“I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable…

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.  After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history…

The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.”

George Orwell Homage to Catalonia

Yahoo still has satellite photos of Georgia on its site:  http://travel.yahoo.com/p-map-473710-map_of_republic_of_georgia-i

The map at the same site only shows major routes without any identifying data.

Of course I wrote Google asking why the blank country.  No reply. 

As an added observation.  George Bush has condemned the Russian invasion as a “disproportionate” reaction to Georgia’s invasion to South Ossetia - a disputed province between Russia and Georgia. Yes - Georgia staged a surprise military invasion of South Ossetia.  Hard to find that fact reading the AP news reports it as a “crackdown” - an ambiguous word.

And my my - imagine the US response - after bombing the ancient country of Iraq into rubble in an all out war that has killed over a million of its people in a country half way around the world - just to get rid of the dictator - Bush thinks the the Russians are overreacting.

The Google Press Team has sent this notice in reply to my question.

“Google has not made any recent change to Georgia, Amenia and Azerbaijan on its Google Maps product. We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks, cities, etc. do not appear.”

So, I’ve asked them if their maps ever showed more information in the past.  The term “recent changes” is very ambiguous as it could refer to only this week or the last day or two. 

To me it is beyond credibility that they would not have the capital and major cities listed.

Google has responded and says it has never had any data posted for the country of Georgia. 

This seems too unreal to believe.