Author: Dania

Bergen-Belsen (or Belsen) was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943 parts of it became a concentration camp. Originally this was an “exchange camp”, where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. Eventually, the camp was expanded, to house Jews from other concentration camps.

Later still the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp. From 1941-1945 almost 20,000 Russian prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there, with up to 35,000 of them dying of typhus in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation.

The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division. They discovered around 53,000 prisoners inside, most of them half-starved and seriously ill, and another 13,000 corpses lying around the camp unburied. The horror of what the British found in the camp, documented on film and in pictures, made the name “Belsen” emblematic of Nazi crimes in general for public opinion in Western countries in the immediate post-1945 period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp

RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. The sinking of Titanic caused the deaths of 1,514 people in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. She was the largest ship afloat at the time of her maiden voyage. One of three Olympic class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line, she was built between 1909–11 by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. She carried 2,223 people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic

The Tenerife airport disaster occurred on March 27, 1977, when two Boeing 747 passenger aircraft collided on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport (now known as Tenerife North Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. With a total of 583 fatalities, the crash is the deadliest accident in aviation history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel “helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War”, according to Will Kaufman.

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called “the most popular novel of our day.” The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that “The long-term durability of Lincoln’s greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals … to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin

Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been “considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived.”

His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

On March 20. 1212 the German Emperor Otto IV declared the foundation of the German boys choir, The Thomanerchor.

Today they sing regularely in the Thomaskirche, Leipzig.

Famous Germans have over centuries been a member of the choir, among them:

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (second son of Johann Sebastian Bach)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Philipp_Emanuel_Bach

Sebastian Krumbiegel, Tobias Künzel, Wolfgang Lenk, Henri Schmidt (Singer and members in the German band Die Prinzen)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Prinzen

Die Prinzen with Millionär (Wannabe Millionair):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAKVsHjmKY4

For the amount of 1,000 USD Elvis Presley puts down a cash deposit to buy Graceland in Memphis.

On March 19. 1932 Sydney Harbour Bridge opened for traffic.

Ever wondered where the houses and other projects by the US TV-show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition are located?

Most of the houses and projects are now found by me and other members and can be seen on VGT.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (EM:HE) is a reality television series providing home renovations for less fortunate families and community schools etc. The show is hosted by former model, carpenter and veteran television personality Ty Pennington.

Each episode features a family that has faced some sort of recent or ongoing hardship such as a natural disaster or a family member with a life-threatening illness, in need of new hope. The show’s producers coordinate with a local construction contractor, which then coordinates with various companies in the building trades for a makeover of the family’s home. This includes interior, exterior and landscaping, performed in seven days while the family is on vacation (paid for by the show’s producers) and documented in the episode. If the house is beyond repair, they replace it entirely. The show’s producers and crew film set and perform the makeover but do not pay for it. The materials and labor are donated. Many skilled and unskilled volunteers assist in the rapid construction of the house.

The series is produced by Endemol USA (the people behind Big Brother, Fear Factor, Deal or No Deal, Wipeout, and other reality shows) in association with Disney-ABC Television Group’s Greengrass Television. The current Executive Producers are Brady Connell and George Verschoor.

The program originally aired on Sunday evenings but was moved to Friday nights as of October 21, 2011. Upon the airing of its final episode in series form, it was ABC’s last series which aired solely in 4:3 standard definition and never converted to a high definition or widescreen presentation.

On December 15, 2011, ABC announced that Extreme Makeover: Home Edition would end its run on January 13, 2012. It will, however, continue to air as a special on the network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Makeover:_Home_Edition

Some of the houses were sold later on after the show because of the house owners couldn’t handle the new expences for their new big house.

The first house they built was this one of the Powers family:

Begining of EM:HE is featured too at the Grommesh family. The the bus is parked outside the house with the crew around the bus and spectators behind the bus. Around the house at the road entrances you can see road blocks and crew vehicles.

During the show there are these two files of the Tate Family and the Anders-Beatty familiy where the house is under construction:

On January 14. 1972 King Frederik IX of Denmark died and Crown Princess Margrethe became Queen Margrethe II. She was proclaimed Queen from the balcony of Christiansborg Palace by Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag on 15 January 1972.

The Queen chose the motto: God’s help, the love of The People, Denmark’s strength.

Margrethe II was the second female ruler in the history of Denmark since Queen Margrethe I in the years 1375 to 1412.