AddThis - Sharing http://www.cnbc.com/id/33310365/site/14081545?__source=ya...

AddThis - Sharing http://www.cnbc.com/id/33310365/site/14081545?__source=ya...

Shared via AddThis

USED VS LOVED . . .

A must read!!


While a man was polishing his new car, his 4 yr old son picked up stone and scratched lines on the side of the car. In anger, the man took the child's hand and hit it many times; not realizing he was using a wrench.

At the hospital, the child lost all his fingers due to multiple fractures. When the child saw his father.....with painful eyes he asked, 'Dad when will my fingers grow back?' The man was so hurt and speechless; he went back to his car and kicked it a lot of times.

Devastated by his own actions......sitting in front of that car he looked at the scratches; the child had written 'LOVE YOU DAD'.

The next day that man committed suicide. . .

Anger and Love have no limits; choose the latter to have a beautiful, lovely life..... Things are to be used and people are to be loved,

But the problem in today's world is that, People are used and things are loved...let's be careful to keep this thought in mind:

Things are to be used, and People are to be loved... especially those that love you!!

Be your self! ....This is the only day we HAVE. I know you want to have a nice day

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits they become character;

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

In all, do not forget that everyone born of a woman at some point was a child.

I'm glad a friend forwarded this to me as a reminder.

God bless you; I hope you are already having a wonderful day!

If you don't pass this on to anybody, nothing bad will happen;

if you do, you will have ministered to someone.

The Will of God will never take you to where the Grace

of God will not PROTECT you...

Stay FAITHFUL and Be GRATEFUL!!!


Christianity is only as strong as the person you love the least.

Tearful Mike Tyson to Oprah: 'I'm Tired of Failing'

By Matt Ufford | Monday, October 12, 2009, 5:04 PM

Mike Tyson opens up to Oprah

Harpo

In an emotional interview with Oprah Winfrey, Mike Tyson claimed to be a new man - one focused on his family. The former heavyweight boxing champion feared that the erratic behavior that has dominated his life for two decades would kill him within two years if he returned to it.

Tyson opened up about most of his headline-grabbing actions over the years, including his years in prison, his tempestuous eight-month marriage to Robin Givens, his long addiction to drugs, the $400 million fortune he squandered, the 1997 comeback match in which he bit Evander Holyfield's ear, and -- for the first time -- the death of his 4-year-old daughter earlier this year.

The key development in Tyson's life stems from what seems to be a newfound self-awareness following his participation in the movie "Tyson," a documentary about his life filmed as he went through rehab two years ago. "If I'm not conscious of who I am, I'm just going to let myself run [wild], and I'm going to destroy my beautiful family, and I'm going to destroy  myself, and I don't want to go down that road any more," he said.

Tyson ranged from terse to surprisingly candid as Winfrey asked the fallen champion about his checkered past, and he delivered eye-opening quotes about Givens and Holyfield while remaining somewhat tightlipped about the specifics of his daughter's death.

On choosing not to know the details of his daughter's accidental death: "I don't know. I don't want to know. If I know ...  [then] somebody's to blame for it, and if somebody's to blame for it, there are going to be problems." The quote seems to insinuate that he doesn't want to be mad at his ex-wife or any of his other children who might be found at fault for the freak accident in which daughter Exodus was found unconscious and tangled in a cord hanging from an exercise machine.

On the "20/20" interview in which he sat idly while Givens called him manic-depressive and said that life with Tyson was "pure hell" and "torture": Tyson explained that the marriage was abusive "both ways" -- that he battered Givens, but that she abused him emotionally.

On the Holyfield incident: "I was pissed off that he was such a great fighter ... I was just mad at him." Tyson said that after the incident, "I didn't feel guilty at all," and that the apology he delivered "wasn't sincere."

On why he hasn't spoken to Holyfield since: "I see him sometimes, I think he's a little leery of me." Tyson added, "I just want to apologize. I've known him for such a long time, and I was just undisciplined. I was in a very competitive mood and I wanted so desperately to beat him for my own self-aggrandizement, and I was just upset."

