the offshore merchant account

Randy Bennett, who was there when the Canadian swim team almost touched bottom, says it’s different this time around because the program has so much more at its disposal.

Thanks to funding arms, they have the requisite number of physiotherapists and sports psychologists. They’re also knee deep in technological advancements, sports scientists and, of course, nutritionists which led to the following timeless question at a Tuesday news conference.

“How do you use beet root?”

How, indeed.

But there’s one other thing the Canadian swimmers have as they prepare for London 2012 and that thing is far more important than physios and sports psyches and, yes, even beet root.

In Ryan Cochrane, they have a star and a leader; a game-changer who can deliver the goods while taking the pressure off his teammates. It might sound simple. But Bennett, the national team coach, will tell you it’s absolutely crucial to Canada’s medal aspirations in the pool.

And the fact he’s talking about aspirations, as in plural, and not an aspiration tells you all you need to know about the change in the Canadian team.

“Ryan winning the (bronze) medal in Beijing has really opened the doors,” said Bennett, the national team coach based in Victoria at a presser hosted by Canadian Sports Centre Pacific. “The expectations aren’t pie in the sky. They’re realistic.

“The mantra going into Sydney (in 2000 when Bennett was an assistant coach) was, ‘We’re going to do our best.’ It was disappointing. Athletes are much more comfortable with expectations. They believe that I believe they’re capable and that’s a big difference.”

Earlier, Bennett stood behind a microphone and said the expectation for London was three Canadian medals. If that sounds unremarkable, consider it would represent one medal more than the total haul from the pool over the last three Olympics.

“I’m really excited we’re talking about medal and winning,” said Cochrane.

And the 23-year-old Victoria swimmer is largely responsible for creating that excitement,

Four years removed from his medal performance in Beijing, Cochrane is now a recognized international star, a multi-medallist at the 2011 world championships and a serious medal threat in the 1,500 metres and 800 metres in London.

In Beijing, he salvaged a disappointing showing by the Canadians and surprised the country by capturing the bronze on the final day of the Olympic meet. Since then, he’s grown with a program which now boasts a handful of medal threats and might even recall the great Canadian swim teams of the ‘80s.

Veteran Brent Hayden is a threat in the 100m freestyle. Annamay Perse is a world-class breaststroker. Martha McCabe medalled at the world championships in Shanghai last year.

True, it’s not exactly Alex Baumann, Victor Davis and Anne Ottenbreit but hopes and ambitions are still higher than they’ve been since Atlanta in ‘96.

“We have way more options,” said Bennett. “You have to have swimmers in the finals to have a chance and we have that now.

“The NCAA has opened up swimming around the world. Tunisia won a gold medal in 2008. Tunisia. Swimming has become like track and field There are 180 countries competing. In winter sport you have 10 or 12 countries trying. People don’t realize how deep the field is.”

But maybe they realize Canada now has a chance in the pool.

“I remember talking about winning a medal (prior to Beijing) and I almost scoffed at the idea,” said Cochrane. “It took six, eight months and I thought, maybe I can do this.

“I was swimming by myself five or six years ago. I had no training partner. There was some sports science but nothing compared to what we have today. To be world-class you have to put the money into it. We have the best physiologists. We have the best psychologists. With that, hopefully, will come performances.”

Asian stocks fell on Tuesday as a Greek political impasse fanned fears the country was closer to exiting the eurozone, while a Moody’s Investors Service decision to slap downgrades on 26 Italian financial institutions further fueled a risk-off trading session.

During Asian trading on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was down 0.15%, Australia’s S&P/ASX200 was down 0.81%, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 Index was down 1.18%.

Greece remained stuck in a political deadlock prior to the opening bell in Asia on Tuesday, unable to form a coalition government in wake of recent parliamentary elections.

Widespread anger over austerity measures such as tax hikes and public-sector layoffs ended relative dominance enjoyed by the New Democracy and PASOK political parties in recent Greek elections, giving rise to organizations such as the leftist Syriza party, which has balked against forming a coalition government.

Syriza leaders remain staunchly opposed to austerity measures gripping the country’s economy, and failure to end the stalemate could force a new round of elections in June, which would arguably increase the chances of Greece ditching austerity in exchange for bailout money and abandon the currency zone altogether.

