Pope John Paul II's blood stolen from church in Italy

Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John Paul II.

A custodian, Franca Corrieri, said she had discovered a broken window early on Sunday morning and had called the police. When they entered the small stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing.

John Paul, who died in 2005, loved the mountains in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He would sometimes slip away from the Vatican secretly to hike or ski there and pray in the church.

Polish-born John Paul, who reigned for 27 years, is due to be made a saint of the Roman Catholic church in May, meaning the relic will become more noteworthy and valuable.

In 2011, John Paul's former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, gave the local Abruzzo community some of the late pontiff's blood as a token of the love he had felt for the mountainous area.

It was put in a gold and glass circular case and kept in a niche of the small mountain church of San Pietro della Ienca, near the city of L'Aquila.

Corrieri said on Monday the incident felt more like a kidnapping than a theft. "In a sense, a person has been stolen," she said.

She said she could not say if the intention of the thieves may have been to seek a ransom for the blood.

Apart from the reliquary and a crucifix, nothing else was stolen from the isolated church, even though Corrieri said the thieves would probably have had time to take other objects during the night-time theft.

Some of John Paul's blood was saved after an assassination attempt that nearly killed him in St Peter's Square on 13 May 1981.

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Meet the proud father Mr.William H.Gates Sr

William Henry Gates, Sr. (born William Henry Gates II; November 30, 1925) is a retired American attorney and philanthropist and author of the book Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime. He is the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Gates was born in Bremerton, Washington, to William Henry Gates I or Sr. (Bremerton, Washington, March 14, 1891 – Bremerton, Washington, August 17, 1969), and wife (married c. 1913) Lillian Elizabeth Rice (Bremerton, Washington, 1891 – Bremerton, Washington, November 27, 1966). He was the third in his family to have the same name, his grandfather being the first William Henry Gates. His paternal grandmother was German and his maternal grandmother was English. Gates was an active member of a Boy Scout troop for several years, and earned the Eagle Scout Award in 1944. After high school he enlisted in the United States Army, changing his name to William Gates, Jr. to avoid the appearance of elitism. He fought in World War II and was honorably discharged in November 1946.
He attended the University of Washington (UW) under the G.I. Bill, where he earned a B.A. in 1949 and a law degree in 1950. While at Washington he joined the Chi Psi Fraternity. He practiced law until 1998, primarily with the law firm which he co-founded as Shidler & King in 1964, later known as Preston Gates & Ellis LLP; the firm was merged into the firm now known as K&L Gates, although Bill Gates, Sr. is not affiliated with the firm. Gates also served on the board of Planned Parenthood.
In 1998, Gates retired from PGE. He currently serves on the Board of Regents for the University of Washington, and is a co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which his son Bill and his son's wife Melinda founded. He has served as a director for Costco Wholesale, a bulk retail corporation, since 2003. He is also a founding co-chair of the Pacific Health Summit. He has adopted the suffix "Sr." to distinguish himself from his more famous son.
Gates is co-author, with Chuck Collins, of the book Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, a defense of the policies promoted by the estate tax.
He married Mary Maxwell Gates, whom he met at UW, and who died in 1994. They had three children: Kristianne, Bill, and Libby. In 1996 Gates married Mimi Gardner Gates, who was director of the Seattle Art Museum.
William H. Gates, Sr. serves as an Honorary Co-Chair for the World Justice Project. The World Justice Project works to lead a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the Rule of Law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.

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Syria will let women and children leave the war-torn city of Homs

The Syrian government led by President Bashar Assaed has agreed to allow women and children safe passage from the besieged city of Homs, says UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi.

Mr Brahimi announced the news at the end of the second day of negotiations at the Syria peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland.

"What we have been told by the government side is that women and children in this besieged area of the city are welcome to leave immediately," he told reporters.

"Hopefully starting tomorrow, women and children will be able to leave the old city in Homs."

Homs, one of the first cities to rise against President Bashar Assad, had a pre-war population of one million, but most residents have fled.

