A South Korean television crew slipped into the Bird’s Nest stadium and came out with some footage of rehearsals for the Summer Olympics opening ceremony. You can see it here, via China Digital Times. For those of you who want to keep the surprise intact, don’t watch or keep reading. The SBS footage shows what looks like a Mass Games-style flashcard countdown and flying apsaras suspended by wires. Director Zhang Yimou’s program also includes whales projected on the stadium walls, lots of drummers and some dancers in white on a stage that rolled out like a scroll.
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Protesters challenge Israeli troops in the West Bank while commemorating the Nakba, or “day of catastrophe” in Arabic, which marks the day when Israel declared its statehood in 1948—an act which forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and into a life of exile
Rebekah Brooks, Husband Charged in Phone-Hacking Scandal
The convoluted saga of the British phone-hacking scandal seems to have been dragging on longer than a back-to-back performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Yet despite the demise of Rupert Murdoch‘s News of the World, the launching of a public inquiry into British press standards, three police investigations and more than 40 arrests, the scandal has yet to draw real blood. The closest it has come was a report released this month by a Parliamentary committee, which accused Murdoch of turning a blind eye to the hacking at his paper and declared him “not a fit person” to run an international company — a damning conclusion that nonetheless seems to have had little immediate effect.
