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...Slightly disappointed that there won't be any live specimens prancing about, we follow O'Rahilly down a long, tapered tunnel meant to shrink the visitor - psychologically, at least - to leprechaun size. The first room is a re-creation of the Giant's Causeway, the legendary hexagonal rock formation in County Antrim that in Irish folklore is prime hunting ground for leprechauns. Then we reach the museum's inner sanctum: the Rainbow Room, where the pristine arc of a rainbow has been fashioned out of velvety multicolored ropes. At the end of the rainbow, naturally, is where the leprechaun...
...This isn't the first roadblock on Hong Kong's long march toward democracy. The British routinely co-opted or marginalized opponents to colonial rule until the 1980s, when they finally allowed a certain number of local district councilors to be elected. In the early 1990s, the first legislative elections were held, but after the handover, the Chinese temporarily replaced the whole legislature. Since then, it has postponed democracy twice. In 2004, Beijing decreed that Hong Kong could not have universal suffrage before 2012. In 2007, after the pan-democrats defeated a package of reforms almost identical to the ones...
Pope Benedict XVI's triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago - his first since becoming Pontiff - was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they'd entered seminary together, the new Pontiff and the retired church-choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town's tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests...
Greece's unions, which had waged only halfhearted protests against the first round of austerity measures, immediately declared war. Over the past week, scattered protests involving tax officials, pensioners, garbage collectors and others have disrupted life in the city. Thursday's strike was the second called by Greece's main unions - representing about half the country's 5 million workers - in less than a week. Flights were halted when air-traffic controllers walked off the job, schools and government offices were shuttered, and public transport was disrupted. (See why Greece's debt crisis threatens the euro...
...Baghdad, or from the Sadrists and other Shi'ite Islamist parties, or even from Allawi's bloc. But Allawi has alleged widespread fraud by his opponent's supporters, setting the stage for a potentially violent struggle over the election's legitimacy. For many Sunnis who voted for the first time on Sunday, being told that the election was rigged against them would reinforce their alienation from the post-Saddam political order - and raise the potential for violence. (See pictures of Iraq preparing to go to the polls...