Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: How old is Iftah Ya Simsim?
The show focused on Arab heritage, like the wedding rituals of countries in the region, and included Arab poems and songs. "Iftah Ya Simsim" premiered in Kuwait in September 1979, and was broadcast in all Arabic-speaking countries excluding Egypt. The show's opening consisted of a catchy tune that became beloved of its young viewers. As the song played, the opening footage showed children across the Arab world running past familiar landmarks like the Pyramids and playing in playgrounds and ancient alleyways before running into a white fort that had its gates open wide. The show's set consisted of an intricately traditional Arabian neighborhood called "Sharee Eshreen" (20th Street).
On 11 May 2007, it was announced that she would be joining the cast of "EastEnders" as Roxy Mitchell, alongside Samantha Womack who played Roxy's sister Ronnie Mitchell. Of her role, Simons said: "I've always watched "EastEnders" and it's been my dream to become part of the Mitchell family." Simons temporarily departed from "EastEnders" in late 2015 (the character departed from screens from 1 January to 4 May 2016), allowing the actress to take part in a Snow White pantomime at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, over the 2015/16 Christmas and New Year period. In August 2016, it was announced that Simons had quit "EastEnders" along with Samantha Womack and that they would be both departing in an "explosive" storyline in 2017. Her on-screen character Roxy Mitchell drowned in a swimming pool in an episode broadcast on New Year's Day 2017, along with her sister Ronnie.
As the sun rises, Rafiki the mandrill calls the animals to Pride Rock. She greets King Mufasa and Queen Sarabi before presenting their cub to the gathered animals ("Circle of Life"). Elsewhere, Mufasa's brother, Scar, laments his lost chance at becoming King. Back at her baobab tree, Rafiki paints an image of the cub and asks the spirits to conjure the new prince's name: Simba.
Rita Joanne Simons (born 10 March 1977) is an English actress, singer, and model from London, who is known for playing Roxy Mitchell in the BBC soap opera "EastEnders" from 2007 to 2017, when her character was killed off. For her performance on the show Simons received many accolades, including the 2008 National Television Award for Most Popular Newcomer.
Atta was born on September 1, 1968, in Kafr el-Sheikh, located in Egypt's Nile Delta region. His father, Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, was a lawyer, educated in both sharia and civil law. His mother, Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi, came from a wealthy farming and trading family and was also educated. Bouthayna and Mohamed married when she was 14, via an arranged marriage. The family had few relatives on the father's side and kept a distance from Bouthayna's family. In-laws characterized Atta's father as "austere, strict, and private," and neighbors considered the family reclusive. Atta was the only son; he had two older sisters who are both well-educated and successful in their careers — one as a medical doctor and the other as a professor.
A young Nala debuted in "The Lion King" (1994) as the daughter of Sarafina and the best friend of Simba, who she often accompanies on his adventures throughout the Pride Lands. Simba invites Nala to visit the forbidden Elephant Graveyard with him, despite his father Mufasa's orders. The cubs are soon ambushed by Shenzi, Banzai and Ed, a trio of hyenas chosen by Simba's treacherous uncle Scar to kill Simba in order to improve his own chances of becoming king, but are ultimately rescued by Mufasa. The following day, however, Nala is devastated to learn from Scar that both Simba and Mufasa have perished during a wildebeest stampede. With both Simba and Mufasa dead, Scar usurps the throne and becomes king. Several years into Scar's tyrannical rule, which has left the kingdom barren and starving, a desperate Nala ventures into the jungle in search of help, where she attempts to eat a warthog named Pumbaa; little does she know that the warthog is actually a friend of Simba's, who is in fact alive and well. While defending Pumbaa from Nala, Simba recognizes Nala, and the two finally reunite only to argue over why Simba is refusing to face his responsibilities and return to Pride Rock. Upon learning that Simba has eventually decided to return to Pride Rock and face Scar, Nala travels back to the Pride Lands to assist him. Surprised to find Simba alive, Scar forces his guilt-ridden nephew to "admit" to the pride that he is responsible for Mufasa's death, which was in fact caused by Scar himself by throwing Mufasa off a cliff into the stampede. Upon learning the truth, Simba forces his uncle to admit his crime to the pride, and a battle ensues between the pride and Scar's army of hyenas. Simba eventually defeats Scar and becomes king, with Nala ultimately becoming his queen.
In January 1969, she married her childhood friend and furniture store heir, Richard "Dick" Simons. The couple moved to Palm Beach, Florida and had one son, Evan Marc Simons (born 1970). In 1972, they divorced. She was introduced to her second husband, Florida banker David L. Paul, by real estate developer Sol Atlas; they divorced 2 months later. In 1977, she married recently divorced New York financier and millionaire Jeffrey Silverman. Silverman adopted Evan and the couple also adopted a daughter, Jessica. In 1995, they divorced after Silverman's affair with Sol Wachtler. Jeffrey Silverman remarried but later committed suicide.