On whether his current family-oriented, monogamous life is boring: "I know I don't have two more years to live if I live this life." (By "this life," he means his former hard-living world of drugs, women, and bankruptcy.)

In all, Tyson was more candid than most athletes are willing to be in today's professional-sports landscape. But then, Mike Tyson has a lot more baggage to unload, too.

Schwarzenegger calls session to discuss water deal (AP)

Schwarzenegger calls session to discuss water deal (AP)

By DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer Don Thompson, Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders plan a seventh straight day of water negotiations Monday, as the governor summoned lawmakers for a special session on the state's water problems.
Talks on how to address the state's deteriorating and inadequate water system ended late Sunday after nearly 12 hours, though leaders said they moved closer to a deal.
"Over the past few days we have made enough progress in our negotiations that I am calling a special session on water," Schwarzenegger said in a statement late Sunday.
He acknowledged that "we still have a few remaining issues to work out," while the leaders said substantial issues remain — including the amount of a water bond to pay for improving the state's inadequate and outdated water storage and conveyance system.
Democratic leaders presented their proposal and answers to concerns that Republicans had been raising for weeks, said Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo.
"I think there is evidence now that we are moving in the right direction," Blakeslee said.
Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Temecula, said the same dozen or so issues have been dividing the four leaders and the governor for days: water conservation and balancing water rights with monitoring how property owners pump groundwater. They barely had time Sunday to discuss how to pay for water system improvements.
"We've got a proposal now that we're going to take back and take a look at. I think it moves both sides closer together," Hollingsworth said.
Democratic leaders said they hope to be able to present a water proposal to rank-and-file legislators this week, and perhaps hold public hearings on a water package before week's end. Passing a water deal that includes a bond needs a two-thirds vote in the Legislature, requiring at least some support from Republicans.
Lawmakers are returning to Sacramento to complete other unfinished business, making Schwarzenegger's call for another special session largely symbolic. But Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg welcomed the move.
"I think it again signifies the importance of the issue," said Steinberg, D-Sacramento.
He and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, said negotiators made significant progress Sunday.
The governor is pushing for more reservoirs and a controversial canal to improve a water storage and conveyance system mostly built in the 1960s.

BUILD YOUR DREAM HOUSE & INVESTMENT PROPERTIES WHILE ABROAD

Many Nigerians who live abroad desire to build residences and commercial properties while they are away, but they require the comfort of knowing that their properties will be built to specification, with integrity and full accountability.
Too common are the horror stories of Nigerians who have sent monies home for construction, only to find that, upon returning to Nigeria, little has been built, and much money squandered by families and relations.
ARCHARRIS ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTION stakes its reputation on integrity and accountability, offering a tested process for providing Nigerians (and others) abroad, our unique Design and Build Synergies, through a phased, check and balance process that protects you, the Client, and ARCHARRIS, the Contractors, fully licensed and registered Architects and Builders. [Our C.E.O. is a full member of the Nigerian Institute of Architects, (NIA) and the Architects Registration Council of Nigeria (ARCON].


Payment Modalities
7. Design
a. Payment for the Preliminary Drawings, a.k.a. Design Schematic, is based on the Statutory Fees Schedule (varying according to the Scale/Scope of Work):
b. All the Consultants (i.e., Architect, Structural, Electrical and Mechanical Engineers & Q.S.) are entitled to 10% of the total Cost of Construction.
Fees Schedule
c. Commitment Fees of 1% (within that 10%) are paid before commencement of the Preliminary Drawings/ Design Schematic;
d. After your acceptance of the Preliminary Drawings, another 2½% is paid to enable us commence Working Drawings (Construction Documents);
e. After the Working Drawings have been completed, you will pay another 4% of the Cost of Construction;
f. The Local Town Planning Authority will assess your Construction Documents and determine the Statutory Approval Fees which must be paid to the State and Local Authorities, while the Client is responsible for payment of these fees. The balance of 2½% will be due to the Consultants at this stage;
g. Thereafter, Construction may commence, as the Client diligently follows the Bill of Quantities for
disbursements, depending upon the agreed upon milestones to be achieved throughout the Construction Process.
Please free to make detailed enquiries or comments as regards this Process, and your specific needs and concerns.
info@archarrisconstruction.com
archarriseng@yahoo.com
aibtonia@yahoo.com
01-8502185, 08033079552, 08027567822, 08056477205, 08056744170

A Recipe for Riches

by Duncan Greenberg

Friday, October 9, 2009provided by Forbes

Want to become a tech titan or hedge fund tycoon? Up your chances by dropping out of college or going to Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs.

