millions of dollars in housing grants. They are still active today helping to fund the school and road systems. Kerkorian remains as optimistic about the health of the Las Vegas resort industry as he was when he arrived in his Cessna in 1945. Personally, I wouldnt say its headed for a fall, says Kerkorian, except that there will be a leveling-out time, and the best hotels and the best operators are going to suffer less than the others. Those who know him describe him not as a hermit in the Howard Hughes fashion, but a gracious normal person. Kerkorian himself claims he is not reclusive. I have 30- or 40-year friendships that I prefer to meeting new peopleâ he said. âI go to an occasional party, but just because I dont go to a lot of events, and Im not out in public all the time doesnt mean Im anti-social or a recluseâ. It is not known how he celebrated his 90th birthday.Labels: billionaires, biography, Kirk Kerkorian, Las Vegas, USA
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-ne By Seigler, Guest Columnist After failing to secure home field advantage for the upcoming super regional tournament, the Tigers are heading down to Mississippi to face the Mississippi State Bulldogs in a best of three match up. While it is disappointing that the Tigers will be unable to play in Clemson at this year’s super regional, the momentum gained during regional play should help them fare well no matter where they play. This is the seventh year total and the third year in a row that the Tigers have reached the super regional in the nine years since the super regional format was instituted. Last year, of course, Clemson entered super regional play against Oral Roberts as the #1 overall tournament seed, taking the first two games and advancing to Omaha and the College World Series. The Tigers of course, defeated Mississippi State in last years regional play in Clemson, winning the regional tournament.
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Instead, I urged the reader to determine the validity of my arguments for interpreting Revelation 12:5 as the rapture before trying to decide when such an interpretation places the Rapture in relation to the tribulation.In this present essay, I will answer the question of the timing of the rapture in revelation 12:5 according to the chronological indicators in Revelation 11–13 and other contextual considerations. In both cases, the rapture of the male child must take place prior to the seven-year tribulation, or interpreters will be guilty of just not playing fair.The Complex AnswerAt this point, readers who have no sympathies for a pretribulational rapture view but who have been convinced by my arguments for the rapture in Revelation 12:5 will find themselves in a sort of crisis. There are really only three options for premillennialists: either it takes place during the first half of the seven-year tribulation, the second half of the tribulation, or during a period somewhere in the midst of the tribulation. The ministry of the two witnesses seems to be closely associated with the time of the reconstruction of the temple (Revelation 11:1 and following), which I understand as a literal event that will take place in the first half of the tribulation.Taken together, I think the evidence is quite strong that the 1,260-day ministry of the two witnesses must take place during the first half of the tribulation. If it refers to the second half, what has she been doing during the ministry of the two witnesses during the first?The portrayal of the events surrounding the woman during the seven-year tribulation clearly affect the placement of the rapture in relation to the tribulation, for the flight of the woman clearly occurs after the catching up of the male child (Revelation 12:5 and following). The time it takes to flee from the dragon and endure the attempted attack, then, occurs during the first half of the tribulation, while the two witnesses are prophesying and protecting Israel by their signs and wonders of judgment.The initial conflict between the woman and the dragon after the rapture of the church is described in terms of the dragon’s spewing water out of his mouth (Revelation 12:13–16). If the spewing of water and the miraculous deliverance of the woman refers to such a military campaign that takes place after the rapture, but prior to the woman’s 3 1/2 year preservation in the wilderness, this pulls the rapture back further than the midpoint of the tribulation.Moreover, if the miraculous thwarting of the dragon’s plans to destroy Israel takes place during the first half of the tribulation, it would occur at the same time the temple is being reconstructed and the two witnesses are prophesying (Revelation 11:1–6).
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-ne Unbelievable.A single Arab family decides not to sell their house in the middle of one of the most important archaeological sites on the planet. (Israel’s birth is also distorted in a single, amazingly inaccurate sentence.) And Reuters proves yet again that it has an agenda, including a headline that generalizes the situation in an absurd way:Jewish history crowds out Jerusalem Arabs Fri Jun 8, 2007 9:09AM BST By Dan Williams JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Widad Sha’abani is living history — and not liking it much. Carved out of the teeming Silwan valley, below the walls of the Old City, the development is among several projects Israel has pursued in Arab East Jerusalem since capturing it 40 years ago this week — in the Six Day War of 1967 that many Jews saw heralding a return to the biblical Zion of King David. In the state of Israel today we have Jews and Arabs living side by side, and also in City of David are Jews and Arabs living side by side, said Doron Spielman, the project’s international director of development. Palestinian officials complain that East Jerusalem Arabs who sell their property to Jews often do so after years of exasperation with an Israeli municipality that is less than attentive to Muslim and Christian residents of the city.
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-ne By advancing Reason as the basis of intellectual authority, the Age of Enlightenment initiated both the rise of modern science and the elevation of humanism, individualism, and democracy as the basis of the modern state.
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pictures soon, but my camcorder is on loan.ANYWAY, i was in the kitchen just now, and i discovered that i accidentally left half a brick of tofu out on the counter.
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