The Olympic Games - Bringing People Together

The 2010 Winter Olympics, officially the XXI Olympic Winter Games are a major international multi-sport event, which is the front-page headline in all the newspapers!  Approximately 2,600 athletes from 82 nations participated in 86 events in fifteen disciplines. .

Here are some of the great highlights from the first week of Olympic competition. We will focus on bringing readers a sense of the scope, detail, passion and excitement that goes into implementation of Olympic Games! As they have always brought people together in peace to respect universal moral principles!

After the first full week of competition at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics Games, Team USA leads all countries with 21 medals.. Team USA's six gold medals lead all countries, but Norway (5 G), Germany (4 G), and Switzerland (4 G) provide a high quality of competition with their medal success so far.

Surprisingly, Canada's Alexandre Bilodeau became the first Canadian ever to win Olympic gold at home - in men's moguls.

 America's Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso, and Bode Miller dominated alpine skiing. Vonn, Mancuso, Miller, and surprise men's Super G bronze medalist Andrew Weibrecht have so far captured an incredible seven medals in alpine skiing events with more races still to come, including Slalom, Giant Slalom, and men's Super Combined.

Shen and Zhao won pairs figure skating gold.. The now-married couple, who were among the oldest members of Team China at 36 and 31 years of age, were first paired up in 1992. Theirs is an inspirational story of dedication, devotion, and, ultimately, love.

Swiss jumper, Simon Ammann became King of the Hills. After struggling at the Torino Games, he came away with gold medals in both the normal hill and the large hill men's ski jumping competitions. It marked a repeat of his double gold performance at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

American Evan Lysacek ended Russia’s long dominance in men’s figure skating. Shocked reigning champion Yevgeny Plushenko took the silver medal after Lysacek gave a risk-free performance, opting against a quadruple jump. He becomes the first American to win the title since Brian Boitano in Calgary in 1988, breaking a stranglehold by men from Russia or the former Soviet Union going back five previous Games.

Snowboarding superstar and defending champion Shaun White won the Olympic men's halfpipe gold. Dazzling the judges, White scored a nearly perfect 48.4 out of 50 in his second run.

As the excitement of the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games draws to a close, London 2012 organizers have been taking advantage of the final opportunity to experience and learn from an Olympic Games, before London becomes the next Olympic Host City!  

Mystery illness traced to water pollution

An illness which has affected the population of the village of Leafton was traced last week to the local water supply.

More than 50 residents have been suffering from stomach pain for over a week.  And local doctors were unable to explain the cause.  It was only when the health authorities were called in that the water supply was found to contain large amounts of mercury, which can be extremely poisonous.

 The source of the poisoning was found to be a small factory located near the river. The factory was dumping untreated waste into the river, which eventually reached the village’s water supply.

One local resident said, "It’s terrible to think that so many people can be poisoned by simple carelessness". The factory has been fined and shut for an unknown period of time.

Daniel Boonе (the first Westerner)

Daniel Boone is such a remarkable figure in American history that he often is viewed as more of a fictional folk hero than a historical figure. In fact his exploits are even more remarkable than fictional accounts. He was born in Pennsylvania to a family of English Quakers (1734). We know very little about his early childhood. His father moved their large family to Virginian when Daniel was a teenager and then on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. Still a teen ager, Daniel developed a reputation as a skilled trapper and hunter and particularly as an expert marksman. He married at age 19 to Rebecca Bryan who was 15. Rebecca is surely one of the most notable backwoods American women. The marriage resulted in a deep and lasting attachment and a number of children. Boone led the first small party through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky (1769) at a time that the British Government was trying to restrict the colonists to the Eastern Seaboard. This is widely seen as the beginning of the American western movement. He returned with a larger party, including Rebecca. This was immortalized by George Caleb Bingham's famed painting. He led subsequently led many other parties.

