LaSalle Bank Corp. said Friday that exhaustive research had uncovered ties to the slave era by some predecessors to its Dutch corporate parent, ABN Amro Bank NV.

Although it said its own predecessors were not found to have any connections to slavery, LaSalle deplored the era of slavery and released full results of the study it commissioned.

The company commissioned the independent study by History Associates Inc. in connection with a Chicago ordinance requiring firms that do business with the city to disclose all historic profits from or investments in African slavery.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. last year became the first companies to acknowledge that their predecessor banks had specific links to the slave trade.

LaSalle said that ABN Amro predecessors in the Netherlands and France traded in securities and goods with slaveholding areas of the U.S. and that its predecessors in the Netherlands, France and Germany had historical connections to African slavery elsewhere in the Americas.

“The era of slavery is a deplorable period in the world’s history,” said LaSalle Chief Executive Norman Bobins. “While predecessors of LaSalle Bank Corp. do not have any historical ties to slavery, it is prudent that we share the full results of the study that we commissioned.”

Chicago Tribune  

 

 

The selfishness of each assures the prosperity of all.

 

 

Easter is an annual festival observed throughout the Christian world. The date for Easter shifts every year within the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the standard international calendar for civil use. In addition, it regulates the ceremonial cycle of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. The current Gregorian ecclesiastical rules that determine the date of Easter trace back to 325 CE at the First Council of Nicaea convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine. At that time the Roman world used the Julian Calendar (put in place by Julius Caesar). The Council decided to keep Easter on a Sunday, the same Sunday throughout the world. To fix incontrovertibly the date for Easter, and to make it determinable indefinitely in advance, the Council constructed special tables to compute the date. These tables were revised in the following few centuries resulting eventually in the tables constructed by the 6th century Abbot of Scythia, Dionysis Exiguus. Nonetheless, different means of calculations continued in use throughout the Christian world.

In 1582 Gregory XIII (Pope of the Roman Catholic Church) completed a reconstruction of the Julian calendar and produced new Easter tables. One major difference between the Julian and Gregorian Calendar is the “leap year rule”. Universal adoption of this Gregorian calendar occurred slowly. By the 1700’s, though, most of western Europe had adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The Eastern Christian churches still determine the Easter dates using the older Julian Calendar method. The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.

The ecclesiastical rules are:

Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox; this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.

Thus resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables - Gregorian or pre-Gregorian - are used. The western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christian churches use the Gregorian tables; many eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches use the older tables based on the Julian Calendar. In a congress held in 1923, the eastern churches adopted a modified Gregorian Calendar and decided to set the date of Easter according to the astronomical Full Moon for the meridian of Jerusalem. However, a variety of practices remain among the eastern churches.

 

 

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“Oh, jab me with your needle a hundred times And a hundred times I will bless you, Saint Morphine” Jules Verne (1828 - 1905)

 

“I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgement in all human affairs.” Albert Einstein 1879-1955)

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

 

 

Just what the doctor ordered?

AYER’S CHERRY PECTORAL “Cures Colds, Coughs and all Diseases of the Throat and Lungs”

        

 

 

    

 

   

 

Just what the doctor ordered….