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By Gore Vidal $11.95
By Cynthia Cohen (Editor); Roberto Gutierrez Varea (Editor); Polly O. Walker (Editor); Dijana Milosevic (Contribution by); Charles Mulekwa (Contribution by) $21.95
$17
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 Wikimedia Commons / U.S. State Department
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Richard Holbrooke was apparently preoccupied with his role as the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan until the very end, discussing the ongoing conflicts in those two countries up until he went into surgery for the heart problem that led to his death Monday.
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 AP / Paul White
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Hey, it’s Tony Blair! Remember him? The former British PM now bears the somewhat unlikely title of special peace envoy to the Middle East, and he’s getting down to business on a project having to do with lists, supplies and Israeli-Palestinian relations.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Bjoertvedt
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His term as the United Nations’ official envoy to Afghanistan is up in March, and in his last address to the world body Kai Eide didn’t sound especially optimistic about the state of the country. In fact, Eide said Wednesday, if certain “negative trends” he sees at work “are not reversed,” the situation in Afghanistan could “become unmanageable.”
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 Flickr / Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, file photo
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Israel launched an airstrike and ground assault into Gaza after a bomb on the Israeli side of the border killed a soldier. The troops pulled back into Israel soon afterward, according to the BBC. The raid was of a smaller scale than the fighting that ended just 10 days ago, but shows the difficult work ahead for George Mitchell, the new U.S. envoy, who is headed to the region.
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 senate.gov
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President Obama didn’t wait long to tackle one of the most intractable items in his in box: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a whirlwind Thursday, Obama spoke to leaders in the region (minus Hamas), called for an end to the Gaza blockade and appointed George Mitchell (above), the man who brokered a truce in Northern Ireland, as Mideast envoy.
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 iphone.foxnews.com
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There was no doubt as to Israel’s take on recent comments about Israeli-Palestinian relations made by United Nations official Richard Falk when he arrived Sunday at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, only to be denied entry and sent immediately back to Zurich.
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 Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Tony Blair had hoped to visit Gaza in his capacity as Mideast envoy for the Quartet—that’s the U.S., the U.N., the EU and Russia—but had to cancel because of a “specific security threat.” It’s hard to be an envoy if you can’t get to where you need to go, but the former British prime minister promised to make it to Gaza eventually and “press for help for the people there.”
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 AP photo
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More than two weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, killing 78,000 people and leaving tens of thousands more unaccounted for. Now the U.N. is pushing Burma’s ruling junta to cooperate with international aid efforts, sending an envoy with a message from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in hopes that a more personal approach will produce lifesaving results.
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 news.bbc.co.uk
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According to the Irish prime minister, Tony Blair has agreed to serve the quartet—the U.S., the U.N., the EU and Russia—as a special envoy to the Mideast. Earlier reports suggested that Blair bristled at the limited scope of the position, but an aide says the outgoing British prime minister was eager to take the job and continue to work on the world stage.
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The U.S. and Israel are pressuring Tony Blair to become the “quartet’s” (that would be the U.S., the EU, the U.N. and Russia) Mideast envoy, because he’s already done such a bang-up job soothing tensions in the Arab world. But Blair might not be interested since President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would want to limit his scope to setting up a functioning Palestinian state.
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“Why not?” asks Clean Air Watch, after Bush just did something equally inane: appointing an avowed anti-regulatory “ghoul” as the White House’s new regulatory czarina.
Posted on Aug 2, 2006
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