Berlin

1284 – The Statute of Rhuddlan incorporates the Principality of Wales into England.
1575 – Indian Mughal Emperor Akbar defeats Bengali army at the Battle of Tukaroi.
1585 – The Olympic Theatre, designed by Andrea Palladio, is inaugurated in Vicenza.
1776 – The first amphibious landing of the United States Marine Corps begins the Battle of Nassau.
1803 – Colégio Militar is founded in Portugal by Colonel Teixeira Rebello.
1820 – The U.S. Congress passes the Missouri Compromise.
1845 – Florida is admitted as the 27th U.S. state.
1845 – For the first time the U.S. Congress passes legislation overriding a presidential veto.
1849 – The United States Department of the Interior is established.

32 STRANGE THINGS

1. A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

2. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.

3. The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.

4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

5. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

6. A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.

7. A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2" by 3-1/2".

8. During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur," a small red car can be seen in the distance (and Heston's wearing a watch).

In exactly one month all eyes will turn to the outstanding setting of the Aspire Dome which will host the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Athletics in Doha, Qatar.

With no World Championships or Olympic Games this year, the three-day competition which runs from 12 to 14 March 2010 will be the most sought after athletics event of the year aside, that is, the newly created IAAF Diamond League and the IAAF World Challenge.

A number of defending champions from the previous edition of Valencia 2008 will be in the spotlight and in particular three-time World Indoor champion Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia who will take part in her first Championships since she no-heighted at last summer’s World Championships in Athletics in Berlin.

A German cryptographer and computer engineer has claimed to have decrypted and published the code employed to protect world’s GSM phone calls from unauthorised snooping.

Karsten Nohl, 28, has deciphered the 21-year-old GSM algorithm, which is being used to safeguard 80 percent of the GSM calls across the globe, the New York Times reported.

Proclaiming his success at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Nohl asserted that he cracked the apparently reliable protection mechanism to expose the weaknesses and loopholes of the system.

http://www.itproport...

Even after you see it, it is still hard to believe!
Water Bridge in Germany . What a feat!
Six years, 500 million euros, 918 meters long.......now this is engineering!
This is a channel-bridge over the River Elbe and joins the former East and West Germany ,
as part of the unification project. It is located in the city of Magdeburg , near Berlin .
The photo was taken on the day of inauguration.
To those who appreciate engineering projects, here's a puzzle for you armchair engineers and physicists.

Did that bridge have to be designed to withstand the additional weight of ship and barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?

Answer: It only needs to be designed to withstand the weight of the water!

Qatar and Deutsche Bahn ‘in $25bn deal’
German rail operator Deutsche Bahn is set to sign a $25bn contract with Qatar tomorrow

Qatar is set to award a $25bn contract to German rail and logistics group Deutsche Bahn tomorrow to build and operate a passenger and freight rail network in the country.
A source said the deal would see the launch of the Qatar Railway Development Company, a joint corporation in which Qatar Railways is expected to hold 51% and Deutsche Bahn 49%.
German Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer yesterday said in Berlin that he would travel to Doha together with Deutsche Bahn chief executive Ruediger Grube to sign the deal.

IANS/New Delhi

India has been ranked as low as 84 among 180 countries on the integrity score, continuing to be perceived as a highly corrupt nation in the world, by global corruption watchdog Transparency International in its latest survey.

The ranking means that 83 other countries are less corrupt than India.

“India’s integrity score stands at 3.4 on a scale of 0 (perceived as highly corrupt) to 10 (least corrupt),” according to the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2009 prepared by the Berlin-based Transparency International, an independent organisation tracking prevalence of corruption worldwide.

India’s integrity score last year was the same. In 2007, its score was a notch better at 3.5, says the survey.

What times were those ... right?
A generation,whose history begins, hopefully with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

- We are the last generation that learned to play in the street, we are the first we've played video games, seen cartoons in color and went to amusement parks

- We were the last to record songs of the radio on cassettes and we are the pioneers of walkmans and chatrooms

- We have been labeled Generation X, and we had to swallow Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 ...

- We will always remember events from before we were born, as if we had not experienced anything historic.

- We have learned what terrorism is, we saw the Berlin Wall fell and a drunk Boris Yelsin grabbing his secretary ass

Once again we support a corrupt president just to further our own ends... However, this time, people are beginning to question.................................

An international summit on the future of Afghanistan was Gordon Brown’s answer last night as the clamour for an exit strategy from the conflict grew louder. With President Karzai ready to claim outright victory in Afghanistan’s flawed elections, the Prime Minister announced his plans for the meeting, which could take place this year in either London or Kabul.