Later Tuesday in Europe, a flurry of economic indicators are due out, and Greek concerns coupled with a Moody’s decision to downgrade 26 Italian banks fueled fears those indicators will show a European economy falling deeper in trouble, which bruised equities worldwide.

Later Tuesday, preliminary gross domestic product growth figures are due out for the eurozone as a whole as well as for France, Germany and Italy.

Meanwhile, the ZEW Centre for Economic Research will release a report on German economic sentiment as well as for the entire eurozone.

Still, Europe doesn’t want to see Greece abandon the currency zone, which prevented an all-out market meltdown early in Asia and on Monday in Europe.

However, the risk-off trading sentiment pushed prices down, especially in wake of weak Chinese industrial output and retail sales figures.

In Hong Kong, the top decliners included Esprit Holdings, down 3.02%, China Merchant Holdings, down 1.61%, and Sino Land, down 1.51%.

In Australia, the top decliners included Aquarius Platinum, down 9.66%, Beadell Resources, down 8.47%, and Kagara Zinc, down 7.69%.

European stock futures indicated a mixed opening.

France’s CAC 40 futures pointed to a loss of 0.10%, while Germany’s DAX 30 futures signaled a gain of 0.07%. Meanwhile, in the U.K., the FTSE 100 futures indicated a gain of 0.15%.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were up 0.16% while the S&P 500 futures were up 0.18%.

On top of growth and sentiment figures due out in Europe Tuesday, European Union finance ministers are also scheduled to conduct meetings to discuss ways out of the crisis.

Small merchants represent the last mile for credit-card companies, which want as many retailers as possible to accept their plastic to increase transaction volume. American Express enjoys mass acceptance among major merchants such as Best Buy Co. (BBY), Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Target Corp. (TGT), but has been less present among small businesses, which often scoff at the fees they must pay each time a customer swipes a card.

“With small merchants we believe particularly now it’s a…cluttered space [for merchant offers], and we don’t want to charge small merchants for this,” said Ed Gilligan, vice chairman of American Express.

Large merchants can load one offer for free but must pay for additional offers based on customer use.

In addition to having offers delivered to cardholders’ mobile phones, all merchants who use American Express’ Go Social platform can have deals presented via social-networking services Foursquare and Facebook, which have partnerships with the credit-card lender. Merchants must accept its cards to use the service.

The latest proposition for consumers from American Express is a service that presents similar offers inside of American Express’ existing mobile app. Cardholders can click a tab to see all the offers available to them, ranked by their past spending and their location when they have the app open on their phones.

The feature will be added to the company’s iPhone app in an update Monday and is expected to be added to its Android app in the future, Gilligan said.

Cardholders can redeem an offer by clicking a button to sync it to their card account and then using their card at the participating merchant. The discount is applied to a cardholder’s account as a statement credit in about three to five days.

“Essentially we’re bringing to bear all the data that we have from cardmembers and from merchants, and from the transactions that happen in between,” said Luke Gebb, vice president of global marketing for American Express.

American Express has the ability to generate revenue by charging other merchants fees to load offers and by increasing customers’ use of their cards, Gilligan said.

“Every time a transaction is consummated where we connect the cardmember and merchant, we’re getting more spend on our network,” Gilligan said.

In addition to being the largest U.S. credit-card lender by spending, American Express also operates a processing network that handles transactions between merchants and cardholders. That model differs from Visa Inc. (V) and MasterCard Inc. (MA), which operate processing networks but rely on banks to lend and issue cards to consumers.

They also have been getting into merchant offers.

Visa is testing a service that lets cardholders receive offer notifications via email and text message based on their location. MasterCard announced last month it was partnering with a company called Local Offer Network to allow banks to give their cardholders access to “daily deals” content.

American Express has been particularly aggressive, announcing partnerships last year with Foursquare and Facebook that let cardholders receive offers based on locations they have checked into and companies they have “liked.” Earlier this year it rolled out a similar service with Twitter, allowing customers to load deals to their cards by tweeting special messages.

Spencer Perceval entered the lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London’s Palace of Westminster. Prime minister of Great Britain and, after Napoleon, the most powerful man in Europe, he was overdue in the House of Commons. As Perceval moved through the crowded lobby, a tall man in a brown coat blocked his path, pressed a revolver against his chest and fired. Perceval was thrown through the air as the shot shattered his ribs and struck his heart. Swept by onlookers into a nearby office, he died within minutes.

The shooter, John Bellingham of Liverpool, was immediately seized. Within hours he was transported through gathering mobs to Newgate prison. Four days later he was tried and convicted of murder, after jury deliberations lasting 14 minutes. Three days after his trial he was publicly hanged in a driving rain. But the country was hardly as outraged by the crime as Bellingham’s swift demise suggests; the assassination of the unpopular prime minister was celebrated on the London streets with an obscene delight.

Since 1865, we Americans have lost one out of every seven presidents to an assassin’s bullet, but the British have been considerably more careful. No British monarch has been assassinated since the future Richard III’s probable murder of his nephew Edward V in 1483, and Perceval is the only prime minister to have met such a violent end. But despite the event’s singularity, the slaying of Spencer Perceval has been virtually forgotten in popular memory. Andro Linklater’s “Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die” seeks to dispel this obscurity. Written with novelistic pace and the literary devices of a potboiler, the book is really two in one. The first, an overview of Perceval’s neglected career, is sure-footed and worthy. The second, a breathlessly conspiratorial account of his death, is compulsively readable and wildly implausible.

Born the younger son of an aristocrat, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Perceval governed Britain from 1809 until his death. His premiership was unexpected and brief, a fact that helps explain his lack of fame. But even so, Perceval’s career was one of consequence. He was in office in 1810, when George III finally succumbed to dementia and was displaced by the regency of his son. Perceval also presided during what Mr. Linklater calls “the most dangerous days of the Napoleonic war,” a period of isolation not matched until Churchill’s government stood alone against Nazi Europe. Britain during these years was a cauldron of economic misery and political disorder, perpetually terrified by the specter of a Jacobin uprising and guillotines in St. James’s Park.

Perceval, a diminutive man known as “Little P,” faced these challenges steeled by rock-ribbed Toryism and fervid evangelical piety. He achieved power partly by flaunting his hatred of Catholicism, a bigotry that appealed to the king. More attractively, he allied himself with William Wilberforce’s Christian crusade against the slave trade.

But the war with France dominated all else. Perceval’s fiscal wizardry funded Wellington’s costly and unpopular—but imperative—Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon. (Even here, religious zeal played its part. Perceval interpreted the campaign as the unfolding of prophecies from the Book of Revelation.) The prime minister’s most loathed policy was an armed trade blockade aimed at Napoleonic Europe. The blockade’s targets included the neutral American merchant fleet and touched off both the War of 1812 and a grim economic recession. It was this unemployment and hunger that drove the London crowds to revel in Perceval’s murder.

All of this political detail will edify Mr. Linklater’s readers. What will fascinate them is his account of Perceval’s assassination. Historians have long accepted the contemporary verdict that Bellingham was a lone (and probably lunatic) gunman, motivated by the British government’s indifference to indignities that he had suffered during an obscure trade dispute in Russia.

New Delhi/Mumbai:The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) intervened on Thursday to stem the continued fall of the rupee, and announced measures to curb speculation and increase liquidity in the currency market.

The central bank directed exporters to convert 50% of their foreign currency holding with banks into rupee balances within a fortnight. The intervention—the fourth in six days—seemed to suggest it was beginning to focus on quantitative measures to limit demand after having tried to increase the inflow of dollars.

Analysts and economists say RBI’s recent moves—which they believe will have only a marginal and temporary effect—once again highlight the pressure on the Indian currency from the twin deficits—the fiscal and current account.

The twin deficit problem remains, said Samiran Chakraborty, head of India research at Standard Chartered Bank. “We have to reduce our import dependency, bring down subsidy on fuel, which in turn will reduce consumption and import of fuel, opt for a better export promotion strategy, and adjust to a weaker rupee, which will lead to export growth,” he said.

And the nature of these problems would suggest that the solution lies elsewhere—with the government. “The time purchased by these measures should be used to address fundamental issues such as growth, and the current account and fiscal deficits,” said Ananth Narayan G, regional head of global markets at Standard Chartered.

Indeed, RBI is aware that while the rupee will get some relief from its measures, these are unlikely to reverse the trend and that it “at best, wants to manage the adjustment”, said Rajeev Malik, a senior economist at CLSA in Singapore, who expects the rupee to fall further to 55 to the dollar.

