Rome wasn't built in a day, and the Internet didn't come out of a golden egg. Many of today's creations were not born of people who had creative ideas, but who did not stop at simply having an idea. They took one brick of capital (资本), another brick of knowledge, perhaps a brick or two of family and friends, and built their empires (帝国) brick by brick.

    If you want to build an online empire, you cannot settle for simply having a website full of articles, or a website full of pictures—there are already thousands of sites like that, so you need to come up with something new and creative.

    So if you are starting to build something up, ask yourself: what do you really want to do, and what are you really good at? Believe it or not, you can make money at something that you are an expert in, and you need to know what that is.

    Remember, having an online empire does not mean that you have to do it alone. You can take your friends along with you. Having a friend advertise your services online is a good way to attract more visitors to your empire.

    Building an online empire, you will have to be prepared to not only come up with creative ideas, but to carry your ideas through. Talk to people who have already succeeded in building their own empires. Talk to people who are struggling. Join a mailing list that will help you get through your struggle to achieve your goal.

    As you move forward, you will find that you can help other people, and you will have a good many stories to tell—not to mention a lot of money in the bank.

    If you learn the real secrets of creating a long term stable (稳定的) online business then you will have enough money to retire on.

    Everyone should be so lucky as to have a friend like Francia Raisa. On Thursday, singer and actress Selena Gomez, 25, used Instagram to explain why she was “laying low” this summer. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed with her friend Francia Raisa holding hands. She said she recently received a kidney transplant from her best friend because of complications（并发症）from lupus（狼疮）, an autoimmune disease, which means it is the result of the immune system attacking normal tissue, including the kidneys, brain, heart and lungs.

    People with lupus may first experience tiredness, joint pain or a little bit of rash（皮疹）on their bodies and can go for a long time before their doctors realize it is more serious. Many people see two or four doctors before the real problem is picked up. According to Dr. Kyriakos Kirou, roughly a third to one-half of people with lupus develop kidney disease, and up to one in five of them will eventually need a transplant, sometimes because they weren't treated with effective drugs to prevent the immune system from attacking the kidneys. Though Gomez said that she was “very well now,” she warned about the dangers of not taking medical diagnoses seriously, like she initially did.

    Her Instagram post also called attention to two major health topics: the need for living organ donators and the fact that Gomez represents three groups more likely to be diagnosed with lupus and lupus-related kidney disease. Nine out of 10 people diagnosed with lupus are women, and most develop the disease between the ages of 15 to 44. And lupus is two to three times more common among women of color, including Hispanic women, according to the Lupus Foundation.

    Raisa is Latina, and Gomez's father is of Mexican origin. While it's not essential that the organ donator and receiver be of the sane ethnicity, people who share a similar background sometimes are better matched, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

    In France, franglais（英式法语）was seen as a national threat. Just as we took in thousands of French words in the Middle Ages, French speakers and writers today are taking in thousands of English and American expressions. By 1994, so many English words had made their way to French that the French government passed a law forbidding the use of English words where good French words existed.

    But the latest edition of the Academy francaise dictionary did admit about 6,000 new words to the French language, including, for the first time, a number of franglais words and expressions.

    However, this sort of thing is not just limited to traditional English – French Competition. Norway and Brazil have recently taken similar measures to keep English out.

    As English spreads around the globe, it has developed rich varieties. English has been spoken in Singapore since the early 19^th century, but after independence from Britain, Singapore went a step further and English was made the official language of business and government. But the day −to–day English that the people of Singapore actually speak is a far cry from the official English that the government wants them to learn. It has become an expressive dialect called “Singlish”, full of vocabulary and grammar borrowed from the Singapores' native languages.

    And this may be the irony（讽刺）of the global spread of English. The more widely it's spoken, the more it may change into local dialects, which are not easily intelligible. People will make English their own and, in doing so, will make it something else. This has happened before to Latin which broke into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. But English has always welcomed variety and change, and it still does.

    Some of the world's most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots（暴动）and hunger make news. But the trend lying behind these matters is rarely talked about. This is the decrease in the growth in production of some of the world's major crops. A new study by the University of Minnesota and McGill University in Montreal looks at where, and how far, this decline is occurring.

    The authors take a vast number of data points for the four most important crops: rice, wheat, corn and soyabeans. They find that on between 24% and 39% of all harvested areas, the improvement inproduction that took place before the 1980s slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s.

    There are two worrying features of the slowdown. One is that it has been particularly sharp in the world's most populous countries, India and China. Their ability to feed themselves has been an important source of relative stability both within the countries and on world food markets. That self-sufficiency (自给自足) cannot be taken for granted if productions continue to slow down.

    Second, production growth has been lower in wheat and rice than in corn and soyabeans. This is problematic because wheat and rice are more important as foods, accounting for around half of all calories consumed. Corn and soyabeans are more important as feed grains. The authors note that "we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars rather than on crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world."

    The report also states the more optimistic findings of another new paper which suggests that the world will not have to dig up a lot more land for farming in order to feed 9 billion people in 2050, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation has argued.

    Instead, it says, thanks to slowing population growth, land currently ploughed（犁）up for crops might be able to revert (回返) to forest or wilderness. This could happen. The trouble is that the prediction assumes continued improvements in productions, which may not actually happen.

    Unlike most other holidays, the history of April Fools' Day, sometimes called All Fools' Day, is not totally clear. The only point in time that can be agreed on as the beginning of this tradition was 1582, in France. Before that year, the New Year was celebrated for eight days, beginning on March 25th. The celebration reached the highest point on April 1st. With the reform of the calendar under Charles IX，the Gregorian calendar(公历，阳历) was introduced, and New Year's Day was moved to January 1st.

    However, because in those days communications were not as developed as they are today, many people did not receive the news for several years. Some people refused to accept the new calendar and continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st. These backward people were considered "fools" by other people. They  were often sent on "fools" errands(徒劳无益的工作)  or were made the targets of jokes.

    This developed, over time, into a tradition of playing a trick on someone on the first day of April. The tradition eventually spread to England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. It was later introduced to the American colonies of both the Britain and France. April Fools' Day thus developed into an international fun feast, so to speak, with different nationalities specializing in their own kind of humor at the expense of their friends and families.

    If a family member blames you for something you have done, it is important to be careful about how you defend yourself. It is not a good idea to use ways that cause hurt, even if they would help you make a valid point. If you can think of an instance where the other person has done exactly what they accuse you of, for example, it would not be good manners to throw it in their face. You should only bring it up if you don't have a choice. Then, you should make sure that you do it respectfully.

    Even if a family member intentionally goes against reasonable wishes you may have, you should understand that people see even the most fundamental things in very different ways. Remember that people are different. If you consider any noise after midnight to be intolerable, for example, others may see it is completely acceptable. It can take them a great deal of time to change their behavior for a demand that they do not understand.

    Think about the family conflicts that you are worried about now. Check to see if your parents had similar problems. People who grow up with parents who fight unfairly often repeat the same behavior. Consider changing the unfair habits that you grew up with.

    Understand that memories tend to change. In long-standing family disputes, all parties involved tend to have completely different recollections of the original problem.

    Families are a curious concept—while family members often feel nothing but annoyed for one another, they will also often be there for them if they should ever be in serious trouble. When you feel resentment for someone, think about how far you would go for them if they happened to be in trouble. It could help soften you. Think about how you care for the other person.