Are billionaires born or made? What are the common attributes among the uber-wealthy? Are there any true secrets of the self-made?

We get these questions a lot, and decided it was time to go beyond the broad answers of smarts, ambition and luck by sorting through our database of wealthy individuals in search of bona fide trends. We analyzed everything from entrepreneurs' parents' professions to where they went to school, their track records in the early stages of their careers and other experiences that may have set them on the path to extreme wealth.

Our admittedly unscientific study of the self-made members of the Forbes 400 yielded some interesting results.

First, a significant percentage of them had parents with a high aptitude for math. The ability to crunch numbers is crucial to becoming a billionaire, and mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some of the most common professions among the parents of Forbes 400 members (for whom we could find the information) were engineer, accountant and small-business owner.

Consistent with the rest of the population, more American billionaires and near-billionaires were born in the fall than in any other season. However, relatively few of them were born in December, historically the month with the eighth-highest birth rate.

Of the 274 self-made tycoons on the Forbes 400, 14% either never started or never completed college. The number of precocious college dropouts is highest among those who forged careers as technology entrepreneurs: Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT), Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL), Michael Dell of Dell (DELL), Larry Ellison of Oracle (ORCL) and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

Forbes 400 members who derive their fortunes from finance make up one of the most highly educated sub-groups: half of them have graduate degrees. Roughly 70% of those with M.B.A.s obtained their master's degrees from one of three Ivy League schools: Harvard, Columbia or the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Goldman Sachs (GS) has attracted a large share of hungry minds that went on to garner 10-figure fortunes. At least 11 current and recent billionaire financiers worked at Goldman or one of it subsidiaries early in their careers, including Edward Lampert, David Tepper, Daniel Och and Leon Cooperman.

Several Forbes 400 members suffered bitter professional setbacks early in their careers that heightened their fear of failure. Pharmaceutical tycoon R.J. Kirk's first venture was a flop--an experience he regrets but appreciates. "Failure early on is a necessary condition for success, though not a sufficient one," he told Forbes in 2007.

According to a statement read by Phil Falcone during a congressional hearing in November 2008, his botched buyout of a company in Newark, N.J., in the early 1990s taught him "several valuable lessons that have had a profound impact upon my success as a hedge fund manager."

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, and FedEx (FDX) founder Frederick Smith.

Finally, ASUU Suspends Strike for 2 weeks

Finally, ASUU Suspends Strike for 2 weeks

2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist..

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer – Sun Oct 11, 3:58 am ET


MEXICO CITY – Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,800 years.

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"

It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or "Planet X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.

One of them is Monument Six.

Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.

It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.

Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.

And anyway, Mayas in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries than 2012.

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."

The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

If it were all mythology, perhaps it could be written off.

But some say the Maya knew another secret: the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon.

That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets.

Another spooky coincidence?

"The question I would ask these guys is, so what?" says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog. He says the alignment doesn't fall precisely in 2012, and distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.

"They're really super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of 2012," Plait said.

But author John Major Jenkins says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicate the Maya were aware of the alignment and attached great importance to it.

"If we want to honor and respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed 2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said Jenkins.

As the Internet gained popularity in the 1990s, so did word of the "fateful" date, and some began worrying about 2012 disasters the Mayas never dreamed of.

Author Lawrence Joseph says a peak in explosive storms on the surface of the sun could knock out North America's power grid for years, triggering food shortages, water scarcity — a collapse of civilization. Solar peaks occur about every 11 years, but Joseph says there's evidence the 2012 peak could be "a lulu."

