WORLD
September 1, 2011 | By Janet Stobart, Los Angeles Times
The impromptu tributes began on a spring day in 2007 when church bell ringers stopped their weekly practice and tolled instead for two passing coffins carrying soldiers slain overseas. The rituals ended Wednesday with a sunset ceremony, as the town of Wootton Bassett said a solemn goodbye to its unique role in honoring Britain's war dead. The bodies of slain military personnel, which had been passing through the south England market town from nearby Lyneham air base, will now return to Brize Norton military airport close to the mortuary outside Oxford and Lyneham air base is to close this year.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 23, 2011 | By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
The J. Paul Getty Museum's iconic statue of Aphrodite was quietly escorted back to Sicily by Italian police last week, ending a decades-long dispute over an object whose craftsmanship, importance and controversial origins have been likened to the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum. The 7-foot tall, 1,300-pound statue of limestone and marble was painstakingly taken off display at the Getty Villa and disassembled in December. Last week, it was locked in shipping crates with an Italian diplomatic seal and loaded aboard an Alitalia flight to Rome, where it arrived on Thursday.
WORLD
June 5, 2010 | Edmund Sanders
One was a college student hauled off a public bus in the West Bank, blindfolded and deported to the Gaza Strip, two months shy of her graduation. Another was a beekeeper, left at the Gaza border after being seized in his West Bank home. He hasn't seen his wife and daughters, ages 8 months and 2 years, since December. The bees are dead and his business has collapsed. They are two of dozens of Palestinians ensnared by Israel's controversial practice of removing former Gaza residents from the lives and families they've led in the West Bank and sending them back to the restive Hamas-controlled seaside territory against their will.
NATIONAL
January 16, 2010 | By Richard Fausset
In an attempt to ensure the flow of remittances to devastated Haiti, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Friday that the Obama administration would temporarily grant legal status to the tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who were living in the United States illegally before this week's earthquake. But Napolitano emphasized that Haitians living in the island nation would not be eligible for temporary protected status, and would be repatriated if they attempted to enter the country, an implicit acknowledgment of the fear, thus far unrealized, that the earthquake could trigger a mass migration of Haitians to U.S. shores.
OPINION
August 21, 2009
The release by Scotland of Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, who was expected to spend his life in prison for the 1988 bombing of a Pan American jetliner, was merciful, certainly, but an outrage nonetheless. The "compassionate release" of the terminally ill Libyan terrorist showed no compassion for relatives of the 270 people killed when the jet exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Compounding their trauma was the muted protest of the Obama administration. Instead of viewing the special relationship between the United States and Britain as a cause for candor, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Atty.
WORLD
March 2, 2009 | Barbara Demick
And the bronze goes to . . . no one. The identity of the bidder who promised to pay the estate of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent $40 million for bronze heads of a rabbit and a rat that had been looted from an imperial Chinese palace was revealed today: an advisor to a nonprofit group dedicated to repatriating missing relics. But the winning bidder, Cai Mingchao, said he had no intention of paying for the heads, which the Chinese government maintain should be returned as stolen property.