Representing yourself in court can be a tricky endeavor. There are confusing legal terms to learn, strict procedures to follow and volumes of case law that often need to be understood to prepare a case. Lake County officials and a private agency that assists indigent litigants in Illinois want to make the practice easier by creating a self-help center for people who choose to represent themselves in legal matters. The center, which will be housed in the law library at the main courthouse in Waukegan, could open later this summer. "I think it's going to be extremely helpful," Court Administrator Bob Zastany said. "There is a population out there that will take advantage of this resource." The self-help center will be the only one of its kind in the county. Only a few operate nationwide, officials said. The project is the work of Lake County circuit court officials and Prairie State Legal Services, a statewide agency with an office in Waukegan that provides information and legal assistance to poor and elderly Illinois residents. The organization has received a $25,000 grant from the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds programs designed to increase access to legal information and assistance, to help pay for the effort. Prairie State will share the money with the county. The county's law library is on the first floor of the governmental center at 18 N. County St. The new self-help center will be designed to help litigants find the information they need to properly represent themselves in court, an undertaking that can be complicated and confusing. "Some people can do OK on their own, and some people can do OK with some help," said Linda Rothnagel, the managing attorney for Prairie State Legal Services. "But other people can't do it. It's not always easy." Self-representation is a right affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The practice is far more common in civil matters than in criminal cases. In fact, self-represented litigants - formally called "pro se" in Latin, or "for oneself" - in criminal defenses are so rare that statistics about the practice generally are not kept, legal experts say.
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QUESTION: What are some facts about self-representation?

The old vaulted church was stripped down: there was no cloth on the altar, just a DJ's toolkit and his beer. Through the dark, I could see three bolts left in the wall from where they'd taken down the crucifix. A confessional too beaten-up to have been sold was shaking in a way that suggested activity inside, and where the pews had been taken out, a couple hundred people were testifying to the DJ's moving sermon. Rachel stepped forward into the crowd while I took a moment to drink in the ceiling's blue-lit, shadowed vault and the light-catching haze from who-knows-what rising between the DJ and the crowd. There was a terrific echo, each beat reverberating inside of the next, and the old stained-glass windows rattled in their frames. On the dance floor, people moved with their eyes closed and their hands in the air. I danced with Rachel for a while, but then something by the bar seemed to be pulling her eyes. She told me that she was heading for a drink and slipped out of the crowd. When she hadn't come back halfway through the next song, I glanced over at the bar. It was just a little set-up where someone had stacked a few crates and brought something alcoholic to share, mostly beer. Rachel was standing with a plastic cup, looking like she was having a conversation, but I couldn't see anyone else there. The next time the crowd split, I saw him. He stood in front of a blue light, so I couldn't see him clearly, but what I saw was memorable. He wore a jacket of what might have been blue velvet, and his hair gleamed black against his white skin. The blue haze seemed to stop just shy of his pallor, setting off his striking face without illuminating its details, and his wrists flashed white in the darkness. He didn't move, just stared and held his drink. The next time I saw them, his mouth was moving. She nodded and he took her arm. I watched them through the crush of dancers as they squeezed along the wall, and the feeling came to me that something was very wrong. Saturday morning, I woke up and saw that she still hadn't come home.
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QUESTION: What jacket did he describe that was memorable

After the 1998 embassy bombings, the U.S. government tried to develop a clearer picture of Bin Laden's finances. A U.S. interagency group traveled to Saudi Arabia twice, in 1999 and 2000, to get information from the Saudis about their understanding of those finances. The group eventually concluded that the oft-repeated assertion that Bin Laden was funding al Qaeda from his personal fortune was in fact not true. The officials developed a new theory: al Qaeda was getting its money elsewhere, and the United States needed to focus on other sources of funding, such as charities, wealthy donors, and financial facilitators. Ultimately, although the intelligence community devoted more resources to the issue and produced somewhat more intelligence, it remained difficult to distinguish al Qaeda's financial transactions among the vast sums moving in the international financial system. The CIA was not able to find or disrupt al Qaeda's money flows. The NSC staff thought that one possible solution to these weaknesses in the intelligence community was to create an all-source terrorist-financing intelligence analysis center. Clarke pushed for the funding of such a center at Treasury, but neither Treasury nor the CIA was willing to commit the resources. Within the United States, various FBI field offices gathered intelligence on organizations suspected of raising funds for al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. By 9/11, FBI agents understood that there were extremist organizations operating within the United States supporting a global jihadist movement and with substantial connections to al Qaeda. The FBI operated a web of informants, conducted electronic surveillance, and had opened significant investigations in a number of field offices, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, and Minneapolis. On a national level, however, the FBI never used the information to gain a systematic or strategic understanding of the nature and extent of al Qaeda fundraising. Treasury regulators, as well as U.S. financial institutions, were generally focused on finding and deterring or disrupting the vast flows of U.S. currency generated by drug trafficking and high-level international fraud. Large-scale scandals, such as the use of the Bank of New York by Russian money launderers to move millions of dollars out of Russia, captured the attention of the Department of the Treasury and of Congress. Before 9/11, Treasury did not consider terrorist financing important enough to mention in its national strategy for money laundering.
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QUESTION: Where were field offices opened to investigate al Qaeda funding?

Have you are burned something on the stove or in the oven? Do you know why things burn? It all has to do with temperature. Changes in matter are affected by temperature. For example, what if you place a cake in the oven and you leave it in too long? What do you think will happen? Thats right, it will probably burn. The same thing will happen if the oven setting is too high and you apply too much heat. In either case, heat has affected the rate of change in matter. Its probably obvious that when the temperature is increased a chemical change, like cooking, will occur faster. What about a physical change? Are physical changes affected by temperature? Most of us have seen steam rising off a wet road after a summer rainstorm. This happens because the road surface is very warm. The warm road and warm air temperature causes the water to evaporate quickly. The liquid water is turning into water vapor, but it is still water. The evaporation of water is a physical change. So yes, temperature affects the rate that physical change occurs.
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QUESTION:
Give two examples of how heat affects the matter.