Some of the government’s recent policies haven’t helped the cause of the rupee either. The trade deficit in 2011-12 rose to 10.9% of gross domestic product (GDP), a record (it narrowed to a 12-month low in April, largely because of a fall in imports), and both the fiscal and current account deficits have soared, but the situation has been exacerbated by recent policies such the proposed implementation of general anti-avoidance rules (GAAR) that has since been deferred. This move, which would have given the taxman significant powers to target structures adopted to avoid taxes, spooked foreign investors.

“It is capital flows that determine the exchange rate…(and) every time the rupee has depreciated in the past, it has (had) nothing to do with the trade deficit. It has a lot to do with what happens in the stock market,” said Rahul Khullar, India’s commerce secretary. “Don’t you think all this GAAR and other things have had an impact on people moving out of assets?” he asked.

When you go to a restaurant and order steak, it’s generally unwelcome to get chicken feet. If you ask for pizza con funghi, you don’t want osso buco.

The hospitality industry understands this pretty well and generally gives people what they want.

The investment industry, not so much.

Time and again investors complain they found themselves holding much more risk than they expected, with nasty results for their financial health.

This is partly because we don’t like too much truth in advertising. We’d rather buy into the “[Insert vaguely Swiss reference here] Prudent Gilt-Edged High-Return Fund” than the “Mezzanine High Hopes Risky Property Scheme”, even if they both invest in the same thing.

However, it’s also because financial services firms either obscure risks from investors or fail fully to understand them.

There are numerous examples of these problems occurring in the past decade’s finance company boom and bust, but one multimillion-dollar case has managed to remain mostly below the radar.

Despite the large sums involved – at least $47 million came a cropper in 2008 – no receiver was ever appointed, nor was any formal moratorium put to the unfortunate investors.

There are two main groups of people affected. One is made up of investors in three unlisted funds set up and run by Auckland outfit NZ Funds Management, namely the Conservative Growth Strategy, the Diversified Growth Strategy and the Capital Appreciation Strategy.

These were in many ways conventional investment funds mainly holding shares and bonds, but as the finance company frenzy reached its zenith in 2007 they began to lend millions to a finance company called Fidelity.

Between July 2007 and June 2008 they put $23.5m into Fidelity, with the Diversified Growth Strategy leading the charge.

It was odd timing. By that stage finance companies Provincial and Western Bay had already gone west and on July 2, 2007, Bridgecorp collapsed into receivership owing $459m to debenture holders. Nathans Finance fell over the following month, as did Five Star, and Capital + Merchant Finance went that November.

We’ll return to the three funds shortly, but Chalkie should introduce the other group of people affected by Fidelity, who were investors in another NZ Funds product called the Super Yield Fund.

Super Yield was frozen in August 2008, mainly because it had huge exposure to now-notorious United States securities known as collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs.

But it was also a major lender to Fidelity, with an exposure of about $40m when the other three funds got involved.

Initially, it will pop up in the form of a payment icon at merchant websites. The wallet will allow users to store all of their cards, and MasterCard plans to distribute developer tools to allow other wallets to work with its network. The move is an attempt to broaden PayPass beyond contactless payments, and into something more ubiquitous.

MasterCard is just the latest to be lured in by the prospect that comes from managing consumers’ multiple credit and debit card accounts. As such, it enters an already crowded field of global mobile wallet players attempting to stake their respective claims in a burgeoning field.

There are already competing efforts to put out a digital wallet by rivals Visa and American Express, the wireless carriers and PayPal. Interestingly, the move could be interpreted as counter to Google’s own digital wallet, in which MasterCard is a key partner.

MasterCard is vowing to be open. Anybody can sign up for a PayPass account. Initially, banks participating in the initiative will alert their customers that the capability is available to them. But consumers can also sign up and enter their own credit cards, which include Visa and American Express.

“Our strategy isn’t to go with a single wallet,” said Ed Olebe, senior vice president of MasterCard’s e-commerce product development. “Our strategy is a network of wallets that interconnect.”

Unlike other, more ambitious attempts, which are trying to push smartphone tap-and-go payments, MasterCard will tiptoe into the mobile payment arena through online purchases on the phone.

PayPass will appear as a payment icon on regular and mobile websites, similar to Amazon’s one-click button, which makes the act of purchasing goods and services on the phone a lot easier than filling out a bunch of information. After clicking on the icon, consumers need to enter the same password and user name that’s associated with their bank accounts to complete the payment. That’s a boon to smaller merchants looking for an easy way to drive online and mobile transactions.

