Word: als
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...become a regional cultural and media hub. Last year Qatar hosted a version of the Tribeca Film Festival, while private investors put together a $200 million fund to jump-start the local film industry. While there have been some cutbacks on salaries and benefits at state-run news network al-Jazeera, according to disgruntled employees, the operation continues to set the news agenda across the Middle East...
Still, Qatar insists it is not trying to become the next Dubai. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar's ruler, doesn't want to make his country a global capital, so much as use his nation's gas resources to move what was once a tribal, Bedouin society into the modern world with Muslim culture and values intact. Qatar, say state officials, will never try to do the kind of high-volume business that put Dubai on the map but also made it so vulnerable to a speculative bubble. "Dubai is all about numbers and bringing in huge infrastructure...
...truth is, the unelected leaders of the Middle East have been happy to learn from Dubai's successes and failures without having to take such risks themselves. In part, that's because Dubai is not more but less politically free than other places in the region. Sheik Mohammed al-Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai, is able to take daring risks not just because he is a hereditary ruler, but because he is unaccountable to the vast majority of Dubai residents, 95% of whom are foreign and who live in Dubai subject to his favor. Other places in the gulf have...
...turn things around. The President may be more of a basketball man than a football fan, but he needs to heed the advice of two great gridiron coaches to head off Cheney's confident prediction. "The future is now," George Allen used to say. And, in the words of Al Davis, "Just win, baby...
...expected April re-election to the presidency of Sudan of an indicted war criminal, Omar al-Bashir, does not sit well with the world's pro-democracy campaigners. Sudan has not had a meaningful election since 1986 - elections in 2000 were boycotted by the vast majority of the country, according to the U.N. Commission of Human Rights - and so holding one is seen as a rare sign of reform from Bashir's military regime. That's until you remember that an election is meant to be about freedom and not endorsing the rule of an autocrat whom the International Criminal...