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/ 14 January 2004
There is something eerily familiar about the American court system. Every now and then the prosecution interrupts the defence with the words: ”Objection — argumentative,” or the judge asks the legal adversaries to ”please approach the bench”, and you look over your shoulder for Cagney and Lacey or Ally McBeal.
When Michael Jackson wrote the lyrics ”But if you’re thinkin’ about my baby/It don’t matter if you’re black or white” in his hit single Black or White, he could claim significant expertise. Jackson has had a fair crack at being both.
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/ 17 December 2003
With Thanksgiving and Christmas within four weeks of each other, there are few worse places and times to be a turkey than in the United States from mid-November to the new year. But what is bad news for the gobblers is good news for Jive Turkey — one of my favourite local takeaways which opened up earlier this year.
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/ 12 December 2003
The snow was still piled high on either side of Harlem’s Martin Luther King Boulevard this week when former United States vice-president Al Gore brought Howard Dean, the leading Democrat candidate, in from the cold.
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/ 11 November 2003
The shooting down of a Chinook helicopter — the warhorse in the United States’s operations in Iraq — the weekend before last highlighted the threat of the sizeable quantities of missiles in the country falling into the hands of opposition groups using guerrilla tactics.
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/ 26 September 2003
Old transatlantic wounds within the UN’s Security Council were reopened this week, as France condemned American unilateralism and demanded a rapid transition to democracy, and the US defended the war and insisted the move to Iraqi sovereignty would not be rushed.
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/ 16 September 2003
A 12-year-old girl in New York, a professor at Yale University and an elderly man in Texas who rarely uses his computer have been included in the first wave of civil actions against people accused of illegally sharing songs on the Internet.
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/ 12 September 2003
In myriad subtle ways the daily lives of the residents of Muncie, Indiana, have changed since September 11 2001. This 70 000-strong town of many churches and increasingly little industry gained fame in the 1920s as the subject of an academic survey of the American heartlands called Middletown.
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/ 5 September 2003
The Bush administration suffered a humiliating diplomatic climbdown over Iraq this week as it presented a draft resolution to the United Nations, asking for military and financial help to rescue it from the ballooning human, financial and political costs of the occupation.
It’s a summer noon in Alabama and those residents of Pell City who brave the outdoors cling to the shade like a life-raft. Because of the heat and humidity they hug the contours of the downtown dollar stores, walking as slowly as a southern drawl. Pell City isn’t a city, strictly speaking.