The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government's measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.

The TARP program originally authorized expenditures of $700 billion and was expected to cost the U.S. taxpayers as much as $300 billion. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act reduced the amount authorized to $475 billion. By March 28, 2012, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated that total disbursements would be $431 billion and estimated the total cost, including grants for mortgage programs that have not yet been made, would be $32 billion. This is significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s but does not include the cost of other "bailout" programs (such as the Federal Reserve's Maiden Lane Transactions and the Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The cost of the former crisis amounted to 3.2 percent of GDP during the Reagan/Bush era, while the GDP percentage of the latter crisis' cost is estimated at less than 1 percent. While it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, those companies are preparing to buy back the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year. Of the $245 billion handed to U.S. and foreign banks, over $169 billion has been paid back, including $13.7 billion in dividends, interest and other income, along with $4 billion in warrant proceeds as of April 2010^[update]. AIG is considered "on track" to pay back $51 billion from divestitures of two units and another $32 billion in securities.

R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians for developing statistical software and data analysis.

R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. S was created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and now, R is developed by the R Development Core Team, of which Chambers is a member. R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly as a play on the name of S.

R is part of the GNU project. The source code for the R software environment is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R. R is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface; however, several graphical user interfaces are available for use with R.

t.A.T.u. (Russian: Тату́, pronounced [tɐˈtu] ( listen)) was a Russian dance music duo composed of Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova (alternative spelling: Julia Volkova). Formed on May 31, 1999 by Ivan Shapovalov, the group signed a deal with independent label Neoformat, then later signed with Universal Music Russia, and finally with Interscope Records in 2001.

t.A.T.u. gained mainstream recognition when they released their first English single "All the Things She Said", which topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Switzerland and other European countries. The music video stirred much controversy, showing the girls kissing and caressing each other in school uniforms soaking wet.

The group's English-language album 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane was the group's best-selling album. t.A.T.u. became the first group ever to get the IFPI Europe platinum award for the same album in two different languages.

The group represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest in Riga, Latvia, with the song "Ne Ver', Ne Boysia", where they placed third. In mid-2005, the group released the single "All About Us", which was another successful hit worldwide. In October 2005, the group released their second English album, "Dangerous and Moving", and their second Russian-language album "Lyudi Invalidy". Then in 2006, the group released their first and only official compilation, "The Best of t.A.T.u.", and announced they had left their record label, Universal Music. The group released their third Russian album "Vesyolye Ulybki" in 2008 and the English counterpart "Waste Management" in December 2009 worldwide digitally.

Raymond Paul "Ray" Mears (born 7 February 1964) is an English woodsman, instructor, author and TV presenter. His TV appearances cover bushcraft and survival techniques, and he is best known for the TV series Ray Mears' Bushcraft, Ray Mears' World of Survival, Extreme Survival, Survival with Ray Mears, Wild Britain with Ray Mears and Ray Mears Goes Walkabout.

Mears grew up in Kenley, Greater London, and the North Downs, where he discovered a countryside abundant with wildlife. Educated at Reigate Grammar School, a co-educational independent school in Reigate, Surrey, he learned to track foxes in the forest at a young age. As a boy, he desired to sleep out on the trail, but unable to afford camping equipment, he resorted to setting up camp using what he could find in his surroundings.

Mears's enthusiasm for his subject, combined with his broad knowledge of survival and the uses which may be made of plants, trees and other natural materials found in woodland, forest or desert, have made him a popular figure in TV broadcasting in the UK.^{[citation needed]} He has travelled extensively across the world for his TV series and has learned survival techniques from the indigenous peoples he has met. In his programmes he demonstrates his knowledge of the wild, how to find food from seeds, berries, roots and other growing things, and how to survive by constructing temporary shelters, fires and canoes from natural materials.