US or U.S. usually refers to the United States of America, a country in North America.

US, U.S. or us may also refer to:

Thomas Edward Perez (born October 7, 1961) is the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. An American politician, consumer advocate and civil rights lawyer, Perez had served as Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (DLLR) from January 2007, when he was appointed to that position by Governor Martin O'Malley, until his October 2009 confirmation by the United States Senate as Assistant Attorney General.

Born in Buffalo, New York,from Dominican parents. Perez received an A.B. in international relations and political science from Brown University in 1983, a J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government also in 1987.

Perez has spent his entire career in public service. He began his law career as a law clerk for Judge Zita Weinshienk of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado from 1987 to 1989.

Perez spent 12 years in federal public service, from 1989 until 2001. He spent the bulk of his federal public service at the United States Department of Justice. He was a federal prosecutor for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In so doing, he prosecuted and supervised the prosecution of some of the Department's most high profile civil rights cases, including a hate crime case in Texas involving a gang of white supremacists who went on a deadly, racially motivated crime spree directed at African Americans. He later served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Attorney General Janet Reno. Among other responsibilities, Perez chaired the interagency Worker Exploitation Task Force, which oversaw a variety of initiatives designed to protect vulnerable workers.

Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist and professor, who is currently the Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Previously, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Yellen was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Anna (née Blumenthal) and Julius Yellen, a doctor. She graduated from Fort Hamilton High School in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. She graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971.

Beginning in 1980, Yellen has been conducting research at the Haas School and teaching macroeconomics to full-time and part-time MBA students. She is now a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics. Twice she has been awarded the Haas School's outstanding teaching award.

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Later in high school he created a pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony.

Regina Ilyinichna Spektor (Russian: Реги́нa Ильи́нична Спе́ктор, IPA: [rʲɪˈɡʲinə ˈspʲɛktər], English: /rɨˈdʒiːnə ˈspɛktər/; born February 18, 1980) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered in New York City's East Village.

Spektor was born in Moscow, Soviet Union in 1980 to a musical Russian Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Soviet college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York. She has a brother Barry (Bear), who was featured in track 7, "* * *", or "Whisper", of her 2004 album, Soviet Kitsch.

She learned how to play piano by practising on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination that Jews faced. Spektor is fluent in Russian and reads Hebrew, and has since paid tribute to her Russian heritage, quoting the poem February by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak in her song Après Moi, and stating “I’m very connected to the language and the culture.”