Author: Ms. R.

Traffic crossings have become a popular place for various messages and symbols. In Stockholm, the traffic counselor decided their traffic signals needed an update that better reflected society.  Initially created as a temporary installation in 2017 to celebrate Pride and to raise awareness of issues affecting the LGBTQ community, 47 lights were modified to show couples of the same gender standing (red) or walking (green) together. The project cost 100,000 SEK and became a recurring theme over the years…….

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Many of the millions of visitors snapping selfies on the Grand Canyon’s rim have no idea that the ruddy limestone cliffs are pockmarked with caves. “There’s really more caves in the Grand Canyon National Park than any other place,” says Jim Mead, a paleontologist and director of The Mammoth Site in South Dakota. Carlsbad Caverns, for instance, boasts somewhere around 119, while the Grand Canyon probably houses hundreds. The network within the steep walls is filled with the remains……

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Chances are that if you’ve walked through the big yellow departure gate of Brisbane International Airport, you have passed this inconspicuous glass cabinet. Upon closer inspection, the contents inside are not what you’d typically see in an airport terminal, such as a taxidermized mongoose in mid-fight with a cobra. This display is comprised entirely of illegal animal products seized by border security at customs. They now serve as a reminder to travelers not to engage in animal trading while……

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In search of an original khaki military jacket or camouflage trousers from World War II? An open-air Italian market has you covered. The market of Pugliano (also known as the market of Resina) is one of Italy‘s best-stocked spots for secondhand clothes and military surplus items. It dates to 1944, when clothes and other objects were snatched from passing American convoys, then sold. After the war, American troops left clothing and supplies behind in warehouses outside the city. These,……

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At the onset of World War II, the Kingdom of Norway was not allied with the Axis or Allied Powers, leading both factions to consider invading the country due to its strategic position in the North Sea. While the British in particular drew plans to mine Norwegian waters and prevent Axis ships from transiting these waters, Nazi Germany actually invaded and occupied the country in 1940. With the Scottish archipelago of Shetland being the closest point between the United Kingdom……

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The world-famous Louvre Museum has a couple branches outside Paris, namely in Lens and Abu Dhabi. There is also an officially sanctioned “sister” museum in Japan, however, albeit of a somewhat different kind. The Louvre Sculpture Museum opened in the city of Tsu in 1987, privately funded and founded by a Buddhist priest and entrepreneur named Yūjiro Takegawa. Greatly impressed by the Louvre in Paris, Takegawa negotiated with the museum over and over until it finally gave him its……

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The site of the former 17th-century garrison house of Rev. Joseph Rowlandson and his family is wonderfully bucolic, set beneath a canopy of shade trees and tucked behind a handsome low stone wall. But the scene was much different during King Philip’s War. It was from this place on February 10, 1676, that Mary Rowlandson and three of her children, Joseph, Mary, and Sarah, were kidnapped during an attack by members of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Nashaway/Nipmuc. Such raids……

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One winter morning, prisoners at the Akmola Labor Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, part of the Soviet gulag system from the 1930s to 1950s, trudged to a nearby lake. As they began gathering reeds to heat their frigid barracks, children and elders from the neighboring community approached the shore. The kids hurled small, hard white balls toward the women, and the camp guards cackled: Their charges weren’t hated only in Moscow, but here in remote Kazakhstan……

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This atmospheric location on the surface is masked by an inconspicuous gray building. However, the true nature of this location is hidden more than 100 feet underground, similar in-depth to the Moscow underground/subway (Metro). This former bunker was constructed during the Cold War and wasn’t declassified until 2018. The purpose of the bunker was to act as a protected storage facility for some of Russia‘s most important foreign policy documents. It’s believed that around 120 tons of documentation, from……

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On the second day of their December 2020 voyage through the punishing Sierra mountain range, the four team members of the Forlorn Hope Expedition woke to find six inches of snow had piled on their tents, and more was falling. They made oatmeal on their camp stoves and hustled to get moving. The previous day, they had covered ground that a group of pioneers in the winter of 1846-47 had needed a week to accomplish—and they would ultimately traverse……

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This peaceful spot in the middle of the 54-acre Brookside Gardens recalls a very somber span of three weeks in October 2002 when local residents were gripped by fear as a series of random and mysterious killings unfolded across Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The perpetrators left behind a trail of dead and wounded on a bloody cross-country trek between February and September 2002, during which they shot and killed seven people and wounded seven more. They arrived in the……

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Azmaris are Ethiopian bards, poet-musicians as skilled in lyrical double-entendre and pun as they are with their instruments. They are comparable to the griots of West Africa, who capture the cultural history of their communities in verse and song and the troubadours of middle-ages Europe, wandering composers and performers of lyrical poetry. Azmaris are traditionally involved in many aspects of Ethiopian life, from marriages and religious celebrations to quiet nights at rural bars. Azmari instruments of choice are the……

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