Saturday, September 10, 2011

Miss Universe 2011 Live Stream, 60th Anniversary Pageant Credicard Hall, São Paulo

Miss Universe 2011, the 60th anniversary of the Miss Universe pageant, will be held at the Credicard Hall, in São Paulo, Brazil on September 12, 2011. Ximena Navarrete of Mexico will crown her successor.

This live feed is in Brazil for the Miss Universe beauty pageant:

Miss Universe Live Stream

Event Information:

Contestants from 89 countries and territories are participating in this year´s pageant, surpassing the previous record of 86 contestants in 2006. Credicard Hall is a music theater in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It opened in September 1999, with capacity for 8,000 people. Considered to be one of the largest entertainment venue in Brazil and one of the largest in Latin America. Naming rights for the venue are held by Citigroup-owned credit card operator Credicard since its opening. The 60th anniversary Miss Universe 2011 pageant will be held on September 12 this year at the hall.

Miss Universe is an annual international beauty contest run by the Miss Universe Organization. The pageant is the most publicized beauty contest in the world with 600 million viewers.  The first use of the title "Miss Universe" was as part of International Pageant of Pulchritude which began in 1926. These events, the first international contests, lasted until 1935 when the Great Depression and other events preceding World War II led to their demise. This pageant had no direct relationship with the modern event.

The Miss Universe Organization, a New York–based partnership between NBC and Donald Trump, has run the contest since June 20, 2002. The current president is Paula Shugart. The Organization sells television rights to the pageant in other countries, and also produces the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA contests with the winner of Miss USA representing the USA in Miss Universe. Each year, Miss Universe organizers receive bids from organizations who wish to select the Miss Universe contestant for a country. This allows competition between different pageants to hold a country's license, as happened for Miss Italy and Miss France for example, when the licenses for their respective traditional organizations were revoked (the usual Miss France competition returned in 2004).

9/11 10th Anniversary Live Stream WTC, Ground Zero Webcam

Ground Zero at the World Trade Center is the scene for the 10th Anniversary remembrance memorial service in 2011, more poignant this year after the death of Osama Bin Laden.

This live feed is at Ground Zero for the memorial events:

Ground Zero webcam

Event Information:

The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11th or 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights.

The death toll of the attacks was 2,996, including the 19 hijackers. The overwhelming majority of casualties were civilians, including nationals of over 70 countries. In addition, there is at least one secondary death – one person was ruled by a medical examiner to have died from lung disease due to exposure to dust from the World Trade Center's collapse.

The United States responded to the attacks by launching the War on Terrorism: it invaded Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda terrorists. The United States also enacted the USA PATRIOT Act. Many other countries also strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded law enforcement powers. Some American stock exchanges stayed closed for the rest of the week following the attack and posted enormous losses upon reopening, especially in the airline and insurance industries. The destruction of billions of dollars worth of office space caused serious damage to the economy of Lower Manhattan.