Word: northerner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Taliban was toppled, and a Northern Alliance-dominated government took its place. Hamid Karzai, educated in India, became President. India stepped in with multimillion-dollar reconstruction projects. Pakistani officials mutter darkly about up to 19 Indian "consulates" based in sensitive border areas as if it were fact (there are only three). "Who is the beneficiary of this war on terror that requires the collaboration of Pakistan?" a retired major in the Pakistani army once asked me. "India is again in Afghanistan, working against us. Unless you demonstrate what good for Pakistan will come out of this collaboration, you will...
...known as the H-Blocks, Long Kesh, the Cages, Thatcher's Breakers Yard. Northern Ireland's notorious Maze prison drew more grim nicknames - and housed more paramilitary prisoners - than any other jail in Western Europe. Its last inmates were released under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which laid the foundation for an end to sectarian violence in the British province. And after bulldozers razed most of the former prison buildings last year, the site where Bobby Sands and nine other Republican militants died in a hunger strike in 1981 became little more than an abandoned relic...
...this year's most talked-about films has put the Maze back at center stage of Northern Ireland's politics. Hunger, which charts Bobby Sands' final weeks inside the Maze, opened in Britain last week and is set for a limited U.S. release next month. This is no jaunty jailhouse flick, but rather the most uncomfortable 96 minutes anyone is likely to spend in a cinema this year. Graphic violence, emaciated bodies and stomach-churning filth provide most of the avert-your-eyes moments...
...film's timing that is making local politicians squirm. Hunger's release comes as Northern Ireland's power-sharing government is under pressure to agree on the final design for a much-contested, large-scale redevelopment program at the Maze site...
...While many Protestants in Northern Ireland's majority Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) view the hunger strikers as little more than convicted terrorists set on suicide, Catholic republicans allied to the DUP's power-sharing partners, Sinn Fein, regard Sands as an iconic political hero. Given the politically loaded history of the prison, agreeing on what the new Maze should symbolize has proved as tricky as an escape from Alcatraz...