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Embroidery 

The Washington Post nails a series of statements where president Bush has been economical with the truth. As it points out, there’s a long tradition of presidential embroidery, but Stephen Hess from Brookings notes, “What worries me about some of these is they appear to be with foresight. This is about public policy in its grandest sense, about potential wars and who is our enemy, and a president has a special obligation to getting it right.”

How big was Troy? 

It seems daggers are drawn in the archaeology department of the University of Tubingen. Manfred Korfmann reckons his excavations show Troy was an important city in the late Bronze Age. Frank Kolb says it was at best a local citadel.

The argument has wider resonance, of course, because of the centrality of Troy in the literary imagination. But sadly, as Korfmann tells The New York Times, “We cannot excavate the Trojan War because it’s literature. We will never find Helen and Hector.”

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