First Muslim student regent at University of California

First Muslim student regent at University of California

Over the objections of Jewish organisations, the University of California regents on Wednesday selected a new student regent whose advocacy for divesting from Israel, and her outspokenness against “Islamophobia”, has placed her in the centre of one of the most divisive issues in campus politics: Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Sadia Saifuddin of UC Berkeley will become the first Muslim to serve as “student regent designate” — for 2014-15 — after receiving unanimous support from the regents who voted.

Regent Dick Blum abstained, saying, “If you’re going to be the student representative, you have to represent all students. You don’t want to alienate them. ... So I’ve got a problem with this.” But many others at the regents’ meeting in San Francisco — including Jews — spoke in favour of appointing Ms. Saifuddin. She embodies “open-mindedness and tolerance”, said Jonathan Stein, a Cal law student who served on the selection committee. A social welfare major and member of student government, Ms. Saifuddin will serve as a nonvoting regent for one year before becoming a voting member in the next year, succeeding Cinthia Flores, a law student from UC Irvine.

To those who spoke on her behalf, Ms. Saifuddin is not only a brilliant student and kind mentor, she is an advocate for tolerance and inclusion of all students.

But to representatives of anti-defamation groups who addressed the regents and sent e-mails opposing the appointment, Ms. Saifuddin’s actions have fomented a “toxic and hostile” environment for Jewish students.

At the lunch break, she faced reporters. “I hope my leadership is seen in a wider perspective,” she said, noting that her divestment activities had been on behalf of a campus advocacy group called the Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian Coalition.

“I think the position on divestment is irrelevant. It may be my personal opinion, but that has nothing to do with my work as a student regent.”

Her main goals on the board will be improving student access to financial aid and making campuses more tolerable for all students, she said. 

Amazing Castles of the World

Castle 

A Castle used to be a fortress to keep the royalty from the touch of enemies and traitors. Back to the modern age, Castle is a place for tourists to get a nice background for their photos or to keep some historical objects that are priceless and symbolic.
A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified, from a fortress, which was not always a residence for nobility, and from a fortified town, which was a public defence – though there are many similarities among these types of construction.you see the Amazing Castle from Around The World

We are posting About interesting and most amazing castles in the world.

Chambord Castle

Chambord Castle was used by King François I as a hunting lodge and mansion. This castle was built close to his mistress palace,Claude Rohan. The castle is featured with 440 rooms, 84 staircases, 365 fireplaces and it is known as the biggest château in Loire Valley

 

Hohenzollern Castle

The castle was built on the top of Mount Hohenzollern, around 30 miles south of Stuttgart, Germany. The castle was built in 11th century for German Emperors and Prussian Rulers. The building was destroyed in 1423 but than finally rebuilt in 1461.

Pele? Castle

Located on the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Pele? Castle is Neo-Renaissance building that is very famous since 1883. King Carol I of the Romanians had resided in this castle and he witnessed the amazement of people who visit this palace. As info, the building were constructed with the hand of many people from Italy, Polish, Turkey, Germany, Greek, Czech, French and Romania it self

Castle Howard

Castle Howard is addressed at Castle Howard, York, North Yorkshire and it is a famous house in England. The construction was started in 1699 and it was completed around 1712. it is famous for the landscape gardens, building construction and historical record. The residence is included in the list Treasure Houses of England and it has been a house for Howard families for 300 years

Prague Castle

Prague Castle is known since the early of 9th century. Located in capital city of Czeh republic, the fortress is also known for the Gothic, Romanesque and baroque architectural styles. The fortress was constructed over 570 x 130 meters area and up to now, this castle is one of the most favorite tourist object in Europe

Himeji Castle

Located in Kansai, Japan, the fortress is known for centuries for the defensive construction, beautiful design, and 83 network buildings. Although the building was demolished and rebuilt 2 times since 1333, the building is still featured with its original advance defensive system up to now. Today, the castle is known as the most visited castle and UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Japan.

Alcázar of Segovia
Alcázar of Segovi or also known as Segovia Castle is located on Segovia Spain and it was owned by an Arab in 12th century. In the middle ages, the castle was used as a primary fortress for Spanish monarchy. The construction appeared to be a great inspiration for Walt Disney company.

