The passage kia

Twitter unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. We’ve covered some of the main aspects already such as the new timeline and discover features, as well as how Twitter is trying to become more mainstreamand accessible.

One major change for brands, however, is new brand pages. Not everyone can see what these look like yet, so I’ve pasted some screenshots here from @AmericanExpress, @generalelectric, @JetBlue, and @@McDonalds. The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012.

The pinned tweet is particularly effective for tweets with images or video. With the new design, videos and images can be seen inline within your stream (just click “Open” on the top right for tweets with images or videos). On brand pages, these video or photo tweets can be set to be open, adding another visually engaging element to the page.

Twitter is launching the new brand pages with 21 partners. If you have the enhanced version of Twitter enabled, you can see them here: @AmericanExpress, @BestBuy, @bing, @chevrolet, @CocaCola, @Dell, @DisneyPixar, @generalelectric, @Heineken, @HP, @intel, @JetBlue, @Kia, @McDonalds, @nikebasketball, @NYSE_Euronext, @GhostProtocol, @pepsi, @Staples, @subwayfreshbuzz, and @VerizonWireless.

You can also read about the changes on Twitter’s advertising blog.

Hickman, 23, was killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb that ripped through his armored truck Nov. 14 — eight years, seven months and 25 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

He was the 4,474th member of the U.S. military to die in the war, according to the Pentagon.

And he may have been the last.

With the final U.S. combat troops crossing out of Iraq into Kuwait, those who held Hickman dear are struggling to come to terms with the particular poignancy of his fate. As the unpopular war that claimed his life quietly rumbles to a close, you can hear within his inner circle echoes of John F. Kerry’s famous 1971 congressional testimony on Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

“Thank God if David is the last one to die, because that means nobody else will have to go through this,” said Logan Trainum, one of Hickman’s closest friends. “But it’s crazy that he died. No matter your position on this war — if you’re for or against it — I think everybody thinks we shouldn’t have been over there anymore.”

U.S. combat operations in Iraq officially ended months before Hickman’s unit shipped out from Fort Bragg in May. His platoon spent most of its deployment on “presence patrols,” walking through Iraqi neighborhoods to remind insurgents that the U.S. military was still there, said Spec. Zack Zornes, who served in Hickman’s platoon.

Hickman liked the military, Zornes said. “But there were days on end where me and Hickman would be sitting in his room, being like: ‘Why are we even here? What are we doing?’ We were just doing police work. I totally agree with Hickman’s friends and family who are mad. We had no reason to be there anymore.”

Whatever one thinks of the war—I supported the invasion but have long since argued that it was time to pull the plug on the ensuing nation building folly—the death of a soldier after the announcement that we’re ending the fight is particularly tragic. That the war has been going on since Hickman was thirteen years old and that he volunteered for not only the Army but the airborne infantry fully knowing that he might be called to risk his life in Iraq doesn’t diminish that.

The school-book expresses most of the themes that would come KIA Forum dominate Trimmer’s later works, such as her gravity on retaining sexually transmitted hierarchies