Word: britains
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...Theater, and in Peanuts Snoopy imagined himself as "Alistair Beagle." Cooke died in 2004, at 95, and would have been 100 this past Thursday. In celebration, Masterpiece is running an hour-long biography, The Unseen Alistair Cooke, this Sunday, with reruns throughout the week. Even for those unfamiliar with Britain's genial emissary to the U.S., the show (produced and directed by Rachel Jardine) is worth TiVoing for its fond but not uncritical portrait of a man who knew everybody, remembered everything...
Those of us of with gray hair have seen things we once never thought possible. As a teenager in 1960s Britain, I remember once looking at a Düreresque woodcut of the steeples of Prague - which then seemed on the far side of the world - and thinking, "How sad that I'll never go there." But now Europe is free from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, its peoples mingling happily, trading with each other, watching the same football games, sharing the same Aegean beaches. Hansa towns on the Baltic, once trapped in a frozen Soviet stubble...
...internal strife after Tony Blair kicked it out of office in 1997. More painful than all the mutual recriminations, he wrote, was the slow realization that nobody outside a small circle cared about any of these arguments. More than a decade later, Conservatives are still out of power in Britain...
...hard and fast. Hong Kong, like much of the rest of Asia, has been booming for several years; between 2004 and 2007, GDP growth averaged more than 7%. The economy was propelled forward by closer ties to China after Hong Kong was handed back to Beijing by Great Britain in 1997. Millions of mainland tourists flooded the city and spent their newfound wealth in Hong Kong's famous luxury shops. A rush of Chinese companies looking to tap international capital markets turned to Hong Kong's stock exchange, solidifying the city's status as a world-class financial...
...pictures of Hong Kong before and after its handover from Britain...