SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY

STRAWBERRY KISSES
SURVEY ABOUT OUR FAVOURITE KISSES

ON OUR LIPS OR ON OUR NECK, IN THE RAIN OR ON THE BEACH,WITH STRAWBERRY FLAVOUR OR CHAMPAGNE AND WITH ROMANTIC MUSIC AT THE BACK. THESE ARE THE MOST DESIRED KISSES BY SPANISH COUPLES .


Spanish couples prefer kisses on our lips, on our neck, with strawberry flavour and if possible in the rain or on the beach, according to a survey made on Saint Valentin Day, a date that thousand couples will celebrate with romantic dinners and gifts.

The survey, made by the publisher of Romantic novels Harlequin Iberica, interviewed 4,000 people in 18 countries, and it also says that more than half Spanish men are satisfied with their way of kissing; one of the highest percentage of the survey.

The self-content in this field is, however, overcome by Italians ( 72% are happy with their way of kissing ), Norwegians ( 68% ) and Mexicans ( 57% ).

The survey reflects something else than our preferences about kisses. It also talks about the war of sex, the differences between men and women in most countries. In that way, men prefer natural lips, especially the sensual and a bit thick, and women like strong and thin ones.
Besides in the mouth, the key answer for the question “Where do you prefer to be kissed on?” is our neck, with an average of 44.8% in the survey, though that percentage goes up to 48% among women ( 27% among men ) in Spain. In the rest, it’s shocking those 29% of Finnish people who answered they like to be kissed on their navel.

When they were questioned for the taste of the kisses, the likes seem to match with some boleros or other romantic sounds and so strawberry, champagne and mint are the most preferred flavours in most of the countries.

The place is not essential either for 53% people questioned provided that you kiss the right person. However, the most romantic places to kiss, for Spaniards, are “in the rain”, as their first choice, and “on the beach”, their second one.
Anyway, millions of kisses will be given away tomorrow, St. Valentin’s Day, a priest who was born in Rome in mid IIIth century and who was martyred after it was revealed he married couples in secret.
Apart from the kisses, several men will choose to take out their couple for a meal in those restaurants which make special offers for lovers. About gifts, the offers are a lot, but the traditional chocolate is the star, according to the Cacao and Chocolate Institute.

Lincoln and Obama

We may find some important matches between Lincoln and Obama. Here we write the biography of the 16th President of the United States and what historians say about Obama's similarities.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1861-1865
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

Now you may read, watch and listen the speech of Obama at the bottom of the monument to Lincoln in Washington on 12th February 2009

Barack Obama's biography

Barack Obama was raised by a single mother and his grandparents. They didn't have much money, but they taught him values from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. He took out loans to put himself through school. After college, he worked for Christian churches in Chicago, helping communities devastated when steel plants closed. Obama turned down lucrative job offers after law school to return to Chicago, leading a successful voter registration drive. He joined a small law firm, taught constitutional law and, guided by his Christian faith, stayed active in his community. Obama and his wife Michelle are proud parents of two daughters, Sasha and Malia.

Early Years
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up looking after goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British.
Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton's army. Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.
It was there, at the University of Hawaii, where Barack's parents met. His mother was a student there, and his father had won a scholarship. He left Kenya and pursued his dreams in America.
Barack's father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.

The College Years
Barack's mother taught him the values of empathy and service, so he moved to Chicago in 1985, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment.
The group had some success, but Barack had come to realize that in order to truly improve the lives of people in that community and other communities, it would take not just a change at the local level, but a change in American laws and politics.
He obtained his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Then, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. Finally, he was a senator for the Illinois State, where he served for eight years. In 2004, he became the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Political Career
In the Illinois State Senate, he worked with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families. He also pushed through an expansion of early childhood education, and after a number of inmates on death row were found innocent, Senator Obama worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.
As a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, Senator Obama has fought to help Illinois veterans get the disability pay they were promised and for the return of the thousands of veterans who will need care after Iraq and Afghanistan. Recognizing the terrorist threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, he traveled to Russia with Republican Dick Lugar to begin a new generation of non-proliferation efforts designed to find and secure deadly weapons around the world. And knowing the threat we face to our economy and our security from America's addiction to oil, he's working to bring auto companies, unions, farmers, businesses and politicians of both parties together to promote the greater use of alternative fuels and higher fuel standards in American cars.
Whether it's the poverty exposed by Katrina, the genocide in Darfur, or the role of faith in our politics, Barack Obama continues to speak out on the issues that will define America in the 21st century. But above all his accomplishments and experiences, he is most proud and grateful for his family. His wife, Michelle, and his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, live on Chicago's South Side.