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/ 19 November 2007
Three men, three extraordinary stories. One spent 18 years in prison in Uganda, convicted for murdering a neighbour later found to be alive. Another survived 34 years facing execution in Japan. The third became the 100th prisoner on death row to be found innocent and freed in the United States.
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/ 12 November 2007
The Bush administration took a hard line last week on United States diplomats resisting postings to Iraq, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the US ambassador in Baghdad issued blunt reminders of their duty to serve anywhere in the world.
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/ 31 October 2007
For a room in which one of the most astonishing experiments in modern science is being conducted, the laboratory in the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is understated. It is divided into wooden workstations reminiscent of a school science lab. There are stacks of glass test tubes and pipettes, and one wall is lined with air-controlled boxes containing Petri dishes, writes Ed Pilkington.
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/ 14 September 2007
You may have heard of Jonathan Safran Foer but, asks Ed Pilkington, what about Nell Freudenberger and Rattawut Lapcharoensap?
It is a party trick well known to curious teenagers across the United States. Zoom down on Washington via Google Earth and you get an extraordinary eagle-eyed view of the world’s greatest powerhouse. There’s the White House and its West Wing. Sweeping south-east across the Potomac you soar above the Pentagon. But there is one thing you can’t do.
It must rank among the greatest compliments the late Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, ever received. A court in Chicago recently heard Frank Calabrese Sr commend the description in the novel of a mafia initiation ceremony as ”very close” to the truth. Coming from Calabrese, that was high praise indeed. He is alleged to be a head of one of Chicago’s most notorious crime syndicates, the Outfit.
Chinua Achebe, ‘the father of modern African literature’, talks to Ed Pilkington about inventing a new language, his years in exile from his beloved Nigeria — and why he changed his name from Albert.
It is not the kind of militaristic statement expected of the peace-loving Canadians. In front of a choreographed line-up of 120 sailors in their summer whites at a naval base outside Victoria in British Columbia, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, gave a warning to other nations with their eye on the potentially oil-rich Arctic.
In the long phoney war of the 2008 United States elections there have been thousands of articles written about Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president. Much less notice has been paid to the efforts being made behind the scenes for Bill Clinton to become the first First Husband in American history, writes Ed Pilkington.
They called it the ”Bloomberg Gun Give-Away”. On Thursday two gun shops in the state of Virginia staged a competition: anyone spending more than in either Bob Moates’s stores or Old Dominion Guns and Tackle would be entered into a draw, first prize a handgun or rifle worth .