Hell’s Kitchen, sometimes known as Clinton (named for Governor George Clinton), is a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City, west of Midtown Manhattan. It is traditionally considered to be bordered by 34th Street to the south, 59th Street to the north, Eighth Avenue to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. Until the 1970s, Hell’s Kitchen was a bastion of poor and working-class Irish Americans. Though its gritty reputation had long held real-estate prices below those of most other areas of Manhattan, by 1969, the City Planning Commission’s Plan for New York City reported that development pressures related to its Midtown location were driving people of modest means from the area. Since the early 1990s, the area has been gentrifying, and rents have risen rapidly. Home of the Actors Studio training school, and adjacent to Broadway theatres, Hell’s Kitchen has long been a home to fledgling and working actors. read more…
Garden Grove< is a city in northern Orange County, California, United States, located 34 miles (55 km) southeast of the city of Los Angeles in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The population is at about 176,000. State Route 22, also known as the Garden Grove Freeway, passes through the city in an east-west direction. The western portion of the city is known as West Garden Grove. Garden Grove was founded by Alonzo Cook in 1874. A school district and Methodist church were organized that year. It remained a small rural crossroads until the arrival of the railroad in 1905. The rail connection helped the town prosper with crops of orange, walnuts, chili peppers and later strawberries. In 1933, much of the town’s central business district was destroyed by the Long Beach earthquake, and one person was killed at the high school. The post-World War II boom led to rapid development, and Garden Grove was incorporated as a city in 1956 with about 44,000 residents. read more…
Hyderabad is a city located in the Sindh province of Pakistan. It is the second-largest city in Sindh and 8th largest in Pakistan. Founded in 1768 by Mian Ghulam Shah Kalhoro of the Kalhora Dynasty, Hyderabad served as a provincial capital until the British transferred the capital to Karachi in 1843. The city was named in honour of Ali, the fourth caliph and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. Hyderabad’s name translates literally as “Lion City” – from haydar, meaning “lion,” and ābād, which is a suffix indicating a settlement. “Lion” references Ali’s valour in battle, and so he is often referred to as Ali Haydar, roughly meaning “Ali the Lionheart,” by South Asian Muslims. read more…
Ohel Jakob (from Hebrew: “Jacob’s Tent”) is a synagogue in Munich in Germany. It was built between 2004 and 2006 as the new main synagogue for the Jewish community in Munich and is located at the Sankt-Jakobs-Platz. The synagogue was inaugurated on 9 November 2006 on the 68th anniversary of the Kristallnacht. The building is part of the new Jewish Center consisting of the synagogue, the Jewish Museum Munich and a community center. read more…
Ayn Rand< was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-fairecapitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals. Literary critics received Rand’s fiction with mixed reviews and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings. She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives. read more…
Peshawar is the capital of the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its largest city. It is the sixth-largest in Pakistan. Peshawar is also the largest Pashtun-majority city in Pakistan and is bilingual in Pashto and Hindko. Situated in the broad Valley of Peshawar near the eastern end of the historic Khyber Pass, close to the border with Afghanistan, Peshawar’s recorded history dates back to at least 539 BCE, making it the oldest city in Pakistan and one of the oldest cities in South Asia. As the center of the ancient Gandhara region, Peshawar served as the capital of the Kushan Empire; and was home to the Kanishka stupa. Peshawar was then sacked by the White Huns, before the arrival of Muslim empires. The city was an important trading centre during the Mughal era before serving as the winter capital of the Afghan Durrani Empire from 1757 until the city was captured by the Sikh Empire in 1818, who were then followed by the British in 1849. read more…
