Word: ago
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite deepening U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the Administration is well aware of Americans' limited appetite for another long-term counterinsurgency commitment. As Defense Secretary Gates told the Los Angeles Times two weeks ago, "After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway." And headway is proving largely elusive. Even those arguing for the efficacy of the clear-hold-build counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq acknowledge that it will take years to bear fruit in Afghanistan...
...scene and its details. Because, I thought, once a Depression descended, these same blocks would look and feel very different; in 2010 or 2011, I might think back to this particular evening - autumn! twilight! - and remember how sweet and jolly the city had felt and looked not so long ago...
...idea of historical cycles can be reassuring: what comes down must go up. However, great nations can shrivel and empires do come to an end. And America in 2009 also looks as if it could rhyme, uncomfortably, with Great Britain circa 1909. A hundred years ago, the British were coming off a proud century as the most important nation on earth. But during the 30 years between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, the United States emerged as the unequivocal world leader, and Britain became an admirable also-ran. Applying that template...
...Just a few years ago, five young men in a room in Sierra Leone would have meant trouble. It was men in their teens and their 20s - but also, tragically, children even younger - who made up the Revolutionary United Front, a ragtag armed militia supported by Liberia's President Charles Taylor (now on trial for war crimes at the Hague) that devastated the country during an 11-year civil war that ended in 2002. Everywhere they went they left a calling card of chopped-off limbs, raped women and senseless bloodshed. Tens of thousands were killed and a third...
This isn't the first time someone has challenged the clarity of Britain's assisted-suicide law. In a similar case eight years ago, Diane Pretty, who had motor neuron disease, wanted to know whether her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her die at home or accompanied her to an assisted-suicide clinic abroad. But the court rejected her request for clarification, and her illness took her life...