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/ 22 January 2008

Hollywood writers’ strike clouds Oscars

In the 80 years since the first Oscars were handed out, it has taken a war or a flood or an assassination to delay the celebration surrounding the film industry’s highest honours. Now Hollywood is wringing its hands over whether the strike by screenwriters could, or should, be enough to postpone the Academy Awards.

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/ 15 January 2008

Survivor: African National Congress

There is more than a touch of Ronald Reagan — or even, dare one say it, George W Bush — in Jacob Zuma. Apparently happily unencumbered by the need to demonstrate a towering intellectual faculty, he is an archetypal instinctive politician — streetwise, savvy and not to be underestimated.

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/ 11 November 2007

Southern preacher could be saviour of Republicans

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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/ 28 October 2007

First lady of Argentina ready to be the new Evita

Cristina Kirchner is poised to triumph in Argentina’s presidential election on Sunday after a radical makeover that has redefined political glamour. The first lady and frontrunner has transformed herself into a style pin-up, but her designer suits, spiky heels, extensive make-up and alleged cosmetic surgery became campaign issues when rivals dubbed her the ”Queen of Botox”.

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/ 27 September 2007

Communist tour becomes offbeat attraction in Poland

Clad in a dirty blue overall, the young man planted his feet squarely on the floor of the stifling bus, raised his megaphone and hectored the passengers: "You stinking capitalists!" Headed by the ageing 1960s bus, the rattle-trap convoy of communist-era vehicles, which also included a couple of Trabant and Lada cars, lumbered off to the heart of what was once the showpiece of the People’s Republic of Poland.

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/ 14 September 2007

‘You’ve gotta think, think BIG’

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.