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/ 22 January 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Tuesday heightened the rancour of their Monday debate by attacking each other’s record and style, bringing what has become a mean-spirited and negative campaign to a new low. At a hastily arranged press conference in Washington, Clinton accused Obama of desperation.
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/ 22 January 2008
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaged in a bitter crossfire on Monday as their United States presidential campaign took an ugly personal turn on the Martin Luther King holiday. Obama’s complaints about former President Bill Clinton’s attacks on him on behalf of his wife’s campaign boiled over at a rancorous debate.
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/ 21 January 2008
Barack Obama lashed out at rival Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, on Monday, calling the former president’s role in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination ”pretty troubling”. ”You know, the former president … has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama said.
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/ 15 January 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come face to face on Tuesday night for the first time since their two camps embarked on the dangerous strategy of trying to extract political gain from the race issue. After Obama’s victory in Iowa and Clinton’s in New Hampshire, the two candidates are looking to break the tie in Nevada.
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/ 11 January 2008
John Kerry, the senator who ran against George Bush in 2004, endorsed Barack Obama yesterday in a slap in the face to Hillary Clinton and to John Edwards, his vice-presidential running mate in 2004. ”Martin Luther King Jr said the time is always right to do what is right,” Kerry told a rally in South Carolina.
Historians will be able to specify the time and the place where Hillary Clinton started to turn the tide. At 10.15am on Sunday, in the car park of the Puritan Backroom restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, in front of a couple of hundred unfashionably fervent Hillary supporters, Clinton chose to make what may turn out to be her last stand.
”They said this day would never come,” said United States Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the outset of his barnstorming victory speech on Thursday night. But as he arrived in New Hampshire early on Friday, Americans woke up to the historic possibility that the day when they might have a black president was closer than they thought.
Barack Obama took a big step on Thursday towards becoming the first black United States president as his campaign for change caught fire in Iowa and swept him past Hillary Clinton in the opening Democratic nominating contest. Republican underdog Mike Huckabee capped a stunning political rise to beat rival Mitt Romney in Iowa.
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/ 23 December 2007
Bill Clinton has never been one to avoid the limelight. Or stay on message. Last week, as he spearheaded a mission to rejuvenate his wife’s troubled presidential campaign, he showed that old habits die hard. In a publicity stunt at a grocery store in the vital first battleground state of Iowa, the ex-president caused brief chaos by breaking away to chat to the public.
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/ 22 December 2007
A dilemma confronts many Democratic activists in the United States. They respect Hillary Clinton’s intellect. They admire her performance in the debates. But it is difficult for them to commit to a candidate who not only voted in favour of the war on Iraq in 2002, but has refused to express contrition, or any deep emotion, about that choice.
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/ 20 December 2007
United States President George Bush is to embark on a week-long tour of the Middle East in the new year to nudge Israelis and Palestinians towards an end to their decades-long conflict and to bolster an Arab coalition against Iran. It will be the first time in his seven years as president that Bush will have visited Israel, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
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/ 18 December 2007
This morning, facing too many deadlines, I found my brain blocked. I have been reading all three fat Mandela books, trying to find something to say for a commissioned article. In the midst of my writer’s block I have been searching for a high by following the Obama campaign on the internet and ignoring our own political frenzy here in Kenya, for this time it has no grace.
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/ 4 December 2007
‘It wasn’t me.’ And with that immortal line in mind, yet another eminent personage joins the ranks. One Mr Yengeni — the newest addition to the Society of the Dishonest Deviants. Where phrases like ”red-handed”, ”in the act” or ”hands in the cookie jar” mean nothing.
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/ 1 December 2007
United States Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton vowed on Friday there would be no change to her campaign, despite a man taking several people hostage at one of her offices. ”I don’t see any changes in my campaign or my schedule,” Clinton told reporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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/ 28 November 2007
United States President George Bush invited Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House to renew long-stalled peace talks on Wednesday but faced deep scepticism over chances for a deal. Finally embracing a hands-on approach, Bush will ceremonially inaugurate the first formal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in seven years.