“We’re trying to enable differentiation and wallet competition, so consumers can get better products, without adding complexity to merchants and consumers without an additional checkout button,” Olebe said.

American Airlines and Barnes & Noble have agreed to add MasterCard’s PayPass icon to their sites for one-click purchasing. MasterCard is working to get other merchants on-board, as well.

MasterCard has one key advantage in its network of PayPass payment terminals at locations such as pharmacies and petrol stations. Those terminals use a technology called near-field communications (NFC), which allows a credit card, keychain or smartphone with an NFC chip to transfer a payment over by simply waving it in front of the sensor.

The NFC-enabled network was one of the reasons why Google partnered with MasterCard on its own digital wallet offering. MasterCard figured prominently in Google’s unveiling of the service a year ago.

But MasterCard’s own digital wallet could eventually compete with Google Wallet, particularly if the company takes the next step and moves into smartphone payments through its own app or partnership with a handset vendor.

Olebe, however, dismissed the notion that today’s announcement indicated any strain with Google.

“We’re still thrilled with the partnership with Google,” he said. “Google isn’t our one answer; there are other things we can do.”

Google Wallet has been criticised as being too inaccessible. The service is only available on Sprint phones or unlocked phones, and only devices with NFC. It’s also only in a few cities.

“There are some for which Google isn’t for them,” Olebe said.

The Wallet product is also unavailable in markets outside the US, meaning that Australians miss out altogether. Google’s Wallet product has been spotted in Sydney at a Google developer day, however, and the Commonwealth Bank’s chief marketing officer, Andy Lark, has expressed a desire to bring Google into the Kaching NFC payments platform.

The idea of using a smartphone as a wallet has been slow to catch on in the United States. A big part of the problem has been that most stores do not have the proper physical equipment to allow customers to pay by tapping their phone.

These stores also do not have the right equipment to allow the use of smart cards, credit cards embedded with computer chips that are much less susceptible to fraud.

But a change is coming that will push both innovations at the same time.

Merchants are facing heavy pressure to upgrade their payment terminals to accept smart cards. Over the last several months, Visa, Discover and MasterCard have said that merchants that cannot accept these cards will be liable for any losses owing to fraud.

“Everybody is going to be upgrading,” said Jennifer Miles, an executive vice president at VeriFone, which provides payment terminals to most merchants in the United States.

While updating the terminals for smart cards, VeriFone also plans to upgrade for smartphone wallets, providing the capability for near-field communication, the technology used by the Google and Isis wallets, the two biggest smartphone wallet projects.

Before the credit card companies made their announcements, almost no merchants were buying terminals with smart card and N.F.C. capabilities, Ms. Miles said. As of January, though, VeriFone stopped installing terminals that did not have N.F.C. readers. Moving to N.F.C. is a windfall for VeriFone, considering that the new systems cost 10 to 30 percent more than standard ones.

It is also a boon for Google and Isis, a cooperative venture of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Google Wallet has been severely limited by a lack of N.F.C.-enabled merchants and phones. Isis, meanwhile is planning to start service later this year in only two cities, Austin, Tex., and Salt Lake City.

It picked Salt Lake City largely because its public transportation system had already installed N.F.C. readers, said Ryan Hughes, the chief marketing officer at Isis.

“This was a gift, to be honest, that was sitting under our Christmas tree that we didn’t anticipate,” he said, of the recent moves by the credit card companies and VeriFone.

Ms. Miles of VeriFone now believes that N.F.C. could be completely mainstream within five years. While that sounds speedy by some standards — she notes that debit cards took about four times that long to take hold — other companies pursuing mobile wallets are not willing to wait.

Square, a start-up founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter, has gained a foothold among small merchants by distributing a free credit card swiper that attaches to a smartphone or tablet, allowing these swipers to serve as their own payment terminals. The company now sees its relationships with merchants as a way to promote its own mobile wallet application, which it revamped in March.

Called Pay With Square, the app tells users which merchants nearby accept Square. When a customer enters those stores, the application alerts the merchant, who can then accept a payment by confirming the person’s identity through the photograph associated with the account.

