Word: britain
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...proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition...
...client regimes that arose across Africa as France swapped colonial control of nations in exchange for arrangements conducive to French political and business interests. For decades, Françafrique produced corrupt and brutal yet stable African partners for France and helped Paris fend off the rival influences of Britain, the U.S. and more recently China. Typically, the authoritarian African leaders who gained from this relationship grew magnificently rich as their people, inversely, became impoverished. And no ruler was more iconic of the so-called Big Men that Françafrique produced than Omar Bongo. (Read "Gabon Faces Bongo's Disastrous...
...Editors at Britain's Collins English Dictionary have added these and 264 other entries to the 30th Anniversary Edition, published Sept. 3. To qualify for inclusion in the esteemed lexicon, a word had to have, over the past two years, six quality citations in Collins' digital corpus, a computerized database that scans 2.5 billion words across a number of print and online resources. (See the best social-networking applications...
...Libya repeatedly warned Britain of "catastrophic effects" for their relationship if al-Megrahi died in jail - the alarmist phrase also emerges in the minutes of the March 2009 Glasgow meeting. Ministers in Westminster duly conveyed these threats to Edinburgh. Labour and the Scottish Nationalists are fierce opponents. "The British government have a better relationship with [Libyan leader Colonel Muammar] Gaddafi than they do with Scotland," says Ed Owen, a former special adviser to Straw. But Scottish politicians could not ignore the overlap between Scottish and U.K. interests. Instead, they devised a plan to release al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, rather...
...Amid all the behind-the-scenes recriminations, Britain's relationship with the U.S. feels that little bit less special. Gaddafi may have boosted his domestic popularity, but the affair has done little to burnish his image abroad. "Given the original intent [to anchor Libya more firmly in the international community], it will be interesting to see how Libya's relations with the world are affected," says former special adviser Owen. The star guests at the Sept. 1 celebration in Tripoli to mark the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought Gaddafi to power were two of the world's most...