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/ 7 December 2005
Think of it as the Sinatra test. On Sunday, assorted liberal, democratic and opposition groups will take on the might of Vladimir Putin in elections for the Moscow city parliament. This should be fertile terrain: the capital city is packed with well-educated, enlightened folk and was once seen as the citadel of Russia’s pro-democracy movement.
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/ 2 November 2005
Now the United States has its own David Kelly affair — the British weapons expert murdered in 2003. There is no corpse but all the other elements are in place. A complex saga, turning on the unwanted outing of a government servant and a judicial investigation zeroing in on the charge that the government cooked up the case on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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/ 12 October 2005
Elusive Peace charts the story of Bill Clinton’s failed attempt to resolve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, a struggle that reached its dismal climax at Camp David in 2000. The latest effort by the remarkable filmmaker Norma Percy features interviews with all the key players — Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat and Clinton himself.
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/ 13 September 2005
It’s safe to say that if George W Bush was in his first term, he would be heading for defeat. Safe, because we will never know: he’s in his second term and will never face the voters again. That quirk in the United States system, with its strict two-term rule, makes it hard to read the impact Hurricane Katrina will have on the Bush presidency.
Almost three-quarters of Britons are happy to give up civil liberties to make us safer from terrorist attack, according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll. Having seen the all-too-real threat of the July bombings, 73% are ready to pay the price, ready to let their protectors do whatever has to be done.
Like an earthquake, the London bombings have brought an aftershock — and it came this week. The police announcement that the explosions on July 7 on the underground and on the Number 30 bus were, apparently, the work of British suicide bombers is the most shocking news to come since the attacks themselves. It is also the bleakest possible development.
It began with the pre-Christmas robbery of the Northern Bank, almost universally blamed on the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But it was the death of Robert McCartney, a Catholic killed by IRA gangsters, that shook everything up. The dead man’s sisters and fiancée have blown the lid off what many describe as a culture of Provo intimidation and criminality.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is not gloating. He could — but he prefers to appear magnanimous in what he hopes is victory. In an interview last week, he was handed a perfect opportunity to crow. He was talking about what he called ”the ripple of change” now spreading through the Middle East, the slow, but noticeable movement towards democracy in a region where that commodity has long been in short supply.
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/ 23 February 2005
”I fall into the [British] generation for whom apartheid was the dominant international cause of our youth. I assumed that a trip [to South Africa] in the winter of 2005 would be to a wholly different country, with apartheid and all its works a bad, fading memory. That’s where I was wrong,” writes Jonathan Freedland.
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/ 7 December 2004
Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams could not be more unlikely political associates. For more than three decades their names served as the very definition of polar opposites, magnetically repelled. North and south, chalk and cheese, — but they need each other.