Jottings from the Granite Studio

A multi-national team of biologists and ecologists just completed a six-week search of the Yangzi River looking for the Chinese River Dolphin (白鱀豚 Baijitun). After an exhaustive search, the team concluded that after 20 million years in the Yangzi, the Baiji are now extinct.
The dolphins were among the rarest of all mammals. Numbering [...]

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Today is the 69th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre (”Rape of Nanking”). Perhaps no other event in the Pacific Theater of World War II has been more controversial. Japanese accounts figure as few as 100,000 non-combatants were killed and there are those still in Japan, and elsewhere, who deny the incident ever took place. Contemporary [...]

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