 Boone is often associated with the Scotts-Irish because so many of the families he led into Kentucky were of Scotts Irish ancestry. He founded Boonesborough and helped lead the resistance to Native Americans backed by the British. Unlike many colonists, he admired the Native Americans. Despite the carnage during the Revolutionary War, he admitted to only killing one Native American. He was captured by the Shawnee (1778), but rather than being killed by them, he had an amazing rapport and was adopted by them. They named him "Big Turtle". Boone spent 4 months with them before escaping back to Boonesville. One biographer writes, "Of famous white Americans, only Sam Houston appears to have had a comparable knack for fitting in with Native peoples." A school teacher published an account of the frontier that turned Boone into an American legend. After the Revolution Boone's star faded because of a series of failed land deals. He finally moved to Missouri, complaining that Kentucky was too crowded. He lived to old age there, regaling visitors with accounts of his exploits in Kentucky. He finally passed away in Missouri (1820). Boone is undoubtedly a major figure in the building of America. He was, however, a tragic figure because it was the wild America and the untrammeled frontier he loved and not the settled territory. This in part explains his connection with Native Americans. Yet his life was spent in making settlement and the destruction of the frontier possible.

“A Walk To Remember” (book review)

“A Walk To Remember” – is an incredible love story by an author Nicholas Sparks. Sparks brings his reader into the lives of two ordinary American teenagers – Landon & Jamie and with every turn of the page the reader is lost in the world of their relations, life, their feelings. It is a bittersweet. . . A tragic yet spiritual love story.

This novel starts of with a 57 year old man Landon Carter, turning back the pages of his life to the time when he was 17 years old, in the late 1950’s and was living in Beaufort, a small town in North Carolina. He speaks of an encounter with this too-good-to-be-true girl, Jamie Sullivan. This meeting changed all his life forever.

Jamie Sullivan - the daughter of the town's Baptist minister, is a shining paragon. She is selfless, kind, tirelessly giving, and deeply spiritual. Beloved by many adults, but largely unnoticed by her peers, she is quiet and thoughtful. She's someone that Landon Carter, a popular senior at Beaufort High, never really noticed or understood. Jamie is described as a girl who carries the Bible in her bag wherever she goes. Moreover, she looked out for her widowed father, rescued hurt animals, and worked as a volunteer to help the orphaned kids.

The story starts moving ahead when Landon has no suitable option left for the school dance and asks Jamie out. Landon Carter's life from that moment on would never be the same. As he comes to know more about Jamie, he begins to develop tender feelings for her. The pace and mood of the novel is suddenly changed when a dark mystery about Jamie is revealed. She is going to die because of leucaemia... From now on the main Landon’s aim – is to make all her dreams come true and to make the last months of her life happy.

Same way Jamie gives all her love and kindness to Landon and changes his attitide to life. In her unwavering faith and uncommon generosity, she challenges his perception of his life in her strong, but gentle way. She teaches him to find forgiveness, to openly give without selfishness, and sets him on the journey to becoming a truly compassionate, good man. Amazingly, he finds love in a place he never expected, in a girl he never noticed. Being with Jamie shows him the depths of the human heart and leads him to a decision so stunning it would send him irrevocably on the road to manhood.

This book is wonderfully written and extremely emotional. The author’s language is plain and simple and it helps the reader to feel better the feeling and emotions of the main characters. The tone of the book is calm and thoughtful, which helps the reader to analyse and explore the inner world of the protagonists. The main theme of the book – is the power of all-triumphant love and changes which may be occured by it.

4 queens

The Four Queens Hotel and Casino is located in downtown Las Vegas on the Fremont Street Experience. Home to the Queen's Machine, the world's largest slot machine, the 690 room hotel and 40,000 sq ft (3,700 m²) casino is owned and operated by TLC Enterprises, which acquired the property from the Elsinore Corporation in 2003.

Construction began on November 16, 1964, opening in 1966. The casino is named after the builder Ben Goffstein's four daughters, Faith, Hope, Benita, and Michele. It originally contained only 120 rooms and a 20,000 sq ft (1,900 m²) casino.
From 1972 to 2003 the hotel/casino was owned by Elsinore Corporation. Elsinore was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hyatt Corporation from 1972 to 1979, when it then became an independent company. At various time Elsinore also had interests in the Atlantis Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Hyatt Lake Tahoe, and several Native American casinos. In 1995, Elsinore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the investment firm Morgens, Waterfall, Vintiadis & Company obtained 99 percent ownership of the company.
In 1976 the casino expanded to 33,000 sq ft (3,100 m²) and changed decor to be warmer.