Mount Everest Story

Mount Everest Story

On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay completed the first confirmed ascent of Mount Everest, which stands 29,035 feet above sea level. Though the two mountaineers spent only about 15 minutes on the snow-covered summit, they managed to snap a few photos, share a celebratory hug and eat a bar of mint cake—an early version of today’s energy bars. Tenzing, a Nepalese Sherpa, also left some of the sweets as a Buddhist offering, and Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, placed a cross nearby. On the 60th anniversary of their widely celebrated feat, which Hillary described as knocking “the bastard off,” here are seven things you may not know about Earth’s highest mountain.

 No one knew of Everest as the roof of the world until the 19th century.
In 1802, the British launched what became known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey in order to map the Indian subcontinent. Heavy equipment, rugged terrain, monsoons, malaria and scorpions made the work exceedingly difficult. Nonetheless, the surveyors were able to take astonishingly accurate measurements. They soon proved that the Himalayas—and not the Andes, as previously believed—were the world’s highest mountain range. By 1852, they had fingered Everest, then called Peak XV, as the king of them all, and by 1856 they had calculated its height as 29,002 feet above sea level. A 1999 survey using state-of-the-art GPS technology found them off by only 33 feet.

 Hillary and Tenzing might have been beat to the summit.
George Mallory, a British schoolteacher, participated in the first three documented attempts to scale Mount Everest from 1921 to 1924. Before the last of those expeditions, he wrote, “It is almost unthinkable…that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated.” On June 4, 1924, a teammate made it within about 900 vertical feet of the summit before turning back. Mallory and climbing partner Andrew Irvine then made their own attempt for glory. They departed the 26,800-foot Camp VI on June 8 and were last seen that afternoon trudging upwards in their tweed coats, hobnailed boots and other primitive apparel. Some people believe that Mallory and Irvine reached the summit before dying on the way down. A camera they supposedly carried could perhaps solve the mystery, but it was not among the items in Mallory’s pockets when his corpse finally was discovered in 1999. Irvine’s body remains unfound.

Tenzing had almost reached the top once before.
After Mallory’s death, the next 10 or so expeditions to Mount Everest also failed. Tenzing gained valuable experience participating in six of them, starting off as a porter and later progressing into a full team member. In 1952 he and a Swiss climber came within about 800 vertical feet of the top—likely higher than anyone had ever gone. He broke his own record the next year by reaching the summit with Hillary. Since then, around 4,000 other mountaineers have likewise climbed Everest, including Hillary’s son and one of Tenzing’s sons.

Corpses are often left behind when a climber dies en route.
About 240 people have died attempting to climb Mount Everest. Avalanches, rock slides  blizzards, falls, altitude sickness, freezing temperatures, exhaustion and combinations thereof have all proven fatal, particularly in the so-called “death zone” above 26,000 feet. Since getting them down is grueling and dangerous, most of the corpses remain up there. They are well preserved in the snow and apparently serve as trail markers for climbers who pass by. Everest’s deadliest day occurred in May 1996, when eight people perished in a storm. Yet that incident, made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air,” did nothing to stem the tide of people willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a chance to tame Earth’s highest mountain. Traffic jams have even been reported near the top, and a fistfight broke out this April between three European climbers and more than 100 Sherpas, over what the guides deemed to be rude and dangerous behavior during an attempted ascent. Meanwhile, the deaths keep coming, including at least 10 last year and around eight this year.

Everest’s litter problem goes well beyond cadavers.
As early as 1963, a climber wrote in National Geographic that parts of Mount Everest had become “the highest junkyard on the face of the Earth.” Empty oxygen bottles, human excrement, food packaging, broken climbing gear and torn tents continue to spoil the environment there. A single cleanup in spring 2011 removed over 8 tons of trash from Everest, and many more tons remain uncollected. In order to counteract the problem, Nepal’s government now requires climbers to bring back all of their equipment or risk losing a $4,000 deposit. New trash bins and a waste incinerator have also recently been installed near the mountain.