While pressing governments to install protection for power grids, Joseph counsels readers not to "use 2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion. I mean, don't let the credit cards go up."

Another History Channel program titled "Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: End of Days" says a galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a "pole shift."

"The entire mantle of the earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster," a narrator proclaims. "Earthquakes would rock every continent, massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe."

The idea apparently originates with a 19th century Frenchman, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a priest-turned-archaeologist who got it from his study of ancient Mayan and Aztec texts.

Scientists say that, at best, the poles might change location by one degree over a million years, with no sign that it would start in 2012.

While long discredited, Brasseur de Bourbourg proves one thing: Westerners have been trying for more than a century to pin doomsday scenarios on the Maya. And while fascinated by ancient lore, advocates seldom examine more recent experiences with apocalypse predictions.

"No one who's writing in now seems to remember that the last time we thought the world was going to end, it didn't," says Martin, the astronomy webmaster. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of memory that things were fine the last time around."

Columbus Day: A Working Holiday?

Fire up the barbecue. Get the mall-walking shoes on. About 517 years have passed since Christopher Columbus stumbled onto North America, and it's time to remember that with a three-day weekend.



Well, for some of us. While national government offices can be depended upon to celebrate a federal holiday, Columbus Day isn't a day off for all Americans. Some schools will stay open, and local bureaucrats will still shuffle paperwork...but the department store sales soldier on.


How a Holiday Is Made

Looking back, the formal recognition of Columbus Day is relatively recent. New York City threw the first recorded Columbus party in 1792, but it took New Yorkers 74 years for another big celebration. Then, Colorado scooted in to become the first state to have a Columbus Day (1905). President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided the Depression could use a new holiday, and made Oct. 12 a federal one in 1937. Under President Richard M. Nixon, Columbus Day got moved to the second Monday in October.


Columbus Controversy

According to the Wall Street Journal, 22 states don't observe the holiday. Why the disparity? Well, among other reasons, a strong contingent feels that the Genoese navigator's sailing the ocean blue in 1492 introduced a dark period of colonization. Protesters and academics have argued for years that the existing American population, plus earlier evidence of Viking houseguests, make the notion of "discovery" misleading.


These impassioned arguments around Columbus go back decades before any holiday: Efforts to make the Italian navigator a candidate for sainthood inspired a tart New York Times editorial that said Columbus got his "fleets at public expense, on the condition that he remove himself and his tediousness as far as possible toward the unknown west."


Floating Holiday

Some states have long just "observed" the holiday, but leave local government offices open. Others use the date to revere the native population who existed long before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed in. According to a Wikipedia round-up, South Dakota declares October 12 as Indigenous People's Day. Hawaii celebrates the more general Discoverers' Day, which actually refers to the Aloha State's Polynesian founders (although the bureaucrats firmly emphasize "this day is not and shall not be construed to be a state holiday").


Tennessee, though, wins for creative calendaring: The Wall Street Journal points out that the state bumped Columbus Day to after Thanksgiving to create a four-day weekend. Indeed, the explorer's day leads in "holiday swapping"—work on that October date, get another day off later in the holiday season.


A Teachable Era

In a way, not having a day off encourages more attention and open discussion around the man, which academics encourage. Searches on Yahoo! for "christopher columbus," "pictures of christopher columbus," "christopher columbus biography," and "christopher columbus ships" are all up—as are queries for the usual conquistadors like Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco de Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Francisco Pizarro, and Marco Polo.


They're not all from schoolkids either (though they do make up more than third of "columbus" searches). Incidentally, of all regions checking out "christopher columbus" online, the one fittingly leading the nation's lookups: Columbia, South Carolina. The state capitol may have his namesake, but it'll be working that day.

World's Strangest Monuments

World's Strangest Monuments: "World's Strangest Monuments"

From a 25-foot shark crashing through a roof to Mongolia’s giant statue of Genghis Khan, the world’s weirdest monuments display local quirks.
By Lyndsey Matthews

Charge your camera batteries before visiting these monuments: You might need photographic evidence to prove that they’re not just a figment of your jet-lagged mind.


