The World Cup

The FIFA World Cup is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams.
This important event is held every 4 years, the current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month.

A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s).
The 19 World Cup tournaments have been won by eight different national teams. Brazil has won five times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. The other World Cup winners are Italy, with four titles; Germany, with three titles; Argentina and inaugural winners Uruguay, with two titles each; and England, France, and Spain, with one title each.
The World Cup is the world's most widely viewed sporting event.

OK let’s go into the history of it and how it was found.
After FIFA was founded in 1904, it tried to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.

Due to the success of the Olympic football tournaments, FIFA, with President Jules Rimet the driving force, again started looking at staging its own international tournament outside of the Olympics. On 28 May 1928, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam decided to stage a world championship itself. With Uruguay now two-time official football world champions and to celebrate their centenary of independence in 1930, FIFA named Uruguay as the host country of the inaugural World Cup tournament.
The national associations of selected nations were invited to send a team, but the choice of Uruguay as a venue for the competition meant a long and costly trip across the Atlantic Ocean for European sides. Indeed, no European country pledged to send a team until two months before the start of the competition. Rimet eventually persuaded teams from Belgium, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia to make the trip. In total thirteen nations took part: seven from South America, four from Europe and two from North America.

The issues facing the early World Cup tournaments were the difficulties of intercontinental travel, and war. Few South American teams were willing to travel to Europe for the 1934 and 1938 tournaments, with Brazil the only South American team to compete in both. The 1942 and 1946 competitions were cancelled due to World War II and its aftermath.


The 1950 World Cup, held in Brazil, was the first to include British participants. British teams withdrew from FIFA in 1920, partly out of unwillingness to play against the countries they had been at war with, and partly as a protest against foreign influence on football, but re-joined in 1946 following FIFA's invitation.
The tournament was expanded to 24 teams in 1982, and then to 32 in 1998, allowing more teams from Africa, Asia and North America to take part.

Two hundred teams entered the 2002 FIFA World Cup qualification rounds; 198 nations attempted to qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, while a record 204 countries entered qualification for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
From 1930 to 1970, the Jules Rimet Trophy was awarded to the World Cup winner. It was originally simply known as the World Cup, but in 1946 it was renamed after the FIFA president Jules Rimet who set up the first tournament. In 1970, Brazil's third victory in the tournament entitled them to keep the trophy permanently. However, the trophy was stolen in 1983, and has never been recovered.

After 1970, a new trophy, known as the FIFA World Cup Trophy, was designed; the new trophy is 36 cm (14.2 in) high, made of solid 18 carat (75%) gold and weighs 6.175 kg (13.6 lb).
From the 1938 World Cup onwards, host nations received automatic qualification to the final tournament. This right was also granted to the defending champions between 1938 and 2002, but was withdrawn from the 2006 FIFA World Cup onward, requiring the champions to qualify.

There are two stages in the world cup: the group stage followed by the knockout stage.
In the group stage, teams compete within eight groups of four teams each.
The other teams are assigned to different "pots", usually based on geographical criteria, and teams in each pot are drawn at random to the eight groups. Since 1998, rules have been applied to the draw to ensure that no group contains more than two European teams or more than one team from any other confederation.

The knockout stage is a single-elimination tournament in which teams play each other in one-off matches, with extra time and penalty shootouts used to decide the winner if necessary. It begins with the round of 16 (or the second round) in which the winner of each group plays against the runner-up of another group. This is followed by the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, the third-place match and the final.

Since the 1958 FIFA World Cup, to avoid future boycotts or controversy, FIFA began a pattern of alternating the hosts between the Americas and Europe, which continued until the 1998 FIFA World Cup. The 2002 FIFA World Cup, hosted jointly by South Korea and Japan, was the first one held in Asia, and the only tournament with multiple hosts. South Africa became the first African nation to host the World Cup in 2010. The 2014 FIFA World Cup will be hosted by Brazil, the first held in South America since 1978, and will be the first occasion where consecutive World Cups are held outside Europe.
The national football association of a country desiring to host the event receives a "Hosting Agreement" from FIFA, which explains the steps and requirements that are expected from a strong bid.
The Golden Ball for the best player determined by a vote of media members.
The Golden Boot for the top goal scorer.
The Golden Glove Award for the best goalkeeper.
The Best Young Player Award for the best player aged 21 or younger.
The FIFA Fair Play Trophy for the team with the best record of fair play.
The Most Entertaining Team for the team that has entertained the public the most during the World Cup determined by a poll of the general public.
An All-Star Team consisting of the best players of the tournament has also been announced for each tournament since 1998.

