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Friday, Jul 05, 2002

chic of araby

"The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three �deficits�. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential�and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness."

ciaegis

"Afridi is probably the only person capable of gathering the Pashtun commanders and tribal chiefs together to broker their interests to get them to agree on one leadership - which could be either former monarch Zahir Shah or any of his nominees - to initially form an interim set-up leading to the formation of a constitutional framework to establish an elected government in Afghanistan."

"Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s. (He had been in custody for over two years). He had also been fined 5 million rupees (US$82,000). No reasons were given for Afridi's release, or under which legislation he was allowed to return to his home town in Khyber Agency in North Western Frontier Province."

Thursday, Jul 04, 2002

urinetown

"The holding in Board of Education of Pottawatomie County v. Earls shouldn't just enrage students and parents unwilling to see their kids shamed just for joining the band. It should terrify any of us who fear that in promoting a War on Something, the court might be prepared to suspend all rules of constitutional interpretation based on the preposterous legal theory that "Heck, we oughtta try something." The majority opinion in Earls reflects some of the worst results-based decision-making we've seen since Bush v. Gore. And like Bush v. Gore, it is rooted in panic, expediency, and a twisting of prior precedent to fit the facts."

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