Saint Wenceslas Riding a Dead Horse
Prague

What It Commemorates: Saint Wenceslas, Bohemia’s patron saint.
What Makes It Strange: For almost 100 years—even during the dark days of Communist rule—the grand sculpture of Saint Wenceslas in Prague’s Wenceslas Square has been a source of national pride. But today, even the revered saint isn’t spared from the Czechs’ irreverent senses of humor. Sculptor David Cerny’s parody of the St. Wenceslas statue, hanging in the Lucerna Palace mere yards from the original, is of Wenceslas mounted atop the belly of a dead horse that’s been strung upside down.

Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue
Tsonjin Boldog, Mongolia

What It Commemorates: The infamous founder of the Mongolian Empire, known locally as Chinggis Khaan.
What Makes It Strange: The 131-foot-tall, 250-ton stainless steel statue, unveiled in 2008 and located an hour’s drive from Ulaanbaatar, is the world’s largest equestrian statue. Visitors can take an elevator to the viewing deck on the horse’s head and look out on the expansive Mongolian steppe. Until 20 years ago, Mongolia’s Communist government banned any celebration of the military leader, but in a surge of nationalism, Mongols have slapped his image and name on everything from an airport to a university and bottles of vodka. The statue is part of a planned theme park featuring nomadic lodging and restaurants serving horsemeat.

Duke of Wellington Statue
Glasgow

What It Commemorates: Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington and commander of the British forces that defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.
What Makes It Strange: For the past 20 years, this innocuous statue—erected in 1844 on Glasgow’s Queen Street—has been a magnet for late-night pranksters, who scale the statue and top it with traffic cones. Locals argue that the cones are an integral part of the statue, as well as the city’s identity. The government doesn’t agree. City workers knock off the cones with a high-powered water jet, and police have threatened to prosecute the pranksters. But since the public has ignored these warnings, anyone caught putting cones on the Duke is simply told to move on.

Fengdu Ghost City
Fengdu, China

What It Commemorates: This necropolis is modeled after the Chinese version of hell.
What Makes It Strange: During the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), two court officials named Yin and Wang moved to Mount Mingshan to obtain enlightenment. Combined, the surnames of this mystical pair sound like “King of Hell” in Chinese, and ever since, locals deemed this a gathering place for spirits. The Ghost City that developed is a complex of Buddhist and Taoist temples adorned with macabre demon statues dismembering humans as they guard the entrance to the netherworld. Landmarks bear frightening names, such as “Last Glance at Home Tower,” “Nothing-to-Be-Done Bridge,” and “Ghost Torturing Pass.” Ironically, the area is literally a ghost city now because of the massive Three Gorges Dam project, completed in 2009, which flooded the town and forced the region’s residents to relocate. Mount Mingshan is now a peninsula that is visited mostly by tourists on Yangtze River cruises.

Calder Mercury Fountain
Barcelona

What It Commemorates: The siege of Almadén, one of the largest mercury mines in the world, by Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War.
What Makes It Strange: Keep your hands away from this one. Poisonous liquid mercury pours through a series of iron and aluminum troughs, splashes against a metal piece that sets a mobile in motion, and cascades into a circular pool of deadly metal. American sculptor Alexander Calder designed the fountain as an anti-fascist tribute for the Spanish Republican government for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris (where it was displayed opposite Picasso’s Guernica). Calder eventually donated his fountain to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, where it is encased behind glass.

Headington Shark
Headington, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

What It Commemorates: The dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
What Makes It Strange: Officially called Untitled 1986, the 25-foot-tall beast known commonly as the Headington Shark appears to have crashed headfirst through the roof of a quaint British home. House owner Bill Heine commissioned the work as a reaction to nuclear power and as an expression of someone “ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation.” Made of metal, polyester resin, and plaster, among other things, the shark was originally viewed as an incongruous eyesore that the city council desperately tried to remove. Today it is accepted as a landmark.