Today the casino occupies the entire block bordered by Fremont St, Casino Center, Third Street, and Carson Avenue. The Four Queens was also a partner in renovating the downtown area and creating the Fremont Street experience.
In April 2007 the Canyon Club opened at the Four Queens providing the first downtown casino club

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells was born on 1 March 1837 in Martinsville, now Martins Ferry, Ohio, the second son of eight children born to Mary Dean Howells and William Cooper Howells, a printer and publisher. As the family moved from town to town, including a year-long residence at a utopian commune in Eureka Mills, later described in his New Leaf Mills (1913), Howells worked as a typesetter and a printer's apprentice, educating himself through intensive reading and the study of Spanish, French, Latin, and German. After a term as city editor of the Ohio State Journal in 1858, Howells published poems, stories, and reviews in the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. 
A longer work, his campaign biography for Abraham Lincoln, earned him enough money to travel to New England and meet the great literary figures of the day-Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and Walt Whitman among them. Awarded the post of U. S. Consul to Venice in 1861 for his service to the Lincoln campaign, Howells lived in Italy for nearly four years. During his residence there, he married Elinor Mead Howells in 1862, and by 1872 the couple had three children: Winifred (b. 1863), John Mead (b. 1868), and Mildred (b. 1872). 
After leaving Venice, Howells became first the assistant editor (1866-71) and then the editor (1871-1881) of the Atlantic Monthly, a post that gave him enormous influence as an arbiter of American taste. Publishing work by authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James, both of whom would become personal friends, Howells became a proponent of American realism, and his defense of Henry James in an article for The Century (1882) provoked what was called the "Realism War," with writers on both sides of the Atlantic ocean debating the merits of realistic and romantic fiction. 
While writing the "Editor's Study" (1886-1892) and "Editor's Easy Chair" (1899-1909) for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and occasional pieces for The North American Review, Howells championed the work of many writers, including Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Frank Norris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Cahan, and Stephen Crane. He was also responsible for promoting such European authors as Ibsen, Zola, Pérez Galdós, Verga, and Tolstoy. Despite Howells's professional success, his personal life during this period was marred in 1889 by the premature death of his daughter Winifred, whose physical symptoms were misdiagnosed as resulting from a nervous disorder and were ineffectively treated. 
After the execution of the Haymarket radicals in 1887, which he risked his reputation to protest, Howells became increasingly concerned with social issues, as seen in stories such as "Editha" (1905) and novels concerned with race (An Imperative Duty, 1892), the problems of labor (Annie Kilburn, 1888), and professions for women (The Coast of Bohemia, 1893). 
Widely acknowledged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the "Dean of American Letters," Howells was elected the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1908, which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915. By the time of his death from pneumonia on 11 May 1920, Howells was still respected for his position in American literature. However, his later novels did not achieve the success of his early realistic work, and later authors such as Sinclair Lewis denounced Howells's fiction and his influence as being too genteel to represent the real America. Although he wrote over a hundred books in various genres, including novels, poems, literary criticism, plays, memoirs, and travel narratives, Howells is best known today for his realistic fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), on the then-new topic of the social consequences of divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his best-known work and one of the first novels to study the American businessman; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of cosmopolitan life in New York City as seen through the eyes of Basil and Isabel March, the protagonists of Their Wedding Journey (1871) and other works.  Other important novels include Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880), The Minister's Charge and Indian Summer (1886), April Hopes (1887), The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904). 
Howells remained proud of his Ohio roots throughout his life, returning to Columbus for the Ohio Centennial Celebration in 1888 and visiting his home in Jefferson late into the 1890s. In the later part of his career, he drew increasingly on his life in Ohio in autobiographical works (A Boy's Town,1890) and novels (The Kentons, 1903).  The legend of a man from Leatherwood Creek, Ohio, who convinces the people there that he is a god inspired one of Howells's last works, The Leatherwood God (1916).

English for ESL learners

English for ESL learners