Word: strengthening
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...recent months, long-standing hostility between the two communities has escalated, whipped up by resurgent Arab secular nationalism. At the federal level, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has repeatedly said he wants to strengthen Baghdad's hand at the expense of Iraq's 18 provinces, including Kurdistan - the semiautonomous three-province Kurdish region in the north - much to the chagrin of the federalist-minded Kurds. At the provincial level, newly empowered hard-line Sunni groups like al-Hadba in Mosul, Nineveh's capital, are preparing to expand their political clout. (See a TIME photographer's diary of the Iraq conflict...
...Tuesday, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta called on the international community to give the country the tools and training it needs to prevail. "Afghanistan is determined to take more responsibilities in the fight on terrorism," Spanta said in Kabul. "We hope that the international community does more to strengthen our police and army. We want them to send more police trainers, more army trainers and send us more equipment...
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's repeated calls to amend the constitution to strengthen the powers of the central government in Baghdad at the expense of Iraq's 18 provinces - including the semiautonomous three-province Kurdish region in the north - have faced fierce pushback from his Kurdish allies, some of whom have called him "the new Saddam." That schism is bound to widen in the coming months, when the U.N. issues its findings over the disputed oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, which Kurds claim as their "Jerusalem" but which Arabs are loath to let go of. (See a TIME...
...Israeli press says, will be set free to possibly strike again. As one minister said, "When the names of these terrorists are released, the earth will shake." A prisoner swap would also be a boon for Hamas because it would be seen as a political victory and strengthen its position in power-sharing talks with its rival, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is backed by the United States and is acceptable to Israel...
...Others are not so sure. Gerald Curtis, professor of politics at Columbia University, who has studied and written about Japan for many years, recognizes that the DPJ wants to strengthen the safety net, but wonders if it has the determination to launch the sort of stimulus package that Barack Obama got through the U.S. Congress in a matter of weeks. Ozawa can come across as all politics, "his own Karl Rove," as Curtis puts it, rather than one who thinks through policies carefully...