Activists say about 800 families are trapped in the rubble-strewn city, without regular access to food, medicine and basic necessities.

Activists say about 800 families are trapped in the rubble-strewn city, without regular access to food, medicine and basic necessities.

"The regime is blocking all convoys to Homs and has been doing so for months," said a senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the peace talks.

"The situation in Homs is extremely urgent. Anything the government says to the contrary is false."
Mr Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat representing the UN and Arab League, acknowledged that the agreement to free women and children fell short of his hope of sending aid convoys into the city.

But, he said, "to bring Syria out of the ditch in which it has fallen will take time."

He said he was pleased with the general tone of talks between Syria's regime and opposition leaders, and was hopeful of a breakthrough in the nearly three-year-old civil war.

"Now we are approaching a solution - at least for the civilians," said Mr Brahimi.

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Kim Kardashian, Kanye West Denied Nuptials At Marie Antoinette’s Palace

Kim Kardashian may yet have a wedding fit for a queen, and there will probably be cake, but her version of a royal wedding to hip hop king Kanye West will not take place at the French Palace of Versailles.

It was at the same Palace that the extravagant-living wife of France’s King Louis XVI, according to legend, told starving peasants to “eat cake.” Though it is now generally accepted that Marie Antoinette never actually spoke that phrase, it seemed believable at the time of the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette, along with the palace where she resided, came to symbolize of the callous indifference of the aristocracy toward the struggles of ordinary people.

Marie Antoinette was tried by a Revolutionary Tribunal then beheaded on October 16, 1793. But Kim Kardashian will avoid any association with the ill-fated French queen. Though, along with her fiancé Kanye West, she paid a visit to the palace over the weekend, sparking rampant speculation that the mega-celebrity couple were eyeing the “let them eat cake” venue as the site of their wedding, the palace staff quickly put the kibosh on those rumors.

When Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were granted a private, after-hours tour of the palace, they were required to sign a “liability waiver” which included, according to the French Press Agency, the pledge, “I do not have any intentions of planning any large wedding event with the Chateau de Versailles premises in the future.”

Chateau de Versailles is the French term for the palace.

The couple also granted permission for palace management to release their signed “waiver” to the press, should journalists become curious about whether the reality TV star and her rapper fiancé were considering a palace wedding.

And inevitably, the press did express just such curiosity. So the palace responded with a statement on its official Twitter account, stating without any ambiguity that the couple would not have their wedding at the palace.

Kim Kardashian, if a source who blabbed to E! Online is to be believed, will be sorely disappointed by the palace’s laying down the “no nuptials” law. The source told E! that both Kim and Kanye were “really impressed” by their tour of the palace.
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“Kim in particular is really in love with the place,” the source confided, noting that the callipygous Keeping Up With The Kardashians star was “raving” about the menu offerings from the palace kitchen, which include foie gras, truffles, sliced veal and other French delicacies. Maybe even cake.

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Writing system of English

Since around the 9th century, English has been written in the Latin script, which replaced Anglo-Saxon runes. The modern English alphabet contains 26 letters of the Latin script: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z (which also have majuscule, capital or uppercase forms: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z). Other symbols used in writing English include the ligatures, æ and œ (though these are no longer common). There is also some usage of diacritics, mainly in foreign loanwords (like the acute accent in café and exposé), and in the occasional use of a diaeresis to indicate that two vowels are pronounced separately (as in naïve, Zoë). For more information see English terms with diacritical marks.

The spelling system, or orthography, of English is multilayered, with elements of French, Latin and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system; further complications have arisen through sound changes with which the orthography has not kept pace. This means that, compared with many other languages, English spelling is not a reliable indicator of pronunciation and vice versa (it is not, generally speaking, a phonemic orthography).

