Later it was mistakenly listed as stolen by the F.B.I. and, consequently, the Register, which tried for years to recover it.
For Turkey, which tried for six months to use its soft power to persuade Assad to reform, the Syrian conflict presents a series of hard power challenges.
Unlike other purifiers, which try for space-age styling (like the Sonoma Breeze SB-100, which comes with three high-tech filters) but resemble props from an early episode of "Doctor Who," it truly looks futuristic.
"All it took was one greedy man," said Stephen Eldridge, owner of a local real estate company, which tried for years to sell the lot to a tree-friendly developer, only to see it sold by someone else.
The government, which tried for years to oust Mr. Cojuangco, has now decided to defer to his popularity among investors and leave him in charge, even though it still accuses him of buying control of San Miguel with funds stolen from a trust fund for the nation's coconut farmers during the Marcos years.
Ironically, its assets were bought by Merrill Lynch, which tried for a time to use them to build a retail brokerage network before giving up.
Three other states Alaska, Washington and, most recently, California, which tries it for the first time this year use a form of open primary, in which the top vote-getter from each party advances to the general election.
For the first time, electronic stability control (which tries to correct for skids) is standard.
An example for this may be a mathematical optimizer; an object which tries to find for a given scalar function f an input vector (vec{x}) such that the output (y = f vec{x})) becomes minimal.