Extraordinary journey of Liz Murray

Liz Murray has inspired many people as she overcame her hardship to achieve success. Liz Murray grew up to heroin-addicted and HIV-infected parents. She did not attend school until 8th grade. Her mother also suffered from blindness and mental illness, and died of AIDS when Liz was 15. When her father moved to a shelter, Liz found herself living on the streets, eating from dumpsters and finding shelter on all-night subway routes. She had dismal grades due to poor attendance, but was accepted by the Humanities Preparatory School in Greenwich Village, where she encountered teachers who cared about her welfare. Liz began to read literature and study physics, but still had no stable place to stay. She did her homework in subway stations and stairwells. Because she started high school late (age 17), she doubled her course load and finished high school in two years. She received a New York Times scholarship for needy students and was accepted to Harvard, where she began classes in 2000.


Liz Murray was born on the 23rd of September, 1980. She was born from cocaine-addicted and alcoholic parents who would both get HIV later,although it should be noted that her parents did love her parents as they were highly intelligent but rendered hopeless by their drug dependence and consequent poverty. At a young age her tough life started as she was forced to eating ice cubes and toothpaste after her parents would spend the first-of-the-month welfare cheques on Happy Meals for Liz and her older sister,Lisa,for the first week and spending the rest of the money to buy drugs, "We ate ice cubes because it felt like eating. We split a tube of toothpaste between us for dinner." This tough life even affected her hair as her hair was so lice-ridden, the bugs literally fell from her head.Liz would turn up to school lice-ridden and was bullied for being smelly and scruffy and eventually dropped out. At 15,she left her house to get away from all that madness,and she would end sleeping in friends' apartments, on the subway or street, or in a motel, paid for by her abusive boyfriend.


She kept on living her uncontrolled and wild life until the age of 16, when her mother died of HIV/AIDS, and this caused her to jolt out of that lifestyle, "My mother gave me the gift of clarity. Unfortunately, she died and that's what it took for me to wake up, but I realized my mortality at 16." She learnt a valuable lesson from her mothers' death, "That moment taught me that life was malleable. If I could have a family and a home one night and all of it's gone the next, that must mean that life has the capacity to change. And then I thought, Whoa! That means that just as change happens to me, I can cause change in my life."

This self-motivation cause Liz to make herself a goal to achieve, and this goal was to complete her high school education in just 2 years(as she was 17 at that time), she had to accomplish this goal without a place to live and not having any regular attendance at school for years. She was commited to her goal and she showed this by fitting four years of school into two, all without a home, supportive parents, or even a bedroom in which to study. "High school was a marathon," she says."
She did a year's work a term and went to night classes. A teacher saw her gumption and mentored her. When he took his top 10 students to Harvard, she stood outside the university and instead of feeling intimidated she admired its architecture – and decided it was within her reach. Then she heard that the New York Times gave scholarships.  At that point, the media caught wind of her story."It started with the Times, and then a segment on 20/20, then, 'Hey, we'd like you to go on Oprah!' "


Her father died in 2006, also of Aids. His saving grace was that he encouraged her to read – and stole books from libraries to give her a love of literature. She has written a best selling memoir called 'Breaking Night' which was released in September 2010.

This link will take you to a short interview of Liz Murray,and in this interview she talks about her hardship and amazing journey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtybvFW0ncY

Dead Leaf Butterfly!!

Don’t step on that leaf, because it’s a butterfly.
Here is some evidence:


Kallima inachus or Dead Leaf is a butterfly found in tropical Asia from India to Japan. With wings closed, it closely resembles a dry leaf with dark veins and is a spectacular example of camouflage.

The dead leaf butterfly disguises itself as its name suggests, a dead leaf, the butterfly does this so it can live without any insects or animals eating it.

When its wings are closed the butterfly takes on the form of a dead leaf, avoiding predators with its exquisite camouflage. Differing in appearance during the wet and dry seasons, the butterfly takes on a richer brown colour during the rainy seasons.
When they do come out of their cover they end up eating plants.