Word: national
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That's one reason Obama may face such a tough sales job when he rolls out his Afghan strategy after nearly three months of debate. Following Obama's expected speech to the nation about his plan, General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, will testify before Congress with other members of Obama's national-security team. They'll have to convince skeptical Americans--as well as NATO allies at a Dec. 7 meeting--that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a solid partner in the war effort. That's a daunting task given the allegations of corruption enveloping...
...Here's why I make that grandiose-sounding claim: Lu Xun is critically regarded as the most accomplished modern writer of the most populous nation on earth, and a grasp of his work is thus extremely useful in forming an understanding of much of humanity. In addition to stories, he wrote poetry, an extended history of Chinese literature and hundreds of essays, including small masterpieces like his eloquent 1926 tirade against the warlord government of the time for gunning down unarmed patriotic student protesters. His stories are wide-ranging in style and subject, from the touchingly nostalgic and straightforward...
...imported workers from China who dig into rice topped with pork belly and chili - black bean sauce. The Chinese, who were shipped in by the state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. that has invested $1.4 billion into this faraway outpost, can understand neither English nor pidgin, two of the national languages. The Papua New Guineans speak no Mandarin. Even at mealtime, an event during which both cultures would normally encourage community and hospitality, the air is weighted by mutual incomprehension. "How can we eat together if everything about us is different?" asks Shen Jilei, whose first overseas experience transferred...
...many Papua New Guineans, it's not surprising that their nation stands on the front lines of China's global campaign. Located on the eastern half of the world's second largest island, P.N.G. is the most linguistically diverse region of the world, with at least 800 distinct local languages spoken by just 6.5 million people. Yet despite the tribal diversity, the nation is unified in at least one aspect: suspicion of foreign exploitation of its plentiful resources, ranging from natural gas and timber to fisheries and gold. Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where...
...even some of the more modest predictions about Jacob Zuma's rise to power had been correct, South Africa would be an empty, corrupt dictatorship by now. Back in 2006, South African memoirist Rian Malan ended his dismal assessment of the nation's prospects ("Not civil war, but sad decay") in British magazine the Spectator by asking: "Anyone want a house here?" A year ago, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said he was "deeply saddened" when Zuma staged a party coup against his predecessor Thabo Mbeki, "deeply disturbed" that both had used institutions of state in their struggle and warned that...