Mar-a-Lago

Mar-a-Lago is a resort and National Historic Landmark in Palm Beach, Florida, owned since 1985 by Donald Trump. Mar-a-Lago was built for businesswoman and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post between the years 1924 and 1927 during the 1920s Florida land boom.

 

• Donald Trump bought it for less than $10 million back in the 1980s. The property has 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms.
• It was built by Marjorie Merriweather Post, an heiress to the Postum Cereal Company. It cost about $7 million to build in the 1920s, which would be more than $100 million today.

Post willed her home to the American government upon her death with the intention that it be used as a warm-weather retreat for the president. But in 1981 the government returned Mar-a-Lago, which had been declared a National Historic Landmark a year earlier, to the Post Foundation, citing its high annual maintenance cost of $1 million.

Mrs. Post was married 4 times. One of her husbands was Mr. Davies who served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Mrs. Post had 2,000 pints of pasteurized cream—frozen by the Birdseye process—and 25 refrigerators shipped ahead to the American Embassy, in Moscow.

Le Méridien Amritsar, Punjab

5-star hotel
Amritsar, India

St. Agatha

St. Agatha is one of the most highly venerated virgin martyrs of Christian antiquity.

• Born: 231 AD, Catania, Italy
• Died: Catania, Italy
• Feast: February 5 (251?)
• Buried: Church of the Abbey of Saint Agatha, Catania, Italy
• Patron saint of breast cancer patients

St. Agatha was a young, Sicilian woman and victim of the Decian persecutions circa 251. At the age of 15, she refused marriage to a Roman prefect. St. Agatha was soon arrested and sent to a brothel and then to prison. She was tortured for her faith and had her breasts cut off. St. Agatha was sentenced to be burnt at the stake but an earthquake delayed her sentence. She was sent to prison where St. Peter appeared to her and healed her wounds. St. Agatha eventually died in prison from repeated torture. She is one of seven women to be remembered in the Canon of the Mass and is also patroness of breast cancer patients, rape victims, nurses and bakers. Her incorrupt body lies in a crypt on Malta. (Source: The Lives of the Saints)

Map of Palestine

Map of Palestine from a 1947 issue of National Geographic.

 

 

New York Times, 1899