Georgia Guidestones
Elberton, Georgia

What It Commemorates: The monument serves as a set of directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse.
What Makes It Strange: Designed and commissioned by an anonymous group, the Georgia Guidestones consist of five 16-foot-tall granite slabs, arranged in a star-shaped pattern, that function as a compass, calendar, and clock (drawing comparisons to England’s Stonehenge). Some local Christians deem the creations the “Ten Commandments of the Antichrist” for their unsettling nature. (One guide reads, “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”) The stones have their fans though, including covens of witches and Yoko Ono.

Memento Park
Budapest

What It Commemorates: Hungary’s Communist past.
What Makes It Strange: Most Eastern European countries ceremoniously destroyed Soviet-era relics once they gave occupying forces the boot. However, rather than demolish all vestiges of a painful past, the city of Budapest removed 42 statues from prominent locations and placed them in a suburban park. Statues of Lenin, Marx, and Engels are all displayed, along with the Boots, a 1-to-1 replica of the remainder of a 27-foot-tall Stalin statue that an angry crowd tore down in 1956.

Underwater Gallery
Grenada

What It Commemorates: Reef ecosystems.
What Makes It Strange: This series of sculptures in the clear, shallow waters off the coast of Grenada has one highly unusual characteristic: it is accessible only to divers (though it can also be viewed through glass-bottomed boats). Sculptor Jason de Caires Taylor created the works, a series of human figures in various groupings and settings, as the world’s first underwater sculpture park, which also serves as an artificial reef to promote conservation awareness.

Series of car bombs kills 19 in western Iraq

BAGHDAD – A spate of car bombings killed 19 people Sunday in Iraq's western Anbar province, once a hotbed of insurgency that later become a showcase for restoring peace.

The province was the scene of some of the most intense fighting by U.S. troops during the insurgency. Violence tapered off significantly after local tribes decided to align themselves with U.S. forces instead of al-Qaida in what is widely considered to be one of the key turning points of the Iraq war.

A reinvigorated insurgency in Anbar would pose a grave danger to Iraq's fragile stability as it prepares for crucial parliamentary elections early next year.

The explosions Sunday occurred in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province about 70 miles (115 kilometer) west of Baghdad. According to a local police official, a parked car first exploded near the Anbar province police headquarters and the provincial council building.

The second car bombing took place as police and bystanders rushed to the scene to help, while a third car exploded about an hour later at the gates to the Ramadi hospital, the police official said.

Police and hospital officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

One bystander, Musaab Ali Mohammed, said he was buying cigarettes from a nearby shop when he heard a big explosion and saw smoke billowing out from the parking lot.

"I saw police cars and firefighters, and they started to carry out the wounded and dead. ... Minutes later, a second explosion took place," he said.

Such explosions coming in quick succession are usually designed to target rescuers and security forces who rush to the scene to assist and were a hallmark of the insurgent group, Al-Qaida in Iraq, during the height of the insurgency.

Sunday's attacks follow a bombing last week in another Anbar city, Fallujah, in which a car bomb tore through an open-air market, killing at least eight people. At least seven people were killed in late September in Ramadi when a suicide bomber slammed a tanker truck packed with explosives into a police outpost.

Iraqi officials have portrayed such attacks as limited in nature and not an indication that the insurgency is regaining its footing.

A member of the Anbar provincial council, Aeefan Sadoun, told The Associated Press that Sunday's attacks "represent a limited security breach that will be fixed soon."

He said the attacks do not indicate a significant deterioration in security in the once-volatile province.

"The security situation in Anbar is good and al-Qaida will never be able to take over again," he said.

But such attacks may increase in the run-up to the elections expected this January, said Michael Hanna, an analyst with the New York-based Century Foundation, especially because Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki's popularity has resulted largely from the country's relative stability.

"There's still an insurgency. They are able to pull these things off," he said. "There's a very clear political motivation for insurgents to carry out violent attacks, to try to undermine the government ... ahead of what are important elections."

However, Hanna said while the recent attacks are troubling, they haven't risen to the level seen during the insurgency's height, an indication that the insurgency does not have the same capability as it once did.