In many parts of Asia the elephant is an auspicious animal. In Hinduism Ganesha, the elephant headed god is the deity to invoke at the beginning of any new plan, or project since he removes all obstacles, and in Buddhism elephants pop up everywhere ...
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Paul Thomas Anderson's ragingly intense There Will Be Blood, dazzlingly unlike his last offering, the brilliant, spiky Punch Drunk Love (2002), is the most ambitious film of the year, an experimental historical epic with mythic overtones. Violent as ...
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Black shoes squared, John Manson stands straight and true, as though out of respect to the history he has recounted for 30 years. His uniform, forest green and gray, is pressed and relatively unadorned: a small nametag over one chest pocket, a gold ...
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The Fourth of July arrives at a gloomy moment. More than three-quarters of Americans say the country is not going "in the right direction," according to an Associated Press poll. But the 232nd anniversary of the durability and success of the American ...
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"When my stepdad went to Iraq, half my heart went with him," says a youngster featured in Nickelodeon's special about the burdens that war and its aftermath place on children. "Coming Home: When Parents Return From the Front," the latest in the line ...
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Once a week, my mail package arrives from The Independent foreign desk in London. It contains anything up to 250 letters and parcels, and wherever I am – in the hot smog of Cairo, amid the Atlantis towers of Dubai or on my own flower-smothered ...
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Teh only way is up ... Gemma Bowes surfing in Hossegor. Photograph: Picasa 2.7 Slowly pulling the long ribbon of my wetsuit's zip up my spine, I looked out across the midnight blue water and surveyed the swell. Out there lay my first waves. I couldn ...
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I've been intrigued by beekeeping since childhood, partly because my grandfather kept them, partly because I have never been stung and always wondered if the first time might be memorable - anaphylactic shock and so on. As well as this whiff of ...
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The Fourth of July means we're in full summer swing, but that also means it's prime time for Lyme disease — the painful, debilitating infection spread by ticks. The Centers for Disease Control says more than 20,000 people get the disease every year ...
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