Word: last
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...might have seemed safe to assume that the drama of the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen had finally ended when President Barack Obama emerged from a last-minute bargaining session with leaders of major developing nations to announce a deal. Obama quickly left town, aides saying Air Force One had to rush to beat the major snowstorm bearing down on Washington. Having agreed terms with the leaders of the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa - the major carbon emitters of today and, even more importantly, of tomorrow - the President would have seemed to have brought two weeks...
...Lanka's treatment of the Tamil minority is a central issue in the election. During the last months of war, the government had restricted nearly 300,000 Tamils who fled the fighting to detention camps. Under intense domestic and international pressure, Rajapaksa announced on Dec. 1 that the 130,000 people still in the camps would have limited freedom to leave. The opposition parties have taken up the cause of these internally displaced people, or IDPs, and Fonseka says the government should give them complete freedom of movement: "If they handled the situation properly, we would have been...
...Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday halted the return of nine-year-old Sean Goldman to his American father - even though international law clearly dictated that the boy should have been handed over when his mother, who had absconded to South America with the child five years ago, died last year. It sounds a lot like the case of Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban boy who, after washing up in Florida in 1999 after a boat disaster his mother did not survive, was for seven months kept from his father in Cuba...
Remarkably, even after she died in childbirth last year, David still had to fight a legal battle to win custody of Sean from the boy's Rio stepfather. And keep in mind, it isn't as if David barely knows Sean: before the abduction he'd helped raise his son for four years. Most fathers would agree that losing the past five years after that - the first little-league games, reading lessons, trips to Disney World - would have been wrenching. It would have been as if Juan Miguel González had lost Elián for seven years instead...
...federal court in Rio finally did the right thing last summer and ruled that Sean and David should be reunited. An appellate court upheld that ruling on Wednesday, and David flew to Rio on Thursday hoping to bring Sean back home for Christmas. But in a move that rivals the most disgraceful machinations of the Elián episode, Brazil's Supreme Court ruled as David arrived that the case requires further review. Now, the soonest the father can hope to be reunited with the son, if he can hope for that at all, is February...