Asunción (full name: Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Asunción), is the capital city and largest city of Paraguay. The city has more than 1.2 million inhabitants, and the metropolitan area has more than 1.8 million inhabitants. It is on the left bank of the Paraguay River and is the main seaport of Paraguay.
The Spanish word "asunción" means "assumption" in English. It refers to the Assumption of Mary; the full name means "Our Lady, Holy Mary of the Assumption".
Predestination
Predestination is a religious concept, which is about the relationship between God and His creation. The religious character of predestination distinguishes it from other ideas about determinism and free will. Those who believe in predestination, such as John Calvin, believe that before the creation God determined the destiny of the universe throughout all of time and space. They believe that God orders some people to Heaven, and all other people will go to Hell because of their sins. This is determined before they even are born.
Definition: predestination is the divine foreordaining or foreknowledge of all that will happen. It applies to the salvation of some and not others. It has been particularly associated with the teachings of St. Augustine of Hippo and of John Calvin.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American slasher movie. It was directed by Wes Craven and released to movie theaters by Warner Bros. It is about five teenagers who are followed in their dreams by the ghost of serial killer Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund. It also stars John Saxon as Lt. Donald Thompson.
Actor Johnny Depp had his first movie role in "A Nightmare on Elm Street".
It is the first in the "A Nightmare on Elm Street movie series". The next movie in the series is "".
Gladiolus
Gladiolus (from Latin, the diminutive of "gladius", a sword) is a genus of flowering plants in the iris family (Iridaceae). Sometimes called the sword lily, the most widely-used English common name for these plants is simply gladiolus (plural gladioli, gladioluses or sometimes gladiolas).
The genus "Gladiolus" contains about 260 species, of which 250 are native to sub-Saharan Africa, mostly South Africa. About 10 species are native to Eurasia. There are 160 species of "Gladiolus" endemic in southern Africa and 76 in tropical Africa. The species vary from very small to the spectacular giant flower spikes in commerce.
These attractive, perennial herbs are semihardy in temperate climates. They grow from rounded, symmetrical corms, that are enveloped in several layers of brownish, fibrous tunics.
Their stems are generally unbranched, producing 1 to 9 narrow, sword-shaped, longitudinal grooved leaves, enclosed in a sheath. The lowest leaf is shortened to a cataphyll. The leaf blades can be plane or cruciform in cross section.
The fragrant flower spikes are large and one-sided, with secund, bisexual flowers, each subtended by 2 leathery, green bracts. The sepals and the petals are almost identical in appearance, and are termed tepals. They are united at their base into a tube-shaped structure. The dorsal tepal is the largest, arching over the three stamens. The outer three tepals are narrower. The perianth is funnel-shaped, with the stamens attached to its base. The style has three filiform, spoon-shaped branches, each expanding towards the apex.
The ovary is 3-locular with oblong or globose capsules, containing many, winged brown, longitudinally dehiscent seeds. In their center must be noticeable the specific pellet like structure which is the real seed without the fine coat. In some seeds this structure is wrinkled and with black color. These seeds are unable to germinate.
These flowers are variously colored, pink to reddish or light purple with white, contrasting markings, or white to cream or orange to red.
The South African species were originally pollinated by long-tongued anthrophorine bees, but some changes in the pollination system have occurred, allowing pollination by sunbirds, noctuid and sphingid moths, long-tongued flies and several others. In the temperate zones of Europe many of the hybrid large flowering sorts of gladiolas can be pollinated by small well-known wasps. Actually, They are not very good pollinators because of the large flowers of the plants and the small size of the wasps. Another insect in this zone which can try some of the nectar of the gladioli is the best-known European Hawk-moth "Macroglossum stellatarum" which usually pollinates many famous garden flowers like "Petunia", "Zinnia", "Dianthus" and others.
Gladioli are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including the Large Yellow Underwing.
Flying possum
A flying possum or glider may refer to any of several marsupial species:
Feathertail glider
The feathertail glider ("Acrobates pygmaeus"), also known as the pygmy gliding possum, pygmy glider or flying mouse, is the world's smallest gliding mammal. It is named after its long feather-shaped tail. Although only the size of a very small mouse (65 to 80 mm and 10 to 14 g), it can leap and glide long distances from tree to tree, up to 25 metres. Like other gliding mammals, the feathertail glider has a skin membrane between the fore and hind legs; thicker than that of the other marsupials like the sugar glider, but smaller in proportion, extending only between the elbows and knees.
Sugar glider
The sugar glider ("Petaurus breviceps") is a small marsupial originally native to eastern and northern mainland Australia, New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago, and introduced to Tasmania. It is called a sugar glider because it likes to feed on the sugary sap from certain trees, and can jump from trees and glide through the air to another tree. They live in trees, and rarely travel on the ground. They eat many foods, but mostly tree sap and insects. They look and act much like a flying squirrel, but they are not related. Sugar gliders are actually related to possums
Around the world, the sugar glider is a popular domestic pet. It is one of the most commonly traded wild animals in the illegal pet trade, where animals are plucked directly from their natural habitats.
In Australia, sugar gliders can be kept in Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory but not Western Australia, New South Wales, ACT or Tasmania.
Sugar gliders are most popular as pets in the United States, where they are bred in large numbers. Most states and cities allow sugar gliders as pets, with some exceptions. In some places, a license or permit might be needed to own a sugar glider, because they are considered an exotic pet, or wild animal.
Bismarck Archipelago
The Bismarck Archipelago is a group of islands off the northeastern coast of New Guinea in the western Pacific Ocean and part of Papua New Guinea.
The first inhabitants of the Archipelago arrived around 33,000 years ago after sailing from what is now Papua New Guinea. Later arrivals included the Lapita people.
The first European to visit these islands was Dutch explorer Willem Schouten in 1616.
The islands remained unsettled by western Europeans until they became part of the German protectorate of German New Guinea in 1884. The area was named in honor of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
On 13 March 1888, a volcano erupted on Ritter Island causing a megatsunami. Almost 100% of the volcano fell in to the ocean leaving a small lake in the volcanic crater.
Following the outbreak of World War I, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force seized the islands in 1914 and Australia later received a League of Nations mandate for the islands. They remained under Australian control – interrupted only by Japanese occupation during World War II – until Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975.
Legal precedent