HARSH WORDS

I ran into a stranger as he passed by,
"Oh excuse me please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;
I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I.
We went on our way saying good-bye.
But at home a difference is told,
how we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.
As I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
"Move out of the way," I said with a frown.
He walked away, his little heart broken.
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.
While I lay awake in bed,
God's still small voice came to me and said,
"While dealing with a stranger, common courtesy you use,
But the children you love, you seem to abuse.
Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you.
He picked them himself: pink, yellow and blue.
He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
and you never saw the tears that filled his little eyes."
By this time, I felt very small,
and now my tears began to fall.
I quietly went and knelt by his bed;
"Wake up, little one, wake up," I said. "
Are these the flowers you picked for me?"
He smiled, "I found 'em, out by the tree.
I picked 'em because they're pretty like you.
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue."
I said, "Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today;
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way."
He said, "Oh, Mom, that's okay. I love you anyway."
I said, "Son, I love you too,
and I do like the flowers, especially the blue."

The Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. Apart from Latin itself, the alphabet was adapted to the direct descendants of Latin (the Romance languages), Germanic, Celtic and some Slavic languages from the Middle Ages, and finally to most languages of Europe. With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, Vietnamese, Malay and Indonesian languages. More recently, Western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when they transcribe or devise written standards for non-European languages; see for example the African reference alphabet.

In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These variants may discard some letters (e.g. the Italian alphabet) or add extra letters (e.g. the Polish alphabet) to or from the classical Roman script, and many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as the lower-case letters. The Latin alphabet evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet, called the Cumaean alphabet.

About the language Latin

Spread of the Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet spread from the Italian Peninsula, along with the Latin language, to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan, evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet gradually spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing their earlier Runic alphabets), as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non-Indo-European) Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. During the Middle Ages the Latin alphabet also came into use among the peoples speaking West Slavic languages and several South Slavic Languages, including the ancestors of modern Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks, as these peoples adopted Roman Catholicism; the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted both Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet.

As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of eastern and southeastern Europe mostly used the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet was still in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic alphabet was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.

Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.

Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world. It spread to the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific with European colonization, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages. In the late eighteenth century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet, primarily because Romanian is a Romance language; although, as the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, until the nineteenth century their Church used the Cyrillic alphabet. Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for use with the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. L. L. Zamenhof used the Latin alphabet as the basis for the alphabet of Esperanto.

Some glyph forms from the Latin alphabet served as the basis for the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however the sounds of the final syllabary were completely different.

In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s, but in the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly-independent Turkic-speaking republics, namely Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Moldovan Romanian, respectively. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, although use of the Pinyin has been very rare outside educational and tourism purposes.

West Slavic and most South Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic, a reflection of the dominant religion practiced among those peoples. Among these, Polish uses a variety of diacritics and digraphs to represent special phonetic values, as well as the letter ł, for a sound which was originally the so-called dark L, but has become similar to an English w in modern varieties of the language. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvořák — the term háček (caron) originates from Czech. Croatian and the Latin version of Serbian use carons in č, š, ž, an acute in ć and a bar in đ. The languages of Eastern Orthodox Slavs generally use the Cyrillic alphabet instead, which is more closely based on the Greek alphabet. The Serbian language uses the two alphabets.

Tour India

Darjeeling (Nepali: दार्जीलिङ्ग (help·info), Bengali: দার্জিলিং) is a town in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is the headquarters of Darjeeling district, in the Shiwalik Hills on the lower range of the Himalaya, at an average elevation of 2,134 m (6,982 ft). The name "Darjeeling" is a combination of the Tibetan words Dorje ("thunderbolt") and ling ("place"), translating to "The land of the thunderbolt." During the British Raj in India, Darjeeling's temperate climate led to its development as a hill station (hill town) for British residents to escape the heat of the plains during the summers.

Darjeeling is internationally famous for its tea industry and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The tea plantations date back to the mid 19th century as part of a British development of the area. The tea growers of the area developed distinctive hybrids of black tea and fermenting techniques, with many blends considered among the world's finest. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway connecting the town with the plains was declared a World Heritage Site in 1999 and is one of the few steam engines still in service in India.

Darjeeling has several British-style public schools, which attract students from many parts of India and neighbouring countries. The town, along with neighbouring Kalimpong was a major centre for the demand of a separate Gorkhaland state in the 1980s, though the separatist movement has gradually decreased over the past decade due to the setting up of an autonomous hill council. In the recent years the town's fragile ecology is threatened by a rising demand for environmental resources, stemming from growing tourist traffic and poorly planned urbanisation.

Did you know

• ...that the Michelsberg culture of Neolithic Central Europe is known for its tulip-shaped pottery (pictured)?
• ...that R. C. Evans, an apostle in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, became the leader of a schismatic sect in 1918 after concluding that Joseph Smith, Jr. was a false prophet?
• ...that Major-General John Hill rose high as a courtier and officer in the British Army in the reign of Queen Anne, becoming Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance despite having no particular military ability?
• ...that Mary Howitt wrote "The Spider and the Fly" (the poem parodied in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and 120 other books, and translated Hans Christian Anderson?
• ...that the National Bike Registry is a database in the United States that has helped to identify and return stolen bicycles and scooters to their rightful owners since 1984?
• ...that a tasting room for Twisted Oak Winery in Murphys, California is located in a building that was once the childhood home of Albert Abraham Michelson, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Physics?

• ...that Apo Reef in Sablayan, Mindoro is the world's second-largest contiguous coral reef system and the largest in the Philippines?

Adolf Hitler's Chilhood

Childhood and heritage

Adolf Hitler as an infant.

Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, the fourth child of six.^[2] His father, Alois Hitler, (1837–1903), was a customs official. His mother, Klara Pölzl, (1860–1907), was Alois' third wife. She was also his cousin, so a papal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage. Of Alois and Klara's six children, only Adolf and his sister Paula reached adulthood.^[3] Hitler's father also had a son, Alois Jr, and a daughter, Angela, by his second wife.^[3]

Alois Hitler was born illegitimate. For the first 39 years of his life he bore his mother's surname, Schicklgruber. In 1876, he took the surname of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler. The name was spelled Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler and probably changed to "Hitler" by a clerk. The origin of the name is either from the German word Hittler and similar, "one who lives in a hut", "shepherd", or from the Slavic word Hidlar and Hidlarcek.

Allied propaganda exploited Hitler's original family name during World War II. Pamphlets bearing the phrase "Heil Schicklgruber" were airdropped over German cities. But he was legally born a Hitler and was also related to Hiedler via his maternal grandmother, Johanna Hiedler.

The name "Adolf" comes from Old High German for "noble wolf" (Adel=nobility + wolf).^[4] Hence, one of Hitler's self-given nicknames was Wolf or Herr Wolf—he began using this nickname in the early 1920s and was addressed by it only by intimates (as "Uncle Wolf" by the Wagners) up until the fall of the Third Reich.^[5] The names of his various headquarters scattered throughout continental Europe (Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Wolfsschlucht in France, Werwolf in Ukraine, etc.) reflect this. By his closest family and relatives, Hitler was known as "Adi".

As a boy, Hitler said he was often whipped by his father. Years later he told his secretary, "I then resolved never again to cry when my father whipped me. A few days later I had the opportunity of putting my will to the test. My mother, frightened, took refuge in the front of the door. As for me, I counted silently the blows of the stick which lashed my rear end."^[6]

Hitler's paternal grandfather was most likely one of the brothers Johann Georg Hiedler or Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. There were rumours that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish and that his grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, became pregnant while working as a servant in a Jewish household. The implications of these rumours were politically explosive for the proponent of a racist ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler had Jewish or Czech ancestors. Although these rumours were never confirmed, for Hitler they were reason enough to conceal his origins. According to Robert G. L. Waite in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Hitler made it illegal for German women to work in Jewish households, and after the "Anschluss" (annexation) of Austria, Hitler turned his father's hometown into an artillery practice area. Waite says that Hitler's insecurities in this regard may have been more important than whether Judaic ancestry could have been proven by his peers.

Hitler's family moved often, from Braunau am Inn to Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and Linz. The young Hitler was a good student in elementary school. But in the sixth grade, his first year of high school (Realschule) in Linz, he failed and had to repeat the grade. His teachers said that he had "no desire to work." One of Hitler's fellow pupils in the Realschule was Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. A book by Kimberley Cornish suggests that conflict between Hitler and some Jewish students, including Wittgenstein, was a critical moment in Hitler's formation as an anti-Semite.^[7]

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hitler in school in a photograph taken at the Linz Realschule in 1903.

