Word: homely
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...national security, to sidestep a political grenade. Rudd's political opponents have called him a "Manchurian Candidate" who has allowed China to gobble up Australia's national treasures. The charge is unfair; he's no apologist for the communist rulers in Beijing. (In Taipei, where Rudd studied Mandarin, his home was the wonderfully named Republic of China Anti-Communist Recover the Mainland International Youth Activity Center.) Rudd wrote his university thesis on the trial of leading democracy activist Wei Jingsheng, and in a speech in Mandarin to students at Peking University last year, he infuriated his Chinese government minders...
...Africa's first elected woman President in 2006, she inherited a country shattered by nearly two decades of civil war. Harvard educated, a former banker and World Bank official, and an opposition leader who was jailed in the 1990s, Johnson Sirleaf had natural allies in the West and at home won widespread support for her promise of egalitarian development. But the test for Liberia's "Iron Lady" was always going to be in the doing. She spoke to Africa bureau chief Alex Perry at Liberia's Foreign Ministry in Monrovia...
That bluntness has earned Lieberman the devotion of Israeli hawks and the disdain of liberals, Palestinians and just about every government in the Arab world. In February's election, Lieberman's 10-year-old party, Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Is Our Home), won the third highest number of seats in the Knesset, making him a linchpin of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government. That has complicated the Obama Administration's effort to pressure Israel to freeze settlement growth and restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians. How far Netanyahu travels in Obama's direction may depend on Lieberman's willingness...
...line is the product of his past. His family moved to Israel in 1978 from the Soviet republic of Moldavia, now Moldova. His father fought in the Red Army in World War II but, like many other Soviet Jews, later spent years of forced exile in Siberia. "In my home, we spoke only about Israel," Lieberman says. "It was a dream that one day we would come here." Upon arriving, Lieberman enrolled at Hebrew University, moonlighting as a bouncer at a student nightclub and becoming active in the right-wing Likud Party. In the late '80s, he and his wife...
...Washington Relief on Student Loans In a rare piece of welcome news for students struggling to pay for college, the Federal Government is offering a loan-repayment plan that reduces monthly bills for graduates who take home thinner paychecks. The new policy is accompanied by an interest-rate reduction on new federal subsidized Stafford loans, which will drop from 6% to 3.4% by 2012. Students who work in public service can have the balance of their loans forgiven after 10 years...