Word: britain
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...Even the junta's notorious xenophobia is rooted less in a desire for isolation than in an ingrained fear of invasion. Burma has been occupied by many foreign powers over the centuries and riven by ethnic insurgencies since its independence from Britain in 1948. The Burmese military's historical role is to safeguard the country from all foes, foreign and domestic. The generals regard a threat to their regime as a threat to the nation. This might seem "misguided, even deluded," observes Andrew Selth, a Burma analyst with Australia's Griffith University, but the generals' fear of invasion is real...
...caveat, of course - talk about tiresome - is the internal state of British politics. Britain must have an election by next May; it is highly likely that it will be won by a Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, in which Euroskepticism seems as firmly rooted as it was when Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech in Bruges 21 years ago. Cameron, who has taken his party out of the center-right European parliamentary grouping, annoying German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has promised a referendum on Lisbon if the treaty is not ratified by all E.U. members...
...will leave it to another day to consider whether such an exercise would be a sensible way for a new Prime Minister with ambitious goals to spend his time. The bigger question is what Cameron thinks Britain gains from being such a pain to its European colleagues. One consequence is already plain: as TIME noted last week, in Paris and Berlin there is new energy behind Franco-German cooperation, and you can bet your bottom dollar that is partly because Merkel and Sarkozy have taken a look at Cameron, remembered the havoc Thatcher caused in the 1980s and thought...
...develop insulin resistance, hypertension, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and orthopedic problems and go into early puberty. "Children are vulnerable. If they're given food and told to finish what's on the plate, they'll eat it, and without exercise get bigger and bigger," says Tam Fry, chairman of Britain's Child Growth Foundation, who is lobbying obesity experts to consider overnutrition a form of child abuse. (Read "Mother's Obesity Raises Risk of Birth Defects...
Then there's the fact that Britain has always stood apart from central E.U. policies such as the common currency. "The very candidacy of Mr. Blair is a slap in the face for Europe," says Philippe Moreau Defarges, European-affairs specialist for the French Institute of International Relations. "The U.K.'s habit of participating only in those E.U. projects it wants to be involved with" is a strike against a Blair presidency, he says. The Benelux countries - the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg - feel the same...