Though letters and sounds may not correspond in isolation, spelling rules that take into account syllable structure, phonetics, and accents are 75% or more reliable. Some phonics spelling advocates claim that English is more than 80% phonetic. However, English has fewer consistent relationships between sounds and letters than many other languages; for example, the letter sequence ough can be pronounced in 10 different ways. The consequence of this complex orthographic history is that reading can be challenging. It takes longer for students to become completely fluent readers of English than of many other languages, including French, Greek, and Spanish. English-speaking children have been found to take up to two years longer to learn to read than children in 12 other European countries.

As regards the consonants, the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is fairly regular. The letters b, d, f, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, z represent, respectively, the phonemes /b/, /d/, /f/, /h/, /dʒ/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /v/, /w/, /z/ (as tabulated in the Consonants section above). The letters c and g normally represent /k/ and /ɡ/, but there is also a soft c pronounced /s/, and a soft g pronounced /dʒ/. Some sounds are represented by digraphs: ch for /tʃ/, sh for /ʃ/, th for /θ/ or /ð/, ng for /ŋ/ (also ph is pronounced /f/ in Greek-derived words). Doubled consonant letters (and the combination ck) are generally pronounced as single consonants, and qu and x are pronounced as the sequences /kw/ and /ks/. The letter y, when used as a consonant, represents /j/. However this set of rules is not applicable without exception; many words have silent consonants or other cases of irregular pronunciation.

With the vowels, however, correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are even more irregular. As can be seen under Vowels above, there are many more vowel phonemes in English than there are vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u, y). This means that diphthongs and other long vowels often need to be indicated by combinations of letters (like the oa in boat and the ay in stay), or using a silent e or similar device (as in note and cake). Even these devices are not used consistently, so consequently vowel pronunciation remains the main source of irregularity in English orthography.

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English is next to Mandarin Chinese and Spanish and origin of English

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the most widely used language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by the majority populations of several sovereign states, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and a number of Caribbean nations; and it is an official language of almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third-most-common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is widely learned as a second language and is an official language of the European Union, many Commonwealth countries and the United Nations, as well as in many world organisations.

English arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and what is now southeast Scotland. Following the extensive influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 17th to mid-20th centuries through the British Empire, it has been widely propagated around the world.Through the spread of American-dominated media and technology, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions.

Historically, English originated from the fusion of closely related dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic settlers (Anglo-Saxons) by the 5th century; the word English is derived from the name of the Angles, and ultimately from their ancestral region of Angeln (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein). The language was also influenced early on by the Old Norse language through Viking invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries.

The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the appearance of a close relationship with those of Latin-derived Romance languages (though English is not a Romance language itself) to what had then become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English.

In addition to its Anglo-Saxon and Norman French roots, a significant number of English words are constructed on the basis of roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life[16] and remains the wellspring of much modern scientific and technical vocabulary.

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Oxfam: World's Richest 1 Percent Control Half Of Global Wealth

Just 1 percent of the world's population controls nearly half of the planet's wealth, according to anew study published by Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.
The study says this tiny slice of humanity controls $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion people.
Other key findings in the report:
— The world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 50 percent of humanity.
— 70 percent of the world's people live in a country where income inequality has increased in the past three decades.
— In the U.S., where the gap between rich and poor has grown at a faster rate than any other developed country, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-recession growth (since 2009), while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.
"Oxfam is concerned that, left unchecked, the effects are potentially immutable, and will lead to 'opportunity capture' — in which the lowest tax rates, the best education, and the best healthcare are claimed by the children of the rich," the relief agency writes. "This creates dynamic and mutually reinforcing cycles of advantage that are transmitted across generations."
In other words, Oxfam says that if trends continue, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.
"People are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.
The World Economic Forum is scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, beginning Jan. 22.
The Oxfam report largely mirrors findings of several other studies in recent years that have documented growing income inequality in the U.S. and across the globe.
In September, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by 31.4 percent over the period 2009 to 2012, while the other 99 percent experienced just 0.4 percent growth. Last month, the Pew Research Center published a study that found income inequality in the U.S. was at its highest since 1928, the year before the start of the Great Depression.

