A funeral for Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a noted foreign policy expert and thinker, will be held Friday at St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Brzezinski died May 26 in Virginia. He was 86. In a statement, Carter called Brzezinski "a superb public servant" as well as "brilliant, dedicated and loyal." Along with Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski helped shape U.S. foreign policy with a lasting impact, while also serving as an adviser to Presidents Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. One of his most well-known accomplishments came in 1978, when Brzezinski helped President Carter reach an agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to secure the Camp David peace accords between the two countries. He also was involved in making other major U.S. foreign policy decisions during the Carter administration, including negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty, arming mujahedin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders and planning a failed mission to rescue 52 American hostages held in Iran. Alexander Vershbow, a former deputy secretary general of NATO and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, told VOA Brzezinski's wisdom also guided U.S. and NATO policy in the post-Cold War period. "On one hand, listening to the appeals of countries like Poland, like Czechoslovakia, like Hungary, to become part of the Western family, which they were denied 70 years ago ... but also reaching out to Russia, and trying to help Russia become an integral part of the European family, the common European house, as [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev described it," Vershbow said. Following his work in the White House, Brzezinski continued to be an influential voice on foreign policy matters. He served as a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Brzezinski went on to ruffle the feathers of Washington's power elite with his 1983 book, "Power and... After the story President Carter may have - wrote a book - not enough information - planned a mission - remembered some old times
remembered some old times

Larisa Grollemond is conducting a comparative study of illuminations in the Mirror of History (Speculum historiale, Miroir historial) as a graduate intern in the Manuscripts Department of the Getty Museum. The massive text, compiled in the 1200s by friar Vincent of Beauvais and translated into French in the 14th century by Jean de Vignay, attempts to compile all of world history from creation to the present into a single source. "If our twenty-first-century way of understanding everything is to put it on the Internet," she says, "the medieval way of understanding was to create big encyclopedic texts that try to encompass all of human history and biblical history in an organized way." Larisa, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on 15th-century French manuscript culture, is focusing on the Getty volumes' unique program of illuminations. The French translation of the Miroir historial exists in some 40 known copies, and while the text remains mostly unchanged from copy to copy, the illuminations vary dramatically, both in how scenes are depicted and in which episodes artists choose to depict. Larisa has decided to focus on the evolution of depictions of India and its inhabitants across these various copies, because the Getty copy, which dates to 1475, contains images that are different from earlier illuminated versions. While other copies don't dedicate more than one or two illustrations to India, the Getty copy has several that draw upon the medieval tradition of the "monstrous peoples" as well as knowledge of geography, materials, and customs newly gained through trade. This work ties into broader scholarly efforts to shed light on globalization in the Middle Ages. "Scholars of medieval art have generally thought of Western Europe as the center and non-European places as the periphery. There has now been a revision of that view," says Larisa. "These manuscripts provide an interesting glimpse into how late-medieval Europeans made sense of their world, including... What subject did Larisa probably enjoy the most in high school? - Mathematics - not enough information - History - Physical education
History

There was a boy named Chan who loved his parents, though they did not love him back; he was not even given a first name. He had been born in the wrong month, during the wrong phase of the moon, his parents told him, and had brought them nothing but bad luck. The promotion at the factory promised to his father was taken away at the last moment. The garden his mother worked in nearly every day never produced anything more than the most meager of weeds since Chan's birth. It was often sunny in the little Chinese village, but there was an almost constant gloom over their house, as if a rogue cloud were blocking the sun only over their property. And his parents, of course, blamed Chan for everything. He was small for his age, and usually quiet. He liked to listen to people instead of talking, filling himself with stories. He was a good boy and always did as he was told, and could see the good in his parents, even if others couldn't. Every so often, his mother would allow him a sweet, or his father would bring home an origami folding kit. They didn't like to show it to others, but his parents could be kind. Chan was patient and knew they would love him eventually. He was digging one day between the fence and the west side of the house for grubs to feed to his pet chameleon, Rainbow. It was a warm July day not long after his tenth birthday. He often went there because it was cool and damp from the shade of the trees, and the worms seemed to like it there. He never took more than he needed, then he thanked the grubs for sacrificing their lives so that Rainbow could remain living and being his pet. Chan was very kind-hearted when it came to grubs. For how long does Chan's mother probably work inthe garden every day? - hours - days - minutes - not enough information
hours