Ewen Macaskill
Guest Author
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/ 7 January 2005

Israel yokes poll process

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned Jewish settlers on Wednesday that he will use all the government’s power against anyone who resists his planned withdrawal from Gaza and the granting of a token part of the West Bank. His comment came after an angry confrontation between settlers and the Israeli army in which the police helped to remove two settler outposts at Shalhevet in the hard line Yizhar settlement on the West Bank.

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/ 14 October 2004

End of the road for Arafat?

His glory days are behind him. At 75, he is frail, his hands shaky, his lapels covered with a score of badges from organisations as diverse as Peace Now and the Samaritans. Imprisoned in his compound, facing assassination and internationally isolated, the Palestinian leader says he has been in worse trouble.

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/ 8 October 2004

Crumbs for Bush and Blair

The Iraq Survey Group, after 17 months of hunting through Iraq and interviewing hundreds of members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, last week delivered a verdict unhelpful to George W Bush or Tony Blair: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when they went to war and that there was no imminent threat. The two leaders will have to justify the war in Iraq in terms of Hussein’s intentions rather than the reality.

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/ 3 September 2004

Soft target shows Hamas weakness

The Palestinian armed response was a long time coming. When the Hamas founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed in an Israeli rocket attack in Gaza in March, the organisation responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel vowed that it would ”open the gates of hell”. Last week the Palestinians finally succeeded in getting two suicide bombers through, blowing up two buses. But these attacks are likely to backfire.

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/ 2 July 2004

Tracing Saudi fault lines

The mood among expatriates in Riyadh remains sombre. It is only a fortnight since the beheading of the American engineer Paul Johnson, and there is genuine fear of being shot at or kidnapped. The atmosphere is comparatively relaxed in Jeddah, on the Red Sea, where the government established its summer base two weeks ago for its four-month annual escape from the heat of the capital.

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/ 12 March 2004

Beating about the Bush

This week US presidential hopeful John Kerry claimed that foreign leaders had told him they could not publicly offer him their support, but added: ”You’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.” Hostility towards a second George W Bush term is assumed to be widespread throughout the world because of the Iraq war, the concept of pre-emptive strikes and bullying of small countries.

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/ 17 October 2003

Dividing the spoils of Iraq

About 100 private companies, mainly from Britain and the United States, gathered in London this week to discuss investment opportunities in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The companies, mainly oil and banking, are being invited by the US and British governments to move in as soon as security is restored.

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/ 14 October 2003

US to compromise in vote on Iraq

The United States is to try to break the United Nations deadlock over Iraq by tabling in the next 24 hours a revised draft resolution that it hopes will bring Russia aboard. The fresh version of the Security Council resolution sets a December 15 deadline for the Iraqi governing council to produce a timetable for the transfer of power to Iraqis.