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“... The origin myth of today’s US special forces is the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. A group of college students had seized the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the extradition of the shah to stand trial in Iran. In an attempt to rescue the 52 US diplomats and military officers in the building, the Pentagon flew Delta Force troops in a C-130 transport aircraft from an island off Oman to the Great Salt Desert near the town of Tabas, where they were to meet helicopters launched from the USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea ...”

“... war criminals and were pouring money into Germany. In Paris a story went the rounds of how a group of wealthy Americans went to a famous restaurant and ordered a magnificent meal. Asked what wine they had chosen, they said they wanted Coca-Cola, whereupon the proprietor ordered them to leave. In those days, one of the Paris telephone exchanges was named ...”

“... in opposite directions: on the one side, heading away from town and into the wilderness was a group of European pensioners – Germans and Brits – all dressed in bright outdoor gear, stout boots and T-shirts. They all looked anxious. In the other direction came the migrants, marching to the town, many leaving their countries for the first time, all ...”

“... terms of trade and GDP the world has three poles: the United States, the EU and China. But in the international financial system a single state has overwhelming power. The vast majority of transnational payments are routed through US banks. US treasury bonds are the de facto reserve asset around the world. The Fed is the global supplier of liquidity in times ...”

“... a glimpse behind the scenes at the congress, which brought together leading figures from the international communist movement and high-profile figures from the Soviet Union, many of whom had known one another for decades. As they convened in Moscow in February 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, most had little real sense of the new political ...”

“... cent vote recorded for ‘yes’ allowed Saied to claim a resounding victory, but since local and international monitors hadn’t been able to observe the voting, it’s impossible to trust the result. Saied had prepared the ground by filling the Independent High Authority for Elections with his own supporters, dissolving the High Judicial Council, and firing ...”

“... indicates two things: first, that we are deeply in need of novel solutions to the global waste crisis; and second, that big business is still hoping we can recycle our way out of the mess we’re in.A few days after the announcement, I visited a recycling sorting centre, or Materials Recovery Facility, in South London. When I mentioned it to people ...”

“... police officers. In 2021, one PC was jailed for belonging to a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group and another was sacked for hitting a teenage girl with learning disabilities more than thirty times with his baton. An official safeguarding review found that racism ‘was likely to have been an influencing factor’ in the strip-searching last year of a ...”

“... which operates supermarkets across the Arab world. Abraaj was unscathed by the global economic crisis of 2008 because, as the magazine Institutional Investor declared, the Middle East was awash in ‘cheap credit for leveraged buyouts’. Naqvi, the ‘Gulf’s Buyout King’, hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and business celebrities, and spoke ...”

“... When in 1960 Adolf Eichmann was tracked down in Argentina and kidnapped by Israel, the want of any international court to try him and the want of any solid basis in international law for the exercise of jurisdiction by Israel were not allowed to stand between him and the gallows. The watching world, myself included, asked ...”

“... after coming under fire from their own side, who not unreasonably assumed they must be with the International Brigades.) Second, Fine Gael has a strong claim to be recognised as the most incompetent opposition party in Europe. It has never out-polled Fianna Fáil in a general election, always relying on the support of Labour and other groups during its ...”

“... 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve ...”

“... This was a long way from his rhetoric thirty years earlier, when, as leader of the student group Fidesz, he had called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces and ‘the establishment of liberal democracy’ in Hungary.Zsuzsanna Szelényi’s detailed and authoritative study, Tainted Democracy, examines this transformation, drawing on her own involvement ...”

“... public policy think tank – much talk about ‘free speech, not me speech’ and ‘the crisis in authority’, much condemnation of ‘greenthink’ and ‘meddling policymakers’ – but which also functions as some sort of platform and refuge for people who used to be in the Revolutionary Communist Party, a British Trotskyist sect that had its ...”

“... his total public identification with Stalinism did him serious harm. His reputation among his peer group never quite recovered from his attempt to justify the charlatan Lysenko, whose views became the orthodoxy of Soviet biology in 1948. This doesn’t, however, explain his failure to make more than a peripheral personal contribution to the great revolution in ...”