Word: britishisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vice versa. Similarly, socioeconomic mobility, especially in the social world, is still significantly limited. The idea of something as egalitarian as public golf courses was fascinating to the populace of Mumbai, a city that has only three golf courses, all of which are extremely exclusive and pervaded with colonial British influence...
Conspiracy theories are like cacti: they flourish when information flows are restricted and are apt to perish under a deluge of facts. So the British government in Westminster and the semi-autonomous Scottish administration in Edinburgh could reasonably have expected the torrent of documents they published on Sept. 1 to kill off the wilder conspiracies surrounding last month's release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. And those documents - letters among Westminster, Edinburgh and Tripoli; minutes of meetings; and reports on everything from al-Megrahi's failing health to the hefty policing costs that would...
...Megrahi's fate was determined solely by the Scottish judicial system that imprisoned him - as politicians in Westminster and Edinburgh have vigorously asserted - or that compassion alone dictated the Libyan's release, the documents suggest a process every bit as murky as conspiracy theorists might have imagined. While the British government made a public show of neutrality on the issue, saying any change in al-Megrahi's status was a matter for Scotland, it turns out that a British minister once gave assurances to Libya that neither Prime Minister Gordon Brown nor his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, "would want...
...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...
...seem almost indifferent to the West's ire over al-Megrahi. In fact, on Aug. 31, Minister of International Cooperation Siala told reporters in Tripoli that Libya thinks now is a good time to ask Britain to investigate an assassination plot several years ago against Gaddafi - a plot which British officials deny ever existed. For its part, Britain wants Libyan officials to divulge information about the murder of British police officer Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot outside the Libyan embassy in 1984. What happens next between Britain and Libya could reveal whether al-Megrahi's release was the start...