Word: britain
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...week, another group of terrorists said it was laying down its weapons. In a DVD video, I.R.A. veteran Seanna Walsh - who spent 21 years in prison for munitions offenses - stood before an Irish flag to read a statement formally ending the organization's 36-year armed campaign to force Britain out of Northern Ireland. By ordering its members to "dump arms" and adopt "exclusively peaceful means," the I.R.A. leadership signaled that their decades-long quest for Irish unity now rests in the hands of their political counterparts in Sinn Fein. The statement prompted a sudden surge forward in the peace...
...SENTENCED. FARYADI SARWAR ZARDAD, 42, former Afghan warlord; to 20 years in a British prison, for torture and hostage taking; in London. In the first trial in Britain for torture committed by a foreigner in another country, Zardad was convicted of human-rights violations while ruling the region of Sarobi outside Kabul from 1992-96. On hearing his sentence, Zardad, who left Afghanistan in 1998 to escape the Taliban and was arrested in 2003 while managing a pizza parlor in London, raised his fist and shouted "Allah is great...
...DIED. EDWARD HEATH, 89, moderate leader of Britain's Conservative Party who, as Prime Minister from 1970-74, brought the U.K. into the European Economic Community (now called the European Union); in Salisbury, England. His tenure was wracked with difficulties?an economy weakened by a global oil crisis and violence in Northern Ireland?and in 1975 a rising Margaret Thatcher ousted him from the party leadership. Though largely marginalized, he served in the House of Commons until his retirement...
...Stevenson is also entwined in the country's political history. Arriving only months after the signing of the Berlin Treaty of 1889, which gave control of Samoa jointly to Germany, Britain and the U.S., the famous Scotsman put his weight behind the non-aligned chief Mata'afa. Former Prime Minister Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi says Stevenson's sympathies were with "indigenous people - their aspirations, their problems trying to hold their own against outsider influences, whether they were missionaries, colonial or business people." Nearly a quarter of a century after they gained independence, Samoans are relaxed in the author...
...sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears," writes Stevenson in A Footnote to History (1892), his journalistic account of the cultural friction that greeted his 1889 arrival in Apia. Samoa was shaping up as the site of a naval conflict between Germany and the U.S., backed by Britain, but war was averted when a hurricane sank several battleships in Apia's harbor. Stevenson prophetically saw the disaster - which led to the signing of the Berlin Treaty - as a historical turning point. With its personal reportage, using fictional techniques, A Footnote was also a pioneering work of journalism...