News For Kids

We've added a new link to the sidebar on Jade's Palace today called "Our Little Earth" that has interesting news about our world,.. just for kids! If you have a kid like me you really should subscribe to the newsletter. It's $15 a year, so save up! And if your big like my Mom & Daddy, you should check it out anyway!

This is an example of one of the stories.
It's about this really neat place called "Angkor TaProhm". Ever heard of it?


Angkor TaProhm is a large temple in Cambodia. It is part of a huge temple complex that was built in the ancient city of Angkor. This week, archaeologists discovered that Angkor was actually a much larger city than was previously thought. They used information from satellites that helped reveal ruins under the ground. More than 70 new temples were discovered, along with roads and canals. It is estimated that the ancient city was spread over almost 1000 square kilometers (400 square miles), making it comparable to the area of London! Also, there could have been close to a million people living in Angkor, which would make it larger than any of the European cities at the time or the great cities of the Mayan civilization.

The Angkor settlement started around 500 AD. The people were called the Khmer. They practiced the Hindu religion. Around 1200 AD, a new king introduced Buddhism. For an unknown reason, the settlement was abandoned around 1500 AD. The new discoveries shed some light on this mystery. The settlement became so large that it caused a lot of erosion and water management problems, which might have led to its ruin.

Over the next four hundred years, the thick jungle around Angkor completely covered the city and its existence was forgotten until French missionaries found it in 1860. The picture shows one of the temples as it was found by the French.

Angkor was featured in the movie "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider". Angelina Jolie, who plays Lara Croft in the movie, fell in love with the country and adopted a Cambodian child.