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George Hamilton Gordon 4th Earl of Aberdeen KG KT FRS PC 1784 - 1860 styled Lord Haddo from 1791 to 1801, was a Scottish politician, successively a Tory, Conservative and Peelite, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1852 until 1855. George Hamilton Gordon was an advocate of homeopathy, and he was a patient of James Manby Gully, who he described as the '… most gifted physician of the Age…'. George Hamilton Gordon was a friend of William Gladstone, Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot and Robert Peel. Born in Edinburgh on 28 January 1784, George Hamilton Gordon was the eldest son of George Gordon, Lord Haddo, son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. His mother was Charlotte, daughter of William Baird. He lost his father in 1791 and his mother in 1795 and was brought up by Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville. He was educated at Harrow, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with an MA in 1804. Before this, however, he had become Earl of Aberdeen on his grandfather's death in 1801, and had travelled all over Europe. On his return to England, he founded the Athenian Society.

Peter Foster, National Post · Jan. 6, 2012 | Last Updated: Jan. 6, 2012 3:10 AM ET I was in a hotel room in Mexico City when I watched the Tokyo fight in which Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson 22 years ago. The result seemed so bizarre that I wondered if I might have stumbled into a parallel universe. That is not an unusual feeling in Latin America. The decision by an Ecuador appeals court to uphold a US$18-billion judgment against petroleum giant Chevron was perhaps less surprising, but hardly less surreal. For the second time in a week, a corrupt, leftist South American government appeared to have gained a legal "victory" over Big Oil. The Chevron decision followed hard on the announcement that the government of Venezuela had to pay only a fraction (under US$1-billion) of Exxon Mobil's demands (US$7-billion) related to expropriation of the company's assets. Any case involving Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is likely to be weird and wonderful. However, the Chevron case in Ecuador - which is ruled by another socialist mobster, Rafael Correa - looks like a plot by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not just because it features incriminating outtakes from documentaries, payoffs to Ecuadorian court officials and evidence that court decisions were ghostwritten by the plaintiffs, but because it has recently been linked with an even more shameless shakedown: the "Yasuni ITT Initiative." The Chevron case goes back almost 20 years, to accusations that Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, had failed to compensate adequately for its pollution of the Amazon while in partnership with state oil company PetroEcuador. This despite having paid for a cleanup that was certified by the Ecuadorian government. The case has - with the help of radical NGOs and U.S. lawyers, and the prospect of a bonanza payday - dragged on. A year ago, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay US$8.6-billion, a sum that would double if it was not joined by an apology. No apology was forthcoming.