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Osho critisized Gandhi's teachings

Once upon a time in India, a man lived. He would go on to become one of the most influential thinkers in new-age thought, but at this time – the early 1970s – he was merely a philosophy teacher.He is Osho.
In an age that looked worshipfully at Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings, this young fellow swam against the tide. He felt Gandhi, and socialists in general, glorified poverty too much. How, he wondered, was India to rise above its grinding, dehumanizing poverty without capitalism, without a striving for physical things?
God in everything, including your wallet
In contrast, what this teacher taught was that physical prosperity was good, not bad, because God was in everything physical – including the cash in your wallet and the Aston-Martin in your driveway – and that we have but to awaken ourselves to Him to see the world in a whole new way, and feel at peace with it, regardless of how much of it we own and control personally.
As you can imagine, this message held great appeal for those who were wealthy and wished to remain so without feeling bad about it.

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More than 200 Dolphins await slaughter in Taiji,Japan

                                                             

Thanks to the considerable efforts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and their team of “Cove Guardians,” the world is watching  as more than 200 dolphins await their fate in the killing cove of Taiji, Japan.

This site, made famous by the 2009 Academy Award-winning film “The Cove,” is where fisherman earlier last week cornered the bottlenose dolphins – a horrific practice that’s a precursor to an eventual mass slaughter.

“They tighten up the nets to bring each sub-group together then the skiffs push them toward the tarps. Under the tarps in the shallows is where the trainers work with the killers to select the ‘prettiest’ dolphins which will sell and make the best pay day for the hunters,” the group said.

“But the process is brutal and stressful. Some of them die from injuries incurred during the manhandling or simply the stress.”

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"TheTrueHOOHA" is the pseudonym of ....

                                                                                              

Several sources have alleged that Snowden, under the pseudonym "TheTrueHOOHA", authored hundreds of posts on technology news provider Ars Technica's chat rooms.The poster discussed a variety of political topics. In a January 2009 entry, TheTrueHOOHA exhibited strong support for the United States' security state apparatus and said he believed leakers of classified information "should be shot in the balls". However, in February 2010 TheTrueHOOHA wrote, "Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop, or was it an relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?"

In accounts published in June 2013, interviewers noted that Snowden's laptop displayed stickers supporting internet freedom organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project.Snowden considers himself "neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American".

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Nehru ,stated ‘I almost overlooked her’

                                                     

Kamala wedded Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru at the age of 17. Her husband went to a trip in the Himalayas shortly after their marriage.In his autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru, referring to his wife, stated "I almost overlooked her."Kamala gave birth to a girl child in November 1917,Indira Priyadarshini, who later succeeded her father as prime minister and head of the Congress party. Kamala gave birth to a boy in November 1924, but he lived for only a week.

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Times man of the year who are minus mirror till now

                                                                  

Although Time’s now-famous distinction began as “Man of the Year” in 1927, evolving to “Person of the Year” later, the magazine has in recent years rewarded ideas and groups, including its choice of “The American Soldier” in 2003, “The Good Samaritans” in 2005, and “You” in 2006 and “The Protester” in 2011.

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Reasons behind Russel Brand’s editor love divorced criketer Imran khan

In 2003 rumours circulated that the couple's marriage was in crisis, Jemima placed an advertisement in Pakistan newspapers to deny them. It read: "Whilst it is true that I am currently studying for a masters degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, it is certainly not true to say that Imran and I are having difficulties in our marriage. This is a temporary arrangement."On 22 June 2004, it was announced that the Khans had divorced ending the nine-year marriage because it was "difficult for Jemima to adapt to life in Pakistan".The marriage ended amicably. Imran has said the six months leading to the divorce and the six months after was the hardest year of his life. After the divorce Jemima returned to Britain with the boys, according to the divorce settlement Khan's sons visit him in Pakistan during their school holidays while he stays with his former mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when he comes to London to see them. According to Jemima, Imran and she have remained on good terms even after the divorce. 

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