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“... it makes a change from ‘comrade’ – and when my briefcase was stolen from the car, a group of Africans gave chase, floored the robber and returned the briefcase to me with wallet and passport intact. Even a week before the election this would have been inconceivable. Zanu-PF, on the other hand, have lost not only many of their big guns (though ...”

“... The Egyptian security forces, charged with the task of ‘crushing’ the militant Islamic group, the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, came to Aswan looking for confrontation. On 9 March, after reports of an attack by Muslim militants on a Coptic church, hundreds of policemen invaded the streets around the Rahman mosque, which was believed to be the local ...”

“... in front of the Greek parliament in Syntagma Square. Since the beginning of the country’s debt crisis six years earlier, Syntagma Square had been the frequent site of angry anti-austerity demonstrations, many of which dissolved into street battles between riot police and anarchists slinging chunks of marble hammered from the paving in the ...”

“... as being close to collapse and badly in need of help. ‘When you have IS and other such groups of international terrorists right next to the capital,’ he said, ‘who is going to want to look for a settlement with the Syrian authorities, sitting practically under siege right in their own capital? However, if the Syrian army demonstrates its viability ...”

“... Troops would be at their disposal since, without the ability to enforce it, there was no point to international law. The alternative was anarchy. After the Cold War there was talk of a UN renaissance, and of a united Security Council ensuring the primacy of the UN’s role in a New World Order. It has not worked out like that. In the course of four years and ...”

“... Unlike the oil ‘shocks’ of the 1970s, the current energy crisis is almost certain to be long-lasting. None of the quick fixes proposed by pundits and politicians – drilling in protected wilderness and maritime areas, curbs on commodity speculators, pressure on members of Opec to increase output – is likely to have much impact ...”

“... Central Economic Information Service, which gave way, a year later, to an Economic Section of a group of economists responsible for surveys and analysis, and a Central Statistical Office, to coordinate the statistics collected by individual departments, and to make regular digests for the use of all parts of government, both bodies being located in the ...”

“... exhibition programme and aided London’s gradual takeover from Paris as a centre for the international art market. Simultaneously, an increase in art education and art publishing offered further proof of Britain’s postwar vitality. The Whitechapel Art Gallery became a major venue after Bryan Robertson took over there, and the British ...”

“... Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on ...”

“... the exhibition is a riot of pennants and heraldry. A silky mint green banner with ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ written on it in strawberry pink – a remnant of the 2009 Climate Camp at Blackheath – connects the end of capitalism to the pleasures of dessert. A marching banner designed and stitched by Ed Hall for the South Yorkshire Community branch of Unite is ...”

“... a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the American right. He was later invited for a secret rendezvous at ...”

“... on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. But two new books about the Cuban missile crisis show how, in a ...”

“... if a massive aid effort gets underway and the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, allows international agencies to reach people in need, it’s already too late for tens of thousands of Tigrayans, most of them children. Two months ago, aid agencies completed spot surveys of villages they could access and reported malnutrition of between 27 and 33 per ...”

“... away. In Crashed, Adam Tooze sets himself the mammoth task of making sense of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its consequences over the last ten years. By and large he succeeds brilliantly. The origins of the GFC are usually traced to the sub-prime housing crash in the US, or to the problems facing the countries on the periphery of the Eurozone. Tooze ...”

“... stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ‘critical’ point, I’d argue, not because it is the worst crisis in our lifetime, but because a long decline – lasting seven decades – in mass death from ...”