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/ 27 November 2007
United States President George Bush said on Tuesday it was the ”right time” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians before launching his biggest initiative to negotiate an end to the conflict. But he warned ”achieving this goal will not be easy”, according to remarks prepared for delivery at the opening later of the Annapolis peace conference.
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/ 26 November 2007
United States President George Bush meets Palestinian and Israeli leaders on Monday in a last-ditch push for Palestinian statehood before he leaves office in 14 months. Expectations are low for three days of talks because Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas all face political challenges at home.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
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/ 13 November 2007
Without its highway bridges spanning the lagoon, Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, would be paralysed. Every day, well before dawn, tens of millions of vehicles set out to cross bridges that were once the envy of the African continent. Deprived of maintenance, they are now showing signs of wear and tear.
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/ 13 November 2007
The European and American tradition of the political novel is deeply entrenched. From Emile Zola to Gore Vidal, the perceptions and attitudes of citizens in these smug old democracies have long been shaped. South Africa too has a rich history of political fiction, from Alan Paton to Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Njabulo Ndebele and Lewis Nkosi. But there is, of course, a vast difference between the literary political novel and the "novel of politics", writes Marianne Thamm.
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/ 11 November 2007
He is a former governor of Arkansas from a town called Hope. He has a nice line in campaign humour and speaks like a Deep South preacher. He is also running for president. But this is not Bill Clinton of 1992. This is Mike Huckabee, a long-shot Republican contender for the 2008 White House who has burst into the leading pack of the race.
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/ 19 October 2007
The battle over the agenda of a conference on Palestinian statehood offers United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a glimpse of the gruelling process that awaits if and when the two sides enter formal negotiations. Four days of shuttle diplomacy by Rice this week were not enough to close the gaps.
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/ 13 October 2007
For years, former United States vice-president Al Gore and a host of climate scientists were belittled and, worst of all, ignored for their message about how dire global warming is. On Friday, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their warnings about what Gore calls ”a planetary emergency”.
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/ 12 October 2007
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded on Friday to former United States vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded ”for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation was launched in October 2006 to promote good governance in Africa with the support of world leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Alpha Konaré, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. On October 22 2007, the foundation will announce the winner of the world’s biggest prize, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, to be awarded to a former African executive head of state.
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/ 30 September 2007
For Barack Obama it was a daring move: hold a rally last week in the heart of New York, the fortress home of his rival, Senator Hillary Clinton. It seemed to pay off. As he bounded onto the stage in Manhattan’s Washington Square in front of a packed crowd of 25 000, he beamed his broad smile and shouted: ”Look at this crowd!”
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/ 25 September 2007
Climate change is spurring a ”worldwide economic and industrial restructuring” as more and more of the world’s largest companies seek to confront global warming, an investor survey said on Monday. Even so, some big firms were still doing far too little to identify risks and opportunities from climate change.
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/ 17 September 2007
Alan Greenspan, the Washington insider and long-time head of the United States central bank, has said the invasion of Iraq was motivated by oil. His claim comes in his newly published autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, in which he also castigates George Bush’s administration for making ”grave mistakes” in economic policy.
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/ 14 September 2007
Who is George Bush? A gaffe-ridden buffoon? The man who confronts the evildoers? Or is he Bush as Bush sees himself, the decider, a leader who makes the hard choices and sticks to them? In just 16 months’ time, the job of working out who Bush really is will move out of the world’s newsrooms and into the book-lined studies of historians.
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/ 13 September 2007
Fuelled by last year’s Nobel Prize for a man nicknamed ”banker to the poor”, microlending to small businesses in the world’s poorest countries is booming as individuals discover they can be their own mini World Bank. And you don’t have to be Bill Gates to get in on the act.
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/ 3 September 2007
Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life after the White House to conflict resolution around the world. Presidents George Bush the elder and Bill Clinton have campaigned together on behalf of communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. So how does President George Bush junior imagine spending his retirement years?
United States Republican Senator Larry Craig on Tuesday vehemently denied he was gay, despite pleading guilty after being arrested by police probing lewd incidents in an airport bathroom. Craig (62) was arrested in the Midwestern city of Minneapolis-St Paul in June by a plainclothes police officer.