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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
128397
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Early in October 2013, a group of high-ranking Greek officials, including Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, came to Washington for the opening of a major art exhibition from their country at the National Gallery of Art. But the black-tie event and the press conference to inaugurate the show, "Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections," were both canceled because of the government shutdown. As a result, a party of angry Greeks left for home muttering darkly about fearing Americans when you bear them gifts. The Greeks were not even allowed a private visit to the exhibition in which virtually every precious icon, ancient manuscript, and piece of mosaic had been loaned by museums and institutions in their country.
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| 2 |
ID:
134846
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This past Labor Day, a great many of the sausages consumed at cookouts across the country came from Smithfield Foods Inc., formerly the US food giant, but for the past year a wholly owned subsidiary of China’s Shuanghui International Holdings. Shuanghui paid $4.7 billion for Smithfield, whose operation spans hog farms and pork processing facilities in more than a dozen states, including Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. The deal was China’s largest single investment in the United States to date, and helped boost Chinese mergers, acquisitions, and “greenfield projects” (companies setting up their own factories) to a record $14 billion by the end of 2013. Despite bilateral tensions over cyber espionage, Chinese territorial disputes with America’s allies in the South China Sea, and the slow progress of China’s massive economic reforms—and despite increasing calls for more scrutiny from Congress—China Inc closed a total of eight hundred and seventy-nine major deals last year across the American map, from New Jersey to California.
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| 3 |
ID:
104310
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What's with these Italians? Every day Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sinks deeper into a mire of sex scandal that portrays him, at seventy-five, as a partying old man fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of his libido. He has been on television, not to tell the nation how his government plans to deal with Italy's precarious public finances and anemic growth rate, but to denounce as defamatory charges against him of sex with an underage prostitute, and to insist that he has never paid for sex in his life.The episode involving Moroccan night club dancer Karima el-Mahroug-better known as Ruby the Heartstealer (in Italian, it's Ruby Ruba-cuori)-is only the latest in a string of racy stories about Berlusconi's private life, involving parties with young women at his various homes. In short, like the Italian male stereotype (as in, for example, Dino Risi's 1962 cult movie Il sorpasso), Berlusconi loves the ladies. But Ruby was seventeen when he is supposed to have paid her for sex; so in May (postponed from April because of commitments of state, like the Libya situation), he goes on trial in a Milan court. The age of consent in Italy is fourteen, but paying a prostitute who is under eighteen is a criminal offense.
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| 4 |
ID:
134092
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Screaming their defiant war cries, Scottish clansmen pointed their long spears and prepared to meet the English charge. The two armies came together in bloody combat, the helmeted English knights, slowed by their cumbersome armor, outmaneuvered by the more agile, more lightly armed Scots, and eventually overwhelmed. When the English drew back, leaving hundreds of dead and wounded on the field, the screaming clansmen charged, turning the enemy's disciplined retreat into a rout.
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| 5 |
ID:
125298
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2013.
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In September, senior clerics from a dozen different Christian denominations all over the Middle East met in Amman, Jordan, for a conference organized by King Abdullah II. The subject was the crisis facing Christianity in the region, and what to do about it. Missing from the meeting were two prominent Arab prelates from Aleppo: Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, the city's Syriac Orthodox bishop, and Metropolitan Boulos Yazigi, his Greek Orthodox counterpart. Both had been abducted by unidentified gunmen somewhere between Aleppo and Antioch in April, and their whereabouts were still unknown.
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| 6 |
ID:
118891
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| 7 |
ID:
115077
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2012.
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BARCELONA??-??Joan Miró's farmhouse in Mont Roig, about fifty miles from here, is well known from the Catalonian artist's own depictions of it. The best of them, a work he called La Ferme (the farm), was owned by his friend Ernest Hemingway, whose widow later gave it to the National Gallery in Washington. The house itself still stands today, but it is empty, rundown, and neglected. Its walls are peeling and what furniture remains is in bad condition; the cobbles in the front courtyard where Miró and his family often dined alfresco are hardly visible among the weeds.
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| 8 |
ID:
132147
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2014.
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Prior to Pope Francis's visit to the Holy Land, his ambassadors sought to temper expectations by reminding officials in Washington and other capitals that the pontiff himself had called it "strictly a religious trip." Its main purpose, they said, was to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the meeting in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras-the first such encounter after a thousand years of antagonism between the two churches, Roman Catholic and Orthodox. But in a region where religion and politics are an explosive mix, every word he spoke, every step he took was going to be scrutinized for any hint of support for one side to the disadvantage of the other, and no one knew it better than Francis. But the Argentine-born pope already had a reputation for not avoiding controversial issues-and a gift for making unexpected symbolic gestures to make his point.
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| 9 |
ID:
125213
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2013.
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Piled in the storeroom of a leading shoemaker in Rome are several pairs of new, red leather shoes, in different styles and various sizes and half-sizes. Among them are the shoes intended for the new Fisher of Men of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis. But the freshly minted pontiff immediately dispensed with the tradition of wearing red shoes, preferring to keep his sturdy, well-worn black cap toes. He also rejected the ermine-trimmed, elbow-length red cape worn by popes before him, buttoned down the front, and known as a mozzetta; and he kept his own iron pectoral cross in preference to the offered gold one. When the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, lately archbishop of Buenos Aires, appeared for the first time on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on a rainy March 13th evening, he wore the white papal cassock and, speaking good Italian, told the huge crowd that the cardinals in the conclave had chosen him "from almost the end of the world."
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| 10 |
ID:
106735
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| 11 |
ID:
122117
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2013.
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At exactly 17:14 on the evening of September 15, 2012, in Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium, thousands of fans at a packed soccer game stood up as one and chanted, "Independence!" The timing was chosen to coincide with the year 1714, when Spanish troops annexed Catalonia-of which Barcelona is the capital-to Spain. Catalonia has its own distinct language and culture, and Catalan activists have been fanning the flames of separatism ever since.
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| 12 |
ID:
103111
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| 13 |
ID:
122125
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| Publication |
2013.
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The town of Eastleigh, in southeast England, doesn't normally make national news. It's old, but not antique. It was once known for its railroad industrial works that built powerful steam locomotives with names like King Arthur. But that was in the early twentieth century. Today, it's more of a dormitory town for larger, nearby cities like Southampton and Winchester. In March of this year, however, Eastleigh (population 120,700) dominated the political headlines and provided a preview of things to come, following a parliamentary by-election whose result seriously rattled the mainstream parties, particularly the governing Conservatives.
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