Liberia

Coordinates: 6°30′N 9°30′W / 6.500°N 9.500°W / 6.500; -9.500

Liberia ⁱ/laɪˈbɪəriə/, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. Liberia means "Land of the Free" in Latin. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to its west, Guinea to its north and Ivory Coast to its east. It covers an area of 111,369 square kilometres (43,000 sq mi) and is home to 4,503,000 people.English is the official language and over 20 indigenous languages are spoken, representing the numerous tribes who make up more than 95% of the population.

Forests on the coastline are composed mostly of salt-tolerant mangrove trees, while the more sparsely populated inland has forests opening onto a plateau of drier grasslands. The climate is equatorial, with significant rainfall during the May–October rainy season and harsh harmattan winds the remainder of the year. Liberia possesses about forty percent of the remaining Upper Guinean rainforest. It was an important producer of rubber in the early 20th century.

Liberia (Manassas, Virginia)

Liberia is a historic plantation home located at Manassas, Virginia. It was built about 1825, and is a two-story, five-bay, Federal style brick dwelling. It has parapet side gable roof and a molded brick cornice with a saw-tooth design. It has a single-pile, modified central passage plan. During the American Civil War, it was used as headquarters by both Confederate and Union forces. Both Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, in addition to other statesmen, visited Liberia during the War. The house was acquired by the City of Manassas on December 31, 1986, for use as a museum. The house is under restoration and is open for special events and tours by appointment.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

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List of minor planets: 1001–2000

Nation

Nation (from Latin: natio, "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock") is a social concept with no uncontroversial definition, but that is most commonly used to designate larger groups or collectives of people with common characteristics attributed to them—including language, traditions, customs (mores), habits (habitus), and ethnicity. A nation, by comparison, is more impersonal, abstract, and overtly political than an ethnic group. It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.

According to Joseph Stalin: "a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people;" "a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people"; "a nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation"; and, in its entirety: "a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."

LGBT pride events in Singapore

Singapore's first public LGBT pride festival, IndigNation, took place during the month of August in 2005, with a second annual IndigNation in August 2006. Previous gay celebrations, exemplified by the Nation parties held annually in Singapore since 2001, were private commercial events held for LGBT recreation, but were also socio-political statements of significance in Singapore gay history and milestones in Singapore's human rights record.

History

Before 2001

Prior to 2001, all events held for LGBT people were private affairs not advertised or even made known to the general public. Most were held indoors, especially on Sunday nights at various mainstream discos which were eager to tap the pink dollar on a day when business from their straight patrons was slow. This phenomenon began in the early 1980s when the police started to turn a blind eye to men disco-dancing with each other, but not during the slow numbers, when they were cautioned by the managements of these venues to "behave". This was done to avoid complaints from heterosexual patrons who were initially invariably present.

Nation (university)

Student nations or simply nations (Latin: natio meaning "being born") are regional corporations of students at a university. Once widespread across Europe in medieval times, they are now largely restricted to the older universities of Sweden and Finland, in part because of the violent conflicts between the nations in university towns in other countries. Medieval universities were large metropolitan centres with students from many different domestic and foreign regions. Students who were born within the same region usually spoke the same language, expected to be ruled by their own familiar laws, and therefore joined together to form the nations. The most similar comparison in the Anglo-world to the nation system is in the collegiate system of older British universities or fraternities at American universities; however, both of these comparisons are imperfect. In Portugal and Brazil, there are fraternities called Repúblicas, but this has nothing to do with the natio original concept of nations (they are created for lodgement purposes).