The mimids are a family of passerine birds which includes thrashers, mockingbirds, tremblers, and the New World catbirds. These birds are notable for their vocalization, especially their remarkable ability to mimic a wide variety of birds and other sounds heard outdoors. The species tend towards dull grays and browns in their appearance.Order: PasseriformesFamily: Sturnidae
Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta ( ; ""  ; September 1, 1968 – September 11, 2001) was an Egyptian hijacker and one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks in which four United States commercial aircraft were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian targets. He served as the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks. At 33 years of age, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks.
Boxing record books show Fitzsimmons officially began boxing professionally in 1883, in Australia. He beat Jim Crawford there by getting a knockout in three rounds. Fitzsimmons had his first 28 definite professional fights in Australia, where he lost the Australian Middleweight title to Mick Dooley (rumours spoke of a fixed bout) and where he also won a fight by knockout while on the floor: when Edward Starlight Robins dropped Fitzsimmons to the canvas in round nine of their fight, he also broke his hand and could not continue, therefore the referee declared Fitzsimmons the winner by a knockout.
Solomons married second Maria-Teresa "MT" Solomons in 1997 having a son, Ze'ev (b. 1998). The Solomons are currently separated but work and train together with the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l'Apnée. He and his wife were members of the Israeli freediving team at Ibiza in 2001 and MT Solomons represented Great Britain at Egypt in 2008. Both are A.I.D.A Instructor Trainers and teach in Israel, the Turks and Caicos, Greece as well as in Mexico.
The fossilized remains of "Homo sapiens idaltu" were discovered at Herto Bouri near the Middle Awash site of Ethiopia's Afar Triangle in 1997 by Tim White, but were first unveiled in 2003. Herto Bouri is a region of Ethiopia under volcanic layers. According to radioisotope dating, the layers are between 154,000 and 160,000 years old. Three well preserved crania are accounted for, the best preserved being from an adult male (BOU-VP-16/1) having a brain capacity of . The other crania include another partial adult male and a six-year-old child.
In 2018, Mufasa, a three-year-old, was in the process of being sold in South Africa after he was taken from an owner illegally keeping him as a pet. An anonymous buyer wanted both Mufasa and a female lion named Soraya, intending to protect both. Over 280,000 signed a petition asking that Mufasa not be auctioned, fearing a buyer might just want the lion for hunting.
At least 65 Palestinians, including at least 17 children, 14 women and 4 elderly were killed and 288 Palestinians were wounded according to Shifa hospital's director, Naser Tattar. The United Nations' Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People put the estimate at over 70 Palestinian dead. Other reports at the time claimed 120 Palestinians had been killed, a third women and children. According to the spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Ashraf al-Qidra, rescue teams retrieved more than 80 dead bodies from houses destroyed in Shuja'iyya, 17 of which were children, 14 women and 4 elderly people.
The mimids are a family of passerine birds which includes thrashers, mockingbirds, tremblers, and the New World catbirds. These birds are notable for their vocalization, especially their remarkable ability to mimic a wide variety of birds and other sounds heard outdoors. The species tend towards dull grays and browns in their appearance. Four species have been recorded in Washington.Order: PasseriformesFamily: Sturnidae
Sam Dana (August 7, 1903 – October 29, 2007), born Sam Salemi, was a professional American football player who played running back for two seasons for the Hartford Blues and New York Yankees. At the time of his death, Dana was thought to be the oldest living NFL player.
Alfred Binet (; July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.
In 2016 the first climbers from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Tunisia reached the summit of Mount Everest. Only two other people from North Africa have summited Everest, one from Algeria and the other from Morocco. The youngest Australian woman to summit Mount Everest was Alyssa Azar. She returned to Australia safely, but a bittersweet victory for Australia after the loss of another Australian woman who was also trying to summit that May with her husband. The youngest Japanese woman also summited (and returned alive) at the age of 19. Another woman record-breaker in 2016 was the first woman from Thailand to summit Mount Everest, Napassaporn Chumnarnsit, who was granted an audience with the Prime Minister of Thailand for her achievement. The first person with Cystic Fibrosis also summited Mount Everest on his third try. Also, a 61-year old summited with two artificial knees. He had been trying for several years and had lost his Nepali friend Sherpa Nawang Tenzing in the 2015 earthquakes. He was not alone in being grief-stricken, as many climbers connected with the Everest mountaineering community lost climbing buddies in two years of disasters. One who narrowly survived the disasters himself climbed this year to bring attention to the disease Lewy body dementia (DLB), which had affected his father.
