Presidents and the Pope
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7420076/site/newsweek/
George W. Bush is the first sitting president to attend a papal
funeral. His attendance speaks volumes about U.S. relations with the
Vatican and the role of Roman Catholics in American politics
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek
Updated: 12:44 p.m. ET April 7, 2005
April 7 - Inside St. Peter's Basilica late Wednesday night, Vatican
officials briefly blocked the massive line of people that had been
waiting hours to view the body of Pope John Paul II. The move prompted
slight outrage among many individuals who were anxious for their chance
to view the late pontiff, but within an instant, that displeasure was
replaced by stunned surprise, as onlookers caught their first glimpse
at the people Vatican officials had moved to accommodate.
Richard Wolffe
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Holly Bailey
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The Shadow in the Corner
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7431648/site/newsweek/
Lately, it's been impossible to avoid the subject of death. But by
talking about it, we free ourselves to live peacefully.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Patti Davis
Newsweek
Updated: 11:31 a.m. ET April 8, 2005
April 8 - This past November, when I did a lecture and signing for my
book "The Long Goodbye," a woman approached me afterward and
criticized me for speaking about death. Actually, her complaint had to
do with the way in which I had spoken about it-I'd described the
comfort of getting used to what I've called the shadow in the corner,
how our fear lessened over the long years of my father's illness and
acceptance moved in.
Patti Davis
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'Nuclear Option'
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7430895/site/newsweek/
GOP efforts to end Dem filibustering on judicial nominees could change
the face of the Supreme Court. Why aren't Americans paying more
attention?
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Contributing Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 11:44 a.m. ET April 8, 2005
April 8 - There's not much for liberals to like about Supreme Court
Chief Justice William Rehnquist when it comes to his judicial views,
but you'd never know it listening to the left these days. Everybody
admires the way he has soldiered through his battle with throat cancer,
continuing his duties amidst all the speculation that he would resign.
"He loves the court," says Ralph Neas, president of People for the
American Way. "He doesn't want to disrupt the court in the middle
of the session. In terms of collegiality, except for one notable
exception in 2000 [in the contested presidential election result],
he's a good manager. People get along."
Eleanor Clift
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Al Gore's 'Current' View
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7433219/site/newsweek/
The former vice president says his new network won't be a leftist
anti-Fox News, but rather TV for the Web generation. Will it work?
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Brad Stone
Silicon Valley Correspondent
Newsweek
Updated: 2:19 p.m. ET April 8, 2005
April 8 - This week, I told former vice president Al Gore why his new
cable-television venture would never work.
But first, an admission. When I first saw Google in the '90s, I thought
to myself: What, another search engine? And I recall writing a few
boosterish dot-com articles back in early 2000, right before the crash.
So that tells you what you need to know about my business instincts.
And I'm certainly no student of television history.
Brad Stone
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Marching towards the gas chamber and the model T
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1455683,00.html
Material progression has often been accompanied by moral regression
Hywel Williams
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
Can history be turned into the story of progress? The ambition that it
should yield that insight has its own kind of history. For at key
moments, circumstances coincide to open up the idea of a chosen future.
And the quality of the choices decides whether that future is an
implosion or an advance.
A general election is a collective choice about national values. At the
same time, beneath today's fluttering flags in Windsor, British
royalism looks enfeebled by Clarence House's poor choices; while in
Rome, cardinals will decide whether a universal church should welcome,
or contradict, modernity.
Hywel Williams
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This week
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1455684,00.html
Rebecca Front
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
This week's column is about sex, because I'm guessing you're sick of
big news stories, and I feel I should offer you something different. My
first instinct was to write about Rosie Millard's debts and the
phenomenon of "impoverished professionals", but then I realised that
what I had to say on that subject could be encapsulated in two words:
Spend Less. So I'm turning instead to sex, which was at the centre of
my three favourite news items. The first concerned the discovery of an
ageing priapic man, a fascinating relic of a bygone age. Now some
writers would be unable to resist the temptation to make a Prince
Charles joke at this point, but I can, and I will.
Smallweed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1455678,00.html
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
What is the use of an information society, which ours is supposed to
be, if even the most basic and necessary information is denied to one?
