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/ 11 December 2006
Afew weeks ago, Washington-based radio host Jerry Klein announced his own very radical plan to assuage public fears of terrorism. All Muslims, he suggested, should be branded with a crescent-shaped tattoo or be forced to wear a red armband. The phones rang off the hook.
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/ 4 December 2006
”In the endgame,” said one of the world’s best-ever chess players, Jose Raul Capablanca, ”don’t think in terms of moves but in terms of plans.” The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower.
With a lingering kiss, and a prime-time declaration of love that brought
rousing applause from the audience, a gay couple stole the show at the Tony
awards in New York last week writes, Gary Younge.
Whether they were dipping, sipping, watching alone or at one of the thousands of “viewer parties” taking place across the country, last week millions of Americans tuned in to the final episode of Friends. Dan Glaister in Los Angeles and Gary Younge in New York report on the passing of the famous TV series.
Many of the the slew of alleged atrocities committed by the United States military in Iraq have produced their own investigation and, inevitably, their own version of shock and bore among the American public. Amazement that US soldiers could be involved in such despicable actions is soon followed by a lack of interest in the consequences.
Shortly before the first Gulf War the recently retired chairperson of the United States joint chiefs of staff, Admiral William Crowe, went for lunch with his successor, Colin Powell. In words that resonate today, Crowe warned Powell that ”a war in the Middle East … would set back the United States in the region for a long time”.
Following United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s visit to South Africa recently, it is worth assessing his 10-year legacy as he steps down from his job in December. Annan was elected secretary general in 1996 under controversial circumstances.
At a diplomatic reception in Beijing a few years ago, the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, dropped a spicy chicken wing into the turn-up of his trousers and continued to make small talk with finger food bobbing closer to his toes than is generally considered decent. A man who displays such a lack of social graces can still go far (for a woman it would be terminal).
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/ 17 February 2006
Oprah is a Zulu. Never mind that she was born and raised in Mississippi and her great-grandparents hailed from no further away than Georgia and North Carolina, Winfrey is not just suggesting her lineage might stretch back thousands of years to a specific African tribe. She is asserting it as a definitive fact.
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/ 23 December 2005
There’s fabulous and then there’s ghetto-fabulous. When it comes to societal approval, these two expressions of ostentatious chic are supposed to be polar opposites. Fabulous is meant to be desirable — classic, classy, pricey and proper. Ghetto-fabulous is meant to be deplorable — crude, crass, vulgar and vile.