In the months following up to the September 11 attacks, officials at the Czech Interior Ministry asserted that Atta made a trip to Prague on April 8, 2001, to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. This piece of information was passed on to the FBI as "unevaluated raw intelligence". Intelligence officials have concluded that such a meeting did not occur. A Pakistani businessman named Mohammed Atta had come to Prague from Saudi Arabia on May 31, 2000, with this second Atta possibly contributing to confusion. The Egyptian Mohamed Atta arrived at the Florenc bus terminal in Prague, from Germany, on June 2, 2000. He left Prague the next day, flying on Czech Airlines to Newark, New Jersey, U.S. In the Czech Republic, some intelligence officials say the source of the purported meeting was an Arab informant who approached the Czech intelligence service with his sighting of Atta only after Atta's photograph had appeared in newspapers all over the world. United States and Czech intelligence officials have since concluded that the person seen with Ani was mistakenly identified as Atta, and the consensus of investigators has concluded that Atta never attended a meeting in Prague.
In December 2018, ITV announced a new project, "ITV Creates", which would be the basis of its idents beginning 1 January 2019. The network will commission artwork featuring the ITV logo from British artists, which will be used as the basis for a new set of idents every week. The first 8 artists of the project are Ravi Deepres, Sutapa Biswas, James Brunt, Patricia Volk, Mark Titchner, Katrina Russell Adams, Kristina Veasey, and James Alec Hardy. ITV Creative executive creative director Tony Pipes explained that the project was meant to be a platform for British visual artists, reflect ITV's position as being an "endlessly creative" broadcaster, and counter the traditional notion of idents being a static theme used for a long-term period.
Ethiopia has close historical ties to all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions. Christians form the majority of the population. Islam is the second most followed religion, with 33.9% of the population being adherents. 2.6% of the population (mainly in the far south and southwest) follow traditional religions; other religions (Bahá'í, Judaism, etc.) make up the remaining 0.6%. Ethiopia is the site of the first hijra in Islamic history and the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa at Negash. Until the 1980s, a substantial population of Ethiopian Jews resided in Ethiopia. The country is also the spiritual homeland of the Rastafari religious movement.
The producers wanted to present the characteristics of the Arabic language and its alphabet. Because pre-production research showed that, although many dialects are spoken in the region, 90% of Arab children were able to understand Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), it was chosen as the show's language. Linguist Kees Versteegh stated that the language used in "Iftah Ya Simsim" was "based on an explicit didactic and linguistic concept". The show's developers decided to use specific aspects of the language. Despite the absence of case endings in the dialects spoken by many of its users, the producers used them and other indispensable features of MSA. They also spelled out what features should be used sparingly, like passive verb forms, and what features they wanted to completely avoid, such as some prepositions. According to Versteegh, "These principles have been followed rather closely". Children who appeared on the show made few grammatical errors in MSA, and although colloquialisms were used rarely, there was an informal quality in their conversations and speech patterns. Versteegh postulated that it was due to the use of intonation patterns and interjections, instead of the use of grammatical and lexical items from the vernacular use of the language. He also said that "Iftah Ya Simsim" proved that it was "possible to use an informal register of Modern Standard Arabic". Versteegh reported that although the show was criticized in some Arab countries, Egypt in particular, for containing too many colloquialisms, he thought the criticism was biased and that "the selection of lexical items in any pan-Arabic programme will probably never satisfy everybody".
A few months after its premiere, "Iftah Ya Simsim" became one of the most popular and successful programs for children in many Arab states. Critics called it "one of the most successful pan-Arab collaborations of educators, creators, writers and artists from the Middle East". The show inspired many studies, which demonstrated that children benefited from watching it. 
In 2010, efforts began to revive the show for a new generation of young viewers in the Arab world. In late 2013, fifteen writers and producers from Bidaya Media attended training about its educational methodology and production techniques from the staff of the American show in New York. "Iftah Ya Simsim" was in pre-production in March 2014, and the first phase of auditions took place in April 2014. The new series debuted on September 1, 2015.
It was also announced that the much loved character No'man the camel and the bird muppet Melsoon were returning to the new run. They were to be joined by new muppets that would "include Shams, a quick witted 6 year old girl who is full of energy and loves to express herself, as well as cute Gargour, a special resident on Iftah Ya Simsim who provides his trademark zaniness, comic chaos and a unique perspective on the world." It was announced that season one Muppet performers included six puppeteers: Abdullah Kassem, Asma Alshamsi, Natheer Khawaldeh, Maher Mozawak, Noura Sadaka, and Michel Jabali. Also announced were actors appearing on the show with the muppets; Abdulla Rafa (in the role of Rashid) and Fatma Al Taei (as Amal). The educational content of the show is directed by the Educational Advisory Committee and the representatives of the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States (ABEGS).
"Iftah Ya Simsim" emphasized scientific thinking and the effects of technology on society. It sought to provide children with experiences that enriched their knowledge about their environment and improved their reasoning, through teaching them mathematical and geometric concepts. The show introduced its viewers to Arab history by citing important events, such as showing castles that were the center of historic battles. Geography was highlighted, especially the location of countries and their cities and capitals, which had the secondary effect of helping children increase their feelings of belonging and feeling proud of their Arab heritage. Children's social awareness, especially their comprehension of social roles and their functions, was also emphasized.