Word: australian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Australia came clean last week about a television soap opera that had offended Malaysia and damaged diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries. In Kuala Lumpur, Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans called on the show's main critic, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, and delivered a letter from Prime Minister Bob Hawke that Malaysian officials described as a virtual apology...
...soap opera, Embassy, chronicles the goings-on at the Australian embassy in a fictional nation in Southeast Asia called Ragaan, which Mahathir contends is an unflattering version of his country. Since the program began appearing on television last fall, Malaysia has protested by reducing diplomatic and social contact with Australian officials and encouraging an informal "Buy Australian Last" campaign...
...daily Melbourne Age blistered Evans for "cringing and curtsying to mollify Mahathir." Evans denied using "the language of apology"; Hawke said he merely acknowledged that "some things" had caused offense. Meanwhile Embassy, a production of the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation, will continue to air -- presumably to larger audiences than ever...
...President, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, an Australian doctor, an idealistic revolutionary, a dazzling lady leftist whose eyes show "a vulnerability that she took such pains to conceal . . ." Len Deighton is at it again, this time in the treacherous jungles of South America. Throughout MAMista (HarperCollins; 410 pages; $21.95), guerrillas attempt to seize control of Spanish Guiana, currently under the thumb of cryptofascist goons. The covert war is rife with betrayal, and ultimately no one is pure in Deighton's 17th spy novel. Intrigues misfire; disease kills more effectively than bullets; and corruption becomes the order of the day. Even...
...Ministry's efforts to computerize the country's social services, proved to be a mixed blessing. Technocrats may admire systems like Bangkok's, which by 2006 will have stored vital data on 65 million Thais in a single, integrated computer network. But civil libertarians are appalled. Simon Davies, an Australian expert on such technology for the watchdog group Privacy International, says Bangkok's prizewinning program is, potentially, "one of the most repressive surveillance systems the world has ever seen...