Few animals venture into Everest’s upper reaches.
Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest and surrounding peaks, supports a variety of mammals at its lower elevations, from snow leopards and musk deer to red pandas and Himalayan tahr. About 150 bird species also reside within the park. Almost no wildlife, however, is found above 20,000 feet, the point at which permanent snow prevents even the hardiest lichens and mosses from growing. Among the exceptions are Himalayan jumping spiders, which have been observed as high as 22,000 feet, where they eat insects blown up by the wind; yellow-billed choughs, a crow-like bird, which have followed mountaineers up to about 26,500 feet; and bar-headed geese, which migrate over Mount Everest on their way from the Tibetan Plateau to India’s marshes.

Everest is the highest point from sea level, but other mountains are taller.
Mauna Kea, a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, tops out at 13,796 feet above sea level. But because it rises from the ocean floor, its base-to-summit height is actually more than 33,000 feet, making it, by that measurement at least, the tallest mountain in the world. Nor is Everest the closest to outer space. Because Earth isn’t a perfect sphere—it bulges at the middle—that honor belongs to 20,561-foot Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

Click here to see a map of the historical route.

Ronnie and Donnie Galyon conjoined twins,

Ronnie and Donnie Galyon conjoined twins

Ronnie and Donnie Galyon (born October 28, 1951) are two American conjoined twins, who hold the current record for the oldest living conjoined twins.
These two are a real inspirational and makes me think that I should live life to the full because I'm lucky to have what I've got. They seem like really amazing people who just love life despite everything they've missed out on. God bless them.

WORLD WAR II in EUROPE and Hitler

WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE

The Holocaust took place in the broader context of World War II. Still reeling from Germany's defeat in World War I, Hitler's government envisioned a vast, new empire of "living space" (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. The realization of German dominance in Europe, its leaders calculated, would require war.

1939
After securing the neutrality of the Soviet Union (through the August 1939German-Soviet Pact of nonaggression), Germany started World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. Within a month, Poland was defeated by a combination of German and Soviet forces and was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

1940
The relative lull in fighting which followed the defeat of Poland ended on April 9, 1940, when German forces invaded Norwayand Denmark. On May 10, 1940, Germany began its assault on western Europe by invading the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), which had taken neutral positions in the war, as well as France. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, which provided for the German occupation of the northern half of the country and permitted the establishment of a collaborationist regime in the south with its seat in the city of Vichy.

With German encouragement, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states in June 1940 and formally annexed them in August 1940. Italy, a member of the Axis (countries allied with Germany), joined the war on June 10, 1940. From July 10 to October 31, 1940, the Nazis waged, and ultimately lost, an air war over England, known as the Battle of Britain.

1941
After securing the Balkan region by invading Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, 1941, the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in direct violation of the German-Soviet Pact. In June and July 1941, the Germans also occupied the Baltic states. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin then became a major wartime Allied leader, in opposition to Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. During the summer and autumn of 1941, German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, but stiffening Red Army resistance prevented the Germans from capturing the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow. On December 6, 1941, Soviet troops launched a significant counteroffensive that drove German forces permanently from the outskirts of Moscow. One day later, on December 7, 1941, Japan (one of the Axis powers) bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States immediately declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States as the military conflict widened.

1942-1943
In May 1942, the British Royal Air Force carried out a raid on the German city of Cologne with a thousand bombers, for the first time bringing war home to Germany. For the next three years, Allied air forces systematically bombed industrial plants and cities all over the Reich, reducing much of urban Germany to rubble by 1945. In late 1942 and early 1943, the Allied forces achieved a series of significant military triumphs in North Africa. The failure of French armed forces to prevent Allied occupation of Morocco and Algeria triggered a German occupation of collaborationist Vichy France on November 11, 1942. Axis military units in Africa, approximately 150,000 troops in all, surrendered in May 1943.

On the eastern front, during the summer of 1942, the Germans and their Axis allies renewed their offensive in the Soviet Union, aiming to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River, as well as the city of Baku and the Caucasian oil fields. The German offensive stalled on both fronts in the late summer of 1942. In November, Soviet troops launched a counteroffensive at Stalingrad and on February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets. The Germans mounted one more offensive at Kursk in July 1943, the biggest tank battle in history, but Soviet troops blunted the attack and assumed a military predominance that they would not again relinquish during the course of the war.