PayPal meanwhile, is trying to move its popular online commerce accounts into the physical world. It recently began passing out Square-like devices, although its version is triangular. In addition to credit cards and checks, PayPal’s system also allows merchants to accept payment via PayPal accounts by typing in their personal identification number.

Both PayPal and Square say that asking customers to buy N.F.C.-enabled phones and wait for merchants to install new hardware is folly. Neither company says it has plans to incorporate N.F.C. into its wallet.

“If I were a device manufacturer, or a device operator, and that was the tool that I had at my disposal to enter the payments market, that might be the thing I pushed,” Sam Schrauger, PayPal’s former vice president for global products and experience, said in an interview shortly before he left the company in April.

But the other systems have inherent weaknesses as well. Because they rely on a wireless data connection, they are vulnerable to service interruptions. Also, some analysts question whether passing out free hardware will be tenable once merchants have to accept smart cards, because these readers are expected to be significantly more expensive to manufacture.

When the British were burning the White House and U.S. Capitol in late August 1814, the U.S. secretaries of War and Treasury fled to Frederick, taking with them public papers for safekeeping.

At about the same time, 107 British prisoners from the Battle of Bladensburg were brought to the Hessian Barracks in Frederick.

Earlier that year, the Farmers Bank of Maryland decided to close its headquarters in Annapolis because the British were so close. The bank moved everything to Frederick.

These are some of the examples of Frederick County’s role in the War of 1812. This year marks its 200th anniversary. Trade restrictions, the impressment of American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy and British support of American Indian tribes against American expansion led to the declaration of the war between Britain and the United States.

The war ended with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814.

The conflict didn’t have the same impact on Frederick that the Civil War would 50 years later. There were no battles fought in Frederick in the War of 1812, and no enemy troops marched through the county as they did during the Civil War.

The closest British troops came to Frederick were Washington and Baltimore, in August and September 1814, respectively.

When most people think of Frederick and the War of 1812, they think of Francis Scott Key and how he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” after the British bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Key was born in what was then Frederick County but is now Carroll County.

He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick.

“You can find information on the War of 1812 in spades, and there is also plenty on Francis Scott Key,” said Jennifer Winter, museum operation coordinator for the Historical Society of Frederick County. “But when you start to delve into Frederick’s role in the War of 1812, the information is few and far between.”

Winter has been researching Frederick’s role in the war since 2008. For three years, she set up special programs on the war at the Roger Brooke Taney House, which was owned by the Frederick resident and chief justice of the United States.

This year, she decided to set up an exhibit, which is open weekends through Dec. 8. It fills one room of the Taney House, 121 S. Bentz St. in Frederick. The exhibit consists of seven panels, a map and a diary from a Frederick soldier who served in the war.

Winter researched the archives of the Historical Society, accounts of the war at the Fort McHenry archives, read books on the war and went online to read articles from newspapers, the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

She found several accounts of the war by Frederick residents who fought in the conflict.

“I like the personal aspect of it, to read about it from someone who actually lived it,” said Winter, who, with the help of intern Kaitlyn Shorter, spent about 20 hours a week researching the war. Shorter is a history major at Hood College.

One such account was a description during the Battle of Baltimore on Sept. 13, 1814, by Jacob Crumbaker, a first lieutenant from Frederick. He served in the Frederick Militia and was stationed at Camp Hampstead in Baltimore when the British bombed Fort McHenry.–

The British hoped to do enough damage to the fort to invade Baltimore. But they were unable to accomplish their goal, and the city was saved.

Winter found Crumbaker’s account and a sketch he made of the battle at Fort McHenry. Officials at Fort McHenry sent her a scan of the letter and sketch.

Overall, many people from Frederick served in the Frederick Militia.

Also, when local people heard about the Battle of Bladensburg, Capt. John Brengle and the Rev. David Schaeffer went into the streets of Frederick calling for volunteers. Eighty men volunteered.

But by the time they got to Clarksburg, they learned that U.S. troops had been routed and the British had entered Washington. The local men eventually found their way to Baltimore.

A Frederick man had a major role in one of the incidents that led to the war. In 1807, the British would send “press gangs” onto American ships who would press Americans into service with the Royal Navy.

On June 22, the British ship HMS Leopold intercepted the American ship USS Chesapeake while looking for a deserter. They asked to board the ship, and the American captain said no. So, the Leopold fired on the Chesapeake, killing three men and wounding 18.

They took four men off the ship, three of them Americans who had been pressed into service. One of the three was William Ware of Pipe Creek.

The three were tried and sentenced to 500 lashes. That was later reduced to five years of service in the British navy. The incident created an outrage in the U.S.

When the British fleet began to wreak havoc with the Chesapeake Bay area in 1814, many residents who lived along the bay came to Frederick. One of those was Monica Taney, mother of Roger Brooke Taney and a resident of Calvert County. She became ill and died in Frederick.

The Republican National Committee recently released the hotel assignments for state delegations at the convention in Tampa this summer.

The Florida delegation was severely penalized with an assignment at the lovely Innisbrook Resort — 40 miles away and probably a two-hour commute from downtown Tampa the week of the convention. The RNC’s slight came as a result of the Legislature (dominated by Republicans) thumbing its nose at the RNC when the state chose a presidential preference primary date outside the committee’s preferences.

The RNC retaliation means Florida delegates will have the longest commute of any delegates and will have to endure long days on their feet without a chance for a mid-afternoon nap, or a place to freshen up before the prime-time activities.

The District of Columbia, which has about 287 resident Republicans when Congress is not in session, scored the Wyndham Tampa Westshore. Even the delegation of the postage-stamp-size island of Guam fared better, with an assignment at the Clearwater Beach Hilton.

If you believe in reading between the lines, the hotel assignment suggests all the talk about Sen. Marco Rubio being on Mitt Romney’s short list for vice president is just hype. Rubio will be lamenting all those unexplainable American Express card charges while riding a bus down U.S. 19 on his way to the convention center. If he stays for the duration of activities, he’ll get back to his room at 12:30 a.m. at the earliest. Poor Marco, his parents’ trip from exile (or not) in Cuba didn’t take that long.

Meanwhile, just a stone’s throw away from the Forum and the Tampa Convention Center sits the Embassy Suites Downtown Convention Center. The name does it justice. The only hotel closer to the convention center than the Embassy Suites is the Tampa Marriott Waterside. Mitt Romney and the Massachusetts delegation will be living large there.

First, it’s important to recognize that despite looking good in a dark suit, sounding all high and mighty on important issues such as runaway federal spending, and generally appearing to be serious souls, Republicans are just as childish about meaningless stuff such as hotel rooms as, well, a fifth-grader. Access to the convention site, proximity to the best restaurants and bars, being inside the security zone, and not having to ride a bus (a really big deal if you’re a Republican) are almost as important as fighting over abortion and gays in the party’s meaningless platform.

The RNC (and to a large degree the Romney campaign) is loving Michigan, though. Detroit, Michigan’s largest city, is home to GM, the once-American company. Today, GM stands for Government Motors, and Detroit is the armpit of America. Once the fourth-largest U.S. city, Detroit is now ninth, and flight from the city continues. Michigan as a whole is overly reliant upon unionized, low-skilled industries. Built on a near-century-old economic model, Michigan’s economy is broken for sure.

Michigan hasn’t voted for the Republican nominee for president since 1988, when George H.W. Bush faced Michael Dukakis. But there is a reason Michigan got the second-best hotel assignment: Gov. Rick Snyder. My bet is he’s Romney’s man for vice president.

Make no mistake, Snyder isn’t exactly a household name. His own website acknowledges that just two years ago he was “a virtual unknown in the political world.” And while his parents didn’t flee persecution (or not) of a Third World dictator, and he never billed household repairs to his Republican Party Amex card, and he never paid a hefty fine for campaign violations like one junior senator from Florida just did, Snyder knows how to get things done.

Snyder has delivered on campaign promises, including eliminating the state’s business tax and replacing it with a flat tax. He also eliminated the state’s $1.5 billion budget deficit — without partisan infighting or a government shutdown, as occurred with his predecessor.

Snyder doesn’t have a “political career.” What he has is real-world experience working for corporations such as Gateway and Coopers and Lybrand. He knows business, the negative effect high taxes have on the economy, and how to create jobs — not because someone wrote him a fancy speech but because he has lived it. He is also an attorney with an MBA.

In his first and only campaign, Snyder got 58 percent of the vote and demonstrated tremendous crossover appeal by picking up a significant chunk of the Democratic vote.

Snyder is the personification of what an elected official should be. He has business experience, and he is disciplined. Too bad he doesn’t speak fluent Spanish.