For reasons I need not go into, Mrs Smallweed has been trying this week
to establish how many level crossings there are in Lincolnshire. There
are clearly a lot, since much, though not all, of that very large
county is flat. Since emergencies sometimes occur at these spots you
would think the county council and the railways would have the facts at
their fingertips, but not so. Some authorities know how many there are
in their own little patches, but others do not, and the same is true of
train operators. Another reason, perhaps, to assert that the railways
should be renationalised. Yet I bet if I were to raise some trifling
question about, say, the number of splay-footed widgeons in Somerset, I
would have the answer in half an hour.
Royalty, religion and reality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1455500,00.html
Face to Faith
Jonathan Romain
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
The most significant aspect of today's royal wedding is not its
constitutional consequences, but the message it gives to tens of
thousands of ordinary people who have a failed relationship behind them
and wonder what to do next.
Herein lies one of the key differences between the Jewish and Christian
approach to marriage. No Jewish wedding service contains that both
wonderful and terrrible phrase, "Till death us do part". It is
"wonderful" because it is a glorious aspiration, which, at the time of
exchanging vows, every couple hopes will be true. It is "terrible"
because it can force unsuited couples to be yoked to each other, living
together in bitterness, or separated but unable to be united with
someone else.
Jonathan Romain
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On the run, again
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1454073,00.html
Thirty years ago, Angus Shaw was called up to fight in the colonial
army in the dying days of white rule in Rhodesia. He deserted. In exile
he met the nationalists and guerrillas who went on to form Zimbabwe's
government. Now, a journalist threatened with jail, he has headed
across the border again. He tells his story. Portrait by Jeff Barbee
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Observer
For even the briefest spell in a Zimbabwe prison, a basic survival kit
is essential. It should contain strong sleeping pills, lice and
mosquito repellents, remedies for dysentery and money for bribes.
You also need cast-iron composure to face humiliation, assaults by
jailers and the knowledge that you are guilty until you prove yourself
innocent. The necessities, tied in a plastic bag, are generally hidden
in the underpants - at least until you're issued with prison
fatigues. Cells built for six at the forbidding Harare central holding
complex are crammed with at least two dozen prisoners, sweltering in a
stench of sweat, excrement and fear; there's no room to sit, let alone
unfold aching limbs.
Gently does it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1454071,00.html
Charles Kennedy is not the aggressive sort. He was against the Iraq
war, but not noisily so. He missed an opportunity to defeat the
government. Will his low-key, Lib Dem style pay off? Decca Aitkenhead
tunes in.
Saturday April 9, 2005
A former Labour party aide tells of a night in the mid-1990s when he
shared a taxi home with Charles Kennedy after a party. They were both
the worse for drink, he recalls, and as the cab wound its way south
towards the Thames, Kennedy took a somewhat maudlin turn. Was a
political career, he muttered morosely, really the way to spend one's
life? What was the point of it all? The young Labour aide barely knew
Kennedy, and was taken aback. What was he trying to say?
Last orders
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1455054,00.html
GK Chesterton, who saw the traditional inn as a symbol of freedom, has
often been invoked by politicians addressing questions of English
identity. But, writes Patrick Wright, behind his quaint vision of
thatched cottages, rolling roads and stoical natives lies an unsavoury
xenophobia
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
It is largely thanks to Gordon Brown that some of the more thoughtful
political speeches of 2004 were concerned with British national
identity, and the values around which a more devolved and various
United Kingdom might cohere. Using platforms provided by the National
Council for Voluntary Organisations (February 18) and the British
Council (July 8), the chancellor argued for a culture that should be at
once enterprising and attentive to the "golden thread" running through
British history. Careful to dissociate himself from backward-looking
nostalgia, he argued for an open and renewable sense of national
identity in which prominence is given to civic values and the sense of
duty and fair play.
When all life changed
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1455057,00.html
John Kelly traces the advance of the Black Death in The Great
Mortality, but loses sight of its wider impact, says Andrew Rissik
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
by John Kelly
364pp, HarperCollins, =A318.99
Between 1347 and 1351 it must have looked as if the end of the world
had come. As John Kelly describes, in a compellingly vivid
moment-to-moment account, a virulent form of plague bacillus swept out
of Asia across China, the Middle East and Europe, killing from a third
to a half of the population. Christendom, which had been sanguine about
the devastation of the pagan Mongol empire, seeing it as God's
judgment, reacted with terror when a Genoese galley brought it closer
to home. A false but wish-fulfilling story soon arose that it had been
spread deliberately.
