120px|Queen Victoria holding a Privy Council meeting The Privy Council is a formal body of advisers to the Sovereign in the United Kingdom. Its membership is mostly made up of senior politicians who are (or have been) members of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. The Privy Council, the modern-day successor to the Privy Council of England, was formerly a powerful institution, but its policy decisions are now exclusively in the hands of one of its committees, the Cabinet. The Council formally advises the Sovereign on the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, and together they issue executive instruments known as Orders in Council, which among other things are used to make Regulations. The Council by itself also has a delegated authority to issue Orders of Council, which are mostly used to regulate certain public institutions. It advises the Sovereign on the issuing of Royal Charters, which are used to grant special status to incorporated bodies, and city or borough status to local authorities. (more...) Recently featured: Art Ross – Compsognathus – Mathew Charles Lamb Archive – By email – More featured articles... Read the rest of this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council_of_the_United_Kingdom> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1814: Sweden and Denmark–Norway signed the Treaty of Kiel, whereby Frederick VI of Denmark, a loser in the Napoleonic Wars, ceded Norway to Sweden in return for the Swedish holdings in Pomerania. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Kiel> 1900: Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca, based on the play La Tosca by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosca> 1957: Kripalu Maharaj became the fifth Jagadguru, the supreme spiritual leader of Hinduism. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadguru_Kripalu_Maharaj> 1960: The Reserve Bank of Australia , the country's central bank and banknote-issuing authority, was established. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Bank_of_Australia> 1967: The counterculture Human Be-In was held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, launching the Summer of Love. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Be-In> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: restitution (n): 1. (law) A process of compensation for losses. 2. A return or restoration to a previous condition or position <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/restitution> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe. --Albert Schweitzer <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer>