How Syria and Libya Got to be Turkey’s Headaches

With neighboring Syria in crisis, the Arab Spring has finally arrived on Turkey’s doorstep — and with it, one big headache for a government that has spent recent years staking its political fortunes on the region. Since coming to power in 2002, the Islamic-rooted government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to become a kingpin in the Muslim world, driven by shared religious sensibility and economic expansionism

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Labour Pains: Gordon Brown is Running Out of Time

It was billed as tragedy — an insurrection that would topple the Labour Party’s flawed hero, Gordon Brown — but it played out like a Marx Brothers farce. The June 8 meeting that would determine Brown’s fate attracted so many Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords that a House of Commons committee room quickly filled to capacity. And still they came, squeezing their way into the mass of bodies politic.

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Austria Squirms in Limelight of the Cellar Incest Trial

The authorities in Sankt Poelten are making the most of their sleepy, baroque town’s misfortune of being the venue for perhaps the most grotesque trial in Austria’s history. A large marquee reminiscent of a beer tent, flanked by sausage stands and a mobile sweetshop, has been erected outside the courtroom to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who’ve arrived here to follow the trial of Josef Fritzl.

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