In July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily and in September went ashore on the Italian mainland. After the Italian Fascist Party's Grand Council deposed Italian premier Benito Mussolini (an ally of Hitler), the Italian military took over and negotiated a surrender to Anglo-American forces on September 8. German troops stationed in Italy seized control of the northern half of the peninsula, and continued to resist. Mussolini, who had been arrested by Italian military authorities, was rescued by German SS commandos in September and established (under German supervision) a neo-Fascist puppet regime in northern Italy. German troops continued to hold northern Italy until surrendering on May 2, 1945.

1944
On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), as part of a massive military operation, over 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France, which was liberated by the end of August. On September 11, 1944, the first US troops crossed into Germany, one month after Soviet troops crossed the eastern border. In mid-December the Germans launched an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied air forces attacked Nazi industrial plants, such as the one at the Auschwitz camp (though the gas chambers were never targeted).

1945
The Soviets began an offensive on January 12, 1945, liberating western Poland and forcing Hungary (an Axis ally) to surrender. In mid-February 1945, the Allies bombed the German city of Dresden, killing approximately 35,000 civilians. American troops crossed the Rhine River on March 7, 1945. A final Soviet offensive on April 16, 1945, enabled Soviet forces to encircle the German capital, Berlin. As Soviet troops fought their way towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies at Reims and on May 9 to the Soviets in Berlin. In August, the war in the Pacific ended soon after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 120,000 civilians. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.

World War II resulted in an estimated 55 million deaths worldwide. It was the largest and most destructive conflict in history.

Adolf Hitler Joins German Workers' Party

Joins German Workers' Party

Corporal Adolf Hitler was ordered in September 1919 to investigate a small group in Munich known as the German Workers' Party.

The use of the term 'workers' attracted the attention of the German Army which was now involved in crushing Marxist uprisings.

After the speech, Hitler began to leave when a man rose up and spoke in favor of the German state of Bavaria breaking away from Germany and forming a new South German nation with Austria.On September 12th, dressed in civilian clothes, Hitler went to a meeting of the German Workers' Party in the back room of a Munich beer hall, with about twenty five people. He listened to a speech on economics by Gottfried Feder entitled, "How and by what means is capitalism to be eliminated?"

This enraged Hitler and he spoke out forcefully against the man for the next fifteen minutes uninterrupted, to the astonishment of everyone. One of the founders of the German Workers' Party, Anton Drexler, reportedly whispered: "He's got the gift of the gab. We could use him."

After Hitler's outburst ended, Drexler hurried over to Hitler and gave him a forty-page pamphlet entitled: "My Political Awakening." He urged Hitler to read it and also invited Hitler to come back again.

Early the next morning, sitting in his cot in the barracks of the 2nd Infantry Regiment watching the mice eat bread crumbs he left for them on the floor, Hitler remembered the pamphlet and read it. He was delighted to find the pamphlet, written by Drexler, reflected political thinking much like his own – building a strong nationalist, pro-military, anti-Semitic party made up of working class people.

A few days later, Hitler received an unexpected postcard saying he had been accepted as a member into the party. He was asked to attend an executive committee meeting, which he did. At that meeting he was joyfully welcomed as a new member although he was actually very undecided on whether to join.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the condition of the party: "aside from a few directives, there was nothing, no program, no leaflet, no printed matter at all, no membership cards, not even a miserable rubber stamp..."

Although unimpressed by the present condition of the German Workers' Party, Hitler was drawn to the sentiment expressed by Drexler that this would somehow become a movement not just a political party. And in this disorganized party, Hitler saw opportunity.

"This absurd little organization with its few members seemed to me to possess the one advantage that it had not frozen into an 'organization,' but left the individual opportunity for real personal activity. Here it was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the more readily it could be put into the proper form. Here, the content, the goal, and the road could still be determined..."

He spent two days thinking it over then decided.

"I finally came to the conviction that I had to take this step...It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back."

Adolf Hitler joined the committee of the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP) and thus entered politics.