Word: northerners
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...when they fail to publicly condemn bin Laden and his followers). At a crucial moment in the process, it becomes detrimental to the goals of the political movement to condone violent extremists, and then, usually, they are self-policed into oblivion. This week the legitimate political wing of the Northern Ireland nationalist movement (Sinn Fein), for instance, asked its violent extremists (the Provos) to disarm. In Spain, ETA has targeted Basque nationalist politicians who have joined the Spanish democratic process, knowing as their power grows, the ETA’s will diminish...
...ironic sense, that BBC journalist Lucy Jago chose Kristian Birkeland for the subject of her first book. Birkeland unlocked the secrets of the aurora borealis, and it was the British that scoffed at Birkeland’s theories and dismissed his work in the early 1900s. The Northern Lights recounts Birkeland’s life-long journey through the still-fledgling fields of electromagnetism and solar astronomy. Jago’s book, although well-written and interesting, fails to rise to the level of “thrilling” that the publisher touts...
Birkeland, a native Norwegian, spent a year on a remote Finnish mountain tracking the magnetic fields of the Earth and their relationship to the auroras, the so-called northern lights. At the end of the nineteenth century, the setting of Jago’s account, the northern lights were still a mystery—heralded by some as messages from the gods and by others as signals from the dead. Jago manages to successfully transport the reader to Birkeland’s world, where adventurers still dreamed not of faraway planets, stars and moons, but of uncharted mountains, desolate frozen...
Although The Northern Lights fills an important hole in scientific literature, Jago’s work fails to rise to the scientifically stimulating level of a book like Dava Sobel’s Longitude or to the level of thrilling adventure stories like Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Journey. Nonetheless, Jago should be applauded for her well-researched attempt to grant Birkeland the credit the British denied him a century...
...That may account for the sense of urgency in this week's efforts by U.S. officials to spur the Northern Alliance to move on Taliban cities, and to encourage the formation of a southern front against the ruling militia. Still, nobody's expecting a speedy collapse of the regime that has hosted Osama Bin Laden. Which means that the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen may have to proceed against the backdrop of an increasingly complex and messy war in Afghanistan...