Word: eventful
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That was music to the ears of many Tories, straight and gay, who have been trying for years to modernize their party. In 2000 Christina Dykes launched Absolutely Equal, a conference event that ran for a number of years and was supported by several minority-rights organizations, in an attempt to broaden her colleagues' focus. "After the bad defeats in 1997 and 2001, the party closed in on itself," she says. "We were just talking to ourselves." Matthew Parris, now a prominent writer and broadcaster, served as a Tory Parliament member during the Thatcher era and remembers when organizers...
Picking her way through gyrating bodies to deliver a welcoming speech, Shadow Equalities Minister Theresa May looked as if she'd dressed for the sort of genteel event more commonly associated with the Conservatives: a church fete or a sedate evening of sherry and nibbles. It was May, in her former job as Conservative chairwoman, who coined the epithet "Nasty Party" in 2002 to warn her colleagues that their moralizing traditionalism was turning off the wider electorate. The rift between the Tories and gay-rights supporters was especially wide following the passage of legislation by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...
...Iain Dale became the first openly gay Tory candidate to be selected for a winnable seat. (He lost, however, to the incumbent, a Liberal Democrat.) Now a blogger and publisher and hoping for another crack at Parliament, Dale co-hosted the Pride event. In his view, sexual orientation has become "a nonissue in the Conservative Party." He adds, optimistically, that equality will soon be so firmly embedded in the party that "in another 10 to 15 years there will be no need for Pride to make a statement." (Read "British Spies: Licensed...
...grouping in the European Parliament. "Your new Polish allies oppose gay marriage and adoption," read the letter, which demanded that Cameron call upon the Polish party "either to change their views or quit your new European group." Meanwhile, Ben Summerskill, director of the gay-rights group Stonewall, boycotted the event. Demonstrators accosted revelers arriving for the party, and a transvestite dressed as Thatcher invited curious bystanders to a simultaneous and hastily arranged counterevent called Tory Shame...
...international community decides Iran is making an atomic bomb - something IAEA inspections may determine later this month - it would complicate any Venezuelan plans to export uranium to the country, since it would be widely viewed as aiding and abetting a rogue nuclear-weapons program. "In that event, the world is watching whether Venezuela seems poised to cross any international legal boundaries," says Johanna Mendelson Forman, a senior associate for the Americas at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "But it's still too early to tell what Venezuela is really doing." (Read a story about...