Word: royaler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This year, the cows had no good news for Cambodia's farmers. Each year before the planting season begins, all eyes in the capital of Phnom Penh turn to a pair of hungry royal oxen for guidance. Placed before the sacred beasts are seven golden trays bearing, respectively, rice, maize, sesame, beans, rice wine, water and grass. What the cows eat-and don't eat-during the ancient Royal Plowing Ceremony predicts the upcoming year's harvest. Munching on rice is good, a signal of a bountiful crop to come. Forgoing water for rice wine could presage a drought, along...
...economic reality made the results of the Royal Plowing Ceremony even more bitter for deeply superstitious farmers. A member of parliament watching the recalcitrant cows said he thought it was the most pathetic display of bovine appetite in more than a decade. (Making the sting more painful: royal cows at a similar ceremony in neighboring Thailand a few days later ate grass, corn and rice with gusto...
...been little transparency in the awarding of exploration contracts to foreign oil companies. Longtime Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has dismissed concerns that oil will be anything other than a huge boon for his country. But for the poor farmers watching the oxen decline to feast at the Royal Plowing Ceremony, the promise of oil revenues must feel completely irrelevant to their hand-to-mouth lives. What will they do if a drought does indeed strike this year, and their rice shoots wilt in the tropical sun? If the sacred cows know the answer, they aren't talking...
...this kind of cybercrime - breaking into top-secret networks for reconnaissance, more than blocking access to Web-based services - that could serve terrorist logistics or research cells, worries Alexander Neill, head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "To what extent are organizations like al-Qaeda using cyber attack to do reconnaissance?" he asks. "Given their command and control, I have no doubt they have experts doing this." For now, though, there's reason to suspect that terrorists might not attempt the sort of online barrage to which Estonia was subjected. "Terrorism is about...
...should all ask ourselves quite regularly, because that way you get to do all the things you want to do before you die. My own "last day on earth" list would include an array of English delights: a pint of Harveys real ale in my village pub (the Royal Oak in Newick, East Sussex), a champagne picnic at Lord's Cricket Ground in London during a test match, an hour spent staring wistfully at the goalmouth in Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium, lunch at the Ivy, dinner at Le Caprice, and a night in the penthouse suite of somewhere historic...