Word: doubtfully
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...weddings took place at the Pazo de Meirás in northwestern Spain on Friday. In one, held in the chapel of the faux-medieval palace, the real Leticia Giménez-Arnau, great-granddaughter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, married her Salvadoran boyfriend in what was no doubt an appropriately austere ceremony. In the other, considerably more rambunctious celebration, an actress playing Leticia arrived at the wedding scene in a convertible driven by a Moorish guard (complete with requisite fez). Greeted with fascist salutes and the extravagant leering of a pompous archbishop, the lovely bride was given away...
Through it all, Russia bided its time - until Georgia offered up a golden opportunity last Friday. By invading its neighbor, Russia has crossed the Rubicon, demonstrating that the Caucasus sit squarely and solely in Russia's sphere of influence. Moscow's long-term objectives in Georgia no doubt are to install a friendly government in Tbilisi (it has tried more than once to do that since Georgian independence), keep Georgia out of NATO, stop the flow of arms into Chechnya and take control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the only important export route from the Caspian that does...
Suffice to say that Vladimir Yakunin - and no doubt his friend, the Prime Minister - didn't approve, and that disgraceful moment sticks in his craw to this day. The Russians are back - and they are not buffoons, thank you. Now, oil and gas wealth plus increasing military might are going to right what they perceive as the humiliations of the recent past. The New Cold War, as Ed Lucas writes...
...wrote George Herbert Walker Bush in his diary on June 4, 1975. The "George" who was tired that day was his son, George W. Bush - jet lagged, no doubt, because the tennis court they played on was in Beijing. 'Bush 43' was then fresh out of the Harvard Business School, and 'Bush 41' was chief of the first United States Liason Office in Beijing - the de facto embassy that had opened after Richard Nixon's historic opening to China...
...would begrudge China the satisfaction of staging a successful Olympics or question that, in the long run, the awarding of the Games to Beijing will prove to be a milestone in China's re-engagement with the world. But there is also little doubt that the immediate impact has been a worrying increase in the authorities' already draconian treatment of dissenting voices such as human-rights activists and restive ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs. Keeping a lid on protest has proven difficult - the bright Olympics spotlight draws all manner of dissidents. Whatever the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic...