Word: 1980s
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...impresario and Africa aid promoter Bob Geldof, a.k.a. "Saint Bob," was back in the headlines this past week after blowing his stack at the BBC for a story it aired alleging that Ethiopian rebels had diverted 95% of the $100 million in Ethiopian famine relief raised in the mid-1980s - much of it by Geldof's iconic Band Aid concert...
...real story behind Ethiopia's famine exemplifies many of the problems with aid. In the West, the famine of the 1980s was seen as a great natural disaster. Band Aid was so successful - it raised tens of millions of dollars - because it played on Westerners' sense of obligation to "save Africa" and their sense of guilt for somehow "allowing" the famine to happen. But the reality was far more complex. While Ethiopia was indeed in the grip of a drought, Mengistu Haile Mariam's government, which was fighting an insurgency at the time, restricted NGOs from helping famine victims...
...early 1980s, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre related a similar concern on a broader level; although we rate many things “good” or “bad” and pretend to operate as if we have absolute definitions these values, we in fact we have none. Therefore, in “After Virtue,” MacIntyre implores humanity to create agreed-upon laws based on rational virtues. Without such standards, issues of conflicting values reign. Sports as usual represent a microcosm of this dilemma. UConn’s team may have won more consecutive games...
...This isn't the first roadblock on Hong Kong's long march toward democracy. The British routinely co-opted or marginalized opponents to colonial rule until the 1980s, when they finally allowed a certain number of local district councilors to be elected. In the early 1990s, the first legislative elections were held, but after the handover, the Chinese temporarily replaced the whole legislature. Since then, it has postponed democracy twice. In 2004, Beijing decreed that Hong Kong could not have universal suffrage before 2012. In 2007, after the pan-democrats defeated a package of reforms almost identical to the ones...
...absence of a consensus on both fronts. Despite their distaste for Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Arab neighbors had long looked to his regime to serve as a regional bulwark against Iranian influence in the Middle East, and supported his eight-year war against the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. The U.S. invasion removed that bulwark, and Iran has profited greatly from Iraqi democracy. The governments elected since Saddam's overthrow have been uniformly friendly toward Tehran and dominated by Shi'ite parties. While none of these governments have been a proxy for Iran, they have certainly been resistant to being...