Hitler claimed his educational slump was a rebellion against his father, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official; Hitler wanted to become a painter instead. This explanation is further supported by Hitler's later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on January 3, 1903, Hitler's schoolwork did not improve. At age 16, Hitler dropped out of high school without a degree.

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Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler
Leader of Germany Führer and Reichskanzler
In office 2 August 1934 – 30 April 1945
Preceded by	Paul von Hindenburg (as President)
Succeeded by	Karl Dönitz (as President)
Chancellor of Germany Reichskanzler
In office 30 January 1933 – 30 April 1945
Preceded by	Kurt von Schleicher
Succeeded by	Joseph Goebbels
Born	20 April 1889 Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary
Died	30 April 1945 (aged 56) Berlin, Germany
Nationality	Austrian by birth till 1925 [1], Since 1932 German
Political party	National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)
Spouse	Eva Braun (married on 29 April 1945)
Occupation	Agitator, Activist, Writer, Painter, Politican
Religion	see section(s) below

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was the leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) German Workers Party. He was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and became "Führer" in 1934, remaining in power until his suicide in 1945.

The Nazis gained power during Germany's period of crisis after World War I. They used propaganda and charismatic oratory, emphasizing nationalism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism. After restructuring the economy and rearming the military, a dictatorship commonly characterized as totalitarian or fascist was established. Hitler pursued an aggressive foreign policy, with an ideological goal of Lebensraum (expanding living space for Germans). The German Invasion of Poland in 1939 triggered armed conflict between the British and French Empires (the Allies) and Germany.

The Axis Powers occupied most of Europe and parts of Asia at their zenith but were eventually defeated by the Allies. By the end of the war, Hitler's policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust.

In the final days of the war, Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin, as the city was overrun by the Red Army of the Soviet Union.

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Dangerous

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Current Accout Balances Of Countries

This is a list of countries and territories by current account balance, in millions of U.S. dollars, equivalence based on The World Factbook ([1]). Most data are 2006 estimates.

According to this list, 64 countries are in surplus, while 99 countries are in deficit.

Rank	Country	Current account balance (million US$)
1	People's Republic of China (PRC)	179,100
2	Japan	174,400
3	Germany	134,800
4	Russia	105,300
5	Saudi Arabia	103,800
6	Norway	63,330
7	Switzerland	50,440
8	Netherlands	50,170
9	Kuwait	40,750
10	Singapore	35,580
11	Venezuela	31,820
12	Sweden	28,610
13	United Arab Emirates	26,890
14	Algeria	25,800
15	Hong Kong	20,900
16	Canada	20,560
17	Malaysia	17,860
18	Libya	14,500
19	Brazil	13,500
20	Iran	13,130
21	Nigeria	12,590
22	Qatar	12,510
23	Taiwan	9,700
24	Finland	8,749
25	Iraq	8,134
26	Angola	7,700
27	Oman	7,097
28	Belgium	6,925
29	Austria	5,913
30	Argentina	5,810
31	Chile	5,063
32	Denmark	4,941
33	Philippines	4,900
34	Luxembourg	4,630
35	Trinidad and Tobago	3,259
36	Azerbaijan	2,737
37	Egypt	2,697
38	Korea, South	2,000
39	Bahrain	1,999
40	Gabon	1,807
41	Botswana	1,698
42	Yemen	1,690
43	Indonesia	1,636
44	Peru	1,515
45	Israel	1,643
46	Uzbekistan	1,410
47	Burma	1,247
48	Republic of the Congo	1,215
49	Vietnam	1,029
50	Ecuador	727
51	Bolivia	688
52	Papua New Guinea	661
53	Namibia	572
54	Ivory Coast	460
55	Cameroon	419
56	Morocco	389
57	Bangladesh	339
58	Turkmenistan	321.2
59	Equatorial Guinea	175
60	British Virgin Islands	134.3 (1999)
61	Kazakhstan	113
62	Cook Islands	26.67 (2005)
63	Palau	15.09 (2004)
64	Tuvalu	2.323 (1998)
65	Samoa	-2.428 (2004)
66	Tonga	-4.321 (2005)
67	Comoros	-17 (2005)
68	Kiribati	-19.87 (2004)
69	Swaziland	-23.13
70	São Tomé and Príncipe	-24.4
71	Vanuatu	-28.35 (2003)
72	Federated States of Micronesia	-34.3 (2005)
73	Anguilla	-42.87 (2003)
74	Cape Verde	-44.43
75	The Gambia	-54.61
76	Burundi	-57.84
77	Haiti	-58.72
78	Tajikistan	-73.95
79	Lesotho	-75.44
80	Seychelles	-78.59
81	Antigua and Barbuda	-83.4 (2004)
82	Guyana	-84.3
83	Rwanda	-104.1
84	Honduras	-160
85	Zambia	-165.4
86	Republic of Macedonia	-167
87	Belize	-173.4
88	Malawi	-186
89	Ghana	-219
90	Armenia	-247.3
91	Togo	-261.9
92	Zimbabwe	-264.6
93	Kyrgyzstan	-287.3
94	Paraguay	-300
95	Chad	-324.1
96	Benin	-342.7
97	Guinea	-344
98	Cambodia	-369
99	Mexico	-400.1
100	Uganda	-423
101	Eritrea	-440.5
102	Mozambique	-444.4
103	Fiji	-465.8
104	Panama	-467
105	Madagascar	-504
106	Laos	-404.2
107	Belarus	-511.8
108	Syria	-529
109	Moldova	-561
110	Uruguay	-600
111	Burkina Faso	-604.6
112	Mauritius	-651
113	Albania	-679.9
114	Georgia	-735
115	Tunisia	-760
116	Slovenia	-789.2
117	Nicaragua	-883
118	Senegal	-895.2
119	Thailand	-899.4
120	Tanzania	-906
121	Malta	-966.2
122	Jamaica	-970
123	Cyprus	-1,051
124	El Salvador	-1,059
125	Sri Lanka	-1,118
126	Kenya	-1,119
127	Dominican Republic	-1,124
128	Costa Rica	-1,176
129	Cuba	-1,218
130	Guatemala	-1,533
131	Bosnia and Herzegovina	-1,730
132	Estonia	-1,919
133	Ukraine	-1,933
134	Colombia	-2,219
135	Serbia	-2,451 (2005)
136	Latvia	-2,538
137	Lithuania	-2,572
138	Jordan	-2,834
139	Croatia	-2,892
140	Iceland	-2,932
141	Ethiopia	-3,384
142	Slovakia	-3,781
143	Czech Republic	-4,352
144	Sudan	-4,510
145	Poland	-4,548
146	Bulgaria	-5,100
147	Lebanon	-5,339
148	Pakistan	-5,486
149	New Zealand	-7,944
150	Hungary	-8,392
151	Ireland	-9,450
152	Romania	-12,450
153	South Africa	-12,690
154	Portugal	-16,750
155	Greece	-21,370
156	Italy	-23,730
157	Turkey	-25,990
158	India	-26,400
159	France	-38,000
160	Australia	-41,620
161	United Kingdom	-57,680
162	Spain	-98,600
163	United States	-862,300

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On This Day

October 1: Labour Day in New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia (2007); National Day in the People's Republic of China (1949); Independence Day in Cyprus and Nigeria (both 1960), Tuvalu (1978) and Palau (1994).

• 331 BC – Alexander the Great of Macedon defeated Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Gaugamela, and was subsequently crowned "King of Asia" in a ceremony in Arbela.
• 1890 – At the urging of preservationist John Muir, the United States Congress established Yosemite National Park in California.
• 1949 – Chinese Civil War: Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
• 1964 – Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the first Shinkansen line of high-speed railways in Japan, opened. (0 Series Shinkansen train pictured)

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The House with Chimaeras is a major Art Nouveau building in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It was built in the period of 1901–1902 by noted architect Vladislav Gorodetsky, who was regarded as the Gaudí of Kiev. The building derives its popular name from its ornate decorations depicting various scenes of exotic animals and hunting scenes, as Gorodetsky was an avid hunter. It is situated on No. 10, Bankova Street, across from the President of Ukraine's office in the historic Pechersk neighborhood. Since 2005 it has been used as a presidential residence for official and diplomatic ceremonies. (more...)

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