Black Death
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With a knapsack full of bombs
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1455060,00.html
Can violence ever be justified? Peter Marshall finds the answers in
studies of anarchism by Colin Ward, David Goodway and Stuart Christie
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
by Colin Ward
199pp, Oxford, =A36.99
Talking Anarchy
by Colin Ward and David Goodway
149pp, Five Leaves, =A36.99
Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me
by Stuart Christie
423pp, Scribner, =A310.99
Anarchy is chaos, anarchy is terror, anarchy is nihilism. This is the
widely held view that these lively and thought-provoking books should
help to dispel. In fact, far from being nihilistic, anarchism has a
rich body of constructive ideas and values that have attracted writers
and thinkers as diverse as Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Wilde,
Tolstoy, Goldman, Read and Gandhi.
It is true that Bakunin argued in the 19th century that it is necessary
to destroy in order to build, and that a few desperados calling
themselves anarchists were involved in a spate of assassinations and
bombings at the turn of the 20th century, but their outrages were
fleabites compared with those perpetrated by monarchists, nationalists
and, above all, state-sponsored terrorists. As anarchists have long
pointed out, it is the state that is the principal cause of violence in
the world.
Our friends from the sky
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1454021,00.html
Bryan Appleyard 's 'open-minded' exploration of belief in aliens reads
like the story of a religion in the making, says Tabish Khair
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
Aliens: Why They Are Here
by Bryan Appleyard
352pp, Scribner, =A3 15.99
The moon may have been a giant leap for mankind, but it is only a short
step from the burning bush to the "glowing oval" of UFOs. That is the
conclusion some open-minded readers are likely to reach on perusing
Bryan Appleyard's Aliens , though Appleyard resists that conclusion
himself because he wants to be, yes, open-minded.
Bush's choice for UN faces bullying claims
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=3D627675
By David Usborne in New York
09 April 2005
President George Bush's controversial choice for America's ambassador
to the UN faces possible rejection at Senate confirmation hearings next
week as Democrats explore allegations that he bullied US officials into
supporting Washington's foreign policy positions.
Hearings into the nomination of John Bolton, the undersecretary of
state for arms control who has a record of harsh criticism of the UN,
were due to start last Thursday but were postponed because some members
of the Foreign Relations Committee were travelling to Rome for the
papal funeral.
John Bolton
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Mexican Standoff: Staying Power May Shape Election
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/international/americas/09assess.html
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Both sides in the struggle over whether Mexico City's leftist mayor
will ever get a chance to run for president are girding for a long
public relations fight.
Brazil's Banks Adjust View of Their Market
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/business/worldbusiness/09poor.html?pagewa=
nted=3Dall&position=3D
By TODD BENSON
Several banks have recently reached out to the 40 million poor
Brazilians who had previously been shut out of the banking system.
At 15, Dreaming Big Dreams: Oh, to Be a Scholar
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/international/americas/09mexico.html?page=
wanted=3Dall&position=3D
By TIM WEINER
Alicia =C1lvarez, a Mexican teen with dreams of attending college, finds
herself, like her country, poised with one foot in the door of
opportunity and one stuck in poverty.
North Korea Said to Reject China's Bid on Nuclear Talks
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/politics/09korea.html?pagewanted=3Dall&po=
sition=3D
By JOEL BRINKLEY
After two meetings between North Korean and Chinese leaders, the
Chinese have failed so far to persuade North Korea to rejoin nuclear
disarmament talks, officials said.
In Rare Legal Protest, Chinese Seek Boycott of Japan Goods
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/international/asia/09beijing.html
By JOSEPH KAHN
Several thousand young Chinese marched through Beijing's high-tech
district calling for a boycott of Japanese-made goods.
Suspect's Death Evokes Hussein Era
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38394-2005Apr8?language=3Dprinter
Brutal Beating Reminiscent of Methods of Ex-President's Enforcers,
Relatives Say
By Salih Saif Aldin and John Ward Anderson, Page A18
TIKRIT, Iraq -- After the arrival of the Americans and the fall of
Saddam Hussein, Hameed Rasheed Sultan and his family thought they had
seen the last of the techniques favored by Iraq's old justice system:
torture, disappearances and death-in-custody.
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