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(01/10/08 5:00am)
"Charlie Wilson's War" comes from quite the pedigree of filmmakers. Mike Nichols ("The Graduate," "Postcards From the Edge") directs a script by Aaron Sorkin (writer of "The West Wing"). The film also unites a certain pair of Hollywood royalty for the first time ever (Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, for those of you who have been in hibernation). While the movie may not be the movie to end all movies that its combination of creative forces suggests, it's still an interesting look at modern history.\nBased on a true story, "Charlie Wilson's War" tells how Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson (Hanks), on the urging of his rich, socialite friend Joanne Herring (Roberts) and with the help of CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), manages to supply Afghani rebels with weapons to fight off the Soviets in the early 1980s. This occurs without the U.S. government "officially" getting involved, all while Wilson is under investigation for a drug-and-prostitution scandal.\nThe script is pure Sorkin: fast-paced, quick-witted political dialogue shot back and forth. Nichols nicely frames the constant flow of conversation, never making it feel too constricted, even if this occasionally means resorting to the Sorkin "Studio 60" method of talking while walking down hallways. The movie also wisely branches away from just Washington and includes many scenes in Afghani refugee camps to show why Wilson and his cohorts feel compelled to get involved. The human suffering both balances and contrasts nicely with the upper-class political banter.\nThe always-likeable Hanks does a fine job playing the sleazy Wilson, who enjoys the occasional nose candy and only hires hot 20-somethings as secretaries. Hoffman is dead-on as always; and although her role isn't as large as the movie's marketing campaign would like you to believe, Roberts gets the job done, even if her accent is occasionally a bit more Katharine Hepburn than Texas twang.\nUnfortunately, the film is cut off too soon. When American aid in Afghanistan ends, so does the movie, and despite the fact that it's briefly shown that this angered Wilson, it seems that he doesn't lose too much sleep over it. Five or 10 additional minutes could have easily answered any remaining questions. By remaining in the '80s, Nichols and Sorkin allow the film to suggest briefly that American aid led to Sept. 11, without getting themselves in too much hot water.\nThe film has pulled in five Golden Globe nods, including Best Motion Picture -- Comedy or Musical. And though it's an entertaining film, "Knocked Up," "Once," and "Waitress" all deserved that spot more.
(11/12/07 2:46am)
The major Northern Ireland Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, announced Sunday it was formally renouncing violence, but a commander said the group would not surrender its weapons to international disarmament officials.\nThe group, which has an estimated 3,000 members across hardline parts of Northern Ireland, has loosely observed a cease-fire since 1994, but until now has refused to surrender a single bullet or bomb – a major objective of a 1998 peace accord.\nIt is the last of Northern Ireland’s underground armies to renounce violence. The Irish Republican Army, the major Catholic paramilitary, did so and disarmed in 2005.\nThe group said in a statement that at midnight Sunday it would “stand down with all military intelligence destroyed, and, as a consequence of this, all weaponry will be put beyond use.”\nThe UDA’s south Belfast commander Jackie McDonald confirmed the group would not surrender its weapons to international disarmament officials.\n“They are the people’s guns,” McDonald said.\nThe UDA appeared to be following the Ulster Volunteer Force – the other major Protestant underground army – which said in May that it had placed its weapons under the custody of senior members and “beyond the reach” of rank-and-file members. The UVF did not surrender any to John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who since 1997 has been trying to oversee paramilitary disarmament in Northern Ireland.\nIrish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern welcomed the UDA’s move, but said it now must cooperate with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning and surrender its weapons.\nHis comments were echoed by Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, the senior British government official in the province: “They will be judged by their actions, not their words,” Woodward said.\nIntelligence officials have said the Protestant paramilitary groups were relatively poorly armed compared to the IRA’s sophisticated arsenal – having only firearms, ammunition, grenades and small supplies of explosives.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
DUBLIN, Ireland – Lithuanian musicians, drum-beating Punjabis and West African dancers used Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day parade on Saturday to celebrate their place in a booming Ireland that has become a land of immigrants.\nOne man dressed as St. Patrick in papal hat and sunglasses did the samba, while another float nearby featured “Miss Panty,” Dublin’s premier drag queen.\nDublin’s freewheeling parade drew a half-million spectators and included Christine Quinn, the first openly gay leader of the New York City Council. Quinn is boycotting the more conservative New York parade because the organizers refuse to let gay and lesbian groups march.\nThis year, she accepted an Irish government invitation to be part of the Dublin City Council contingent.\n“The fact I’m here in Dublin and able to march and participate in inclusive events should send a message of how backwards the New York parade is,” said Quinn.\nThe Irish economy has been booming for the past 13 years, drawing immigrants from around the world to the country – and its festivities.\n“Nowadays there’s far more color in the parade. It’s great to see all our new Irish from across the world dressed up in green,” said Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who normally spends St. Patrick’s Day in the United States but returned overnight after visiting President Bush in the White House.\nThe parade also featured about a dozen U.S. high school and college bands.\nThe leader of Ireland’s 4 million Roman Catholics, Archbishop Sean Brady, appealed to Ireland to remember the religious roots of the holiday.\n“The challenge for all of us is to be consistent and coherent, not just in honoring Patrick with our lips and our parades, but with our hearts and lives – to honor what he really represents by earnestly trying to embody it in our own lives,” Brady said.\nMore than 1,000 police were on duty to deal with expected alcohol-fueled trouble in the evening, following widespread drunkenness that led to 700 arrests in 2005 and lesser trouble last year.\nDublin liquor stores were ordered closed until 4 p.m. to deter public drinking until well after the parade concluded.\nThis was the first St. Patrick’s Day period when police have been empowered to breathalyze drivers randomly on road checkpoints – a new law that resulted in 60 arrests in the hours before the parade.
(03/10/05 4:17am)
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- President Bush's envoy to Northern Ireland called Wednesday for the IRA to disband after the outlawed group made an unprecedented public offer to kill four men -- including two of its own expelled members -- linked to a Belfast slaying.\nThe envoy, Mitchell Reiss, told BBC radio in Belfast that the IRA's allied Sinn Fein party should accept the legitimacy of the police force.\n"It's time for the IRA to go out of business. And it's time for Sinn Fein to be able to say that explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated," Reiss told the BBC in the interview from Washington.\nThe Irish Republican Army, which is supposed to be observing a 1997 cease-fire in support of Northern Ireland's peace process, has faced weeks of embarrassment over its members' role in killing a Catholic civilian, intimidating witnesses and destroying evidence. The case highlights the IRA's decades-old practice of seeking to impose its authority on the most hard-line Catholic parts of Northern Ireland.\nThe victim's family, which lives in an IRA power base in east Belfast, has waged a rare public campaign demanding that the IRA acknowledge its involvement in killing Robert McCartney, 33, and encouraging witnesses to give evidence to police.\nThe McCartneys' stand has forced the IRA to make a string of admissions, culminating in Tuesday night's declaration it had offered to kill four people the IRA blames for the Jan. 30 killing outside a Belfast pub.\n"The IRA representatives detailed the outcome of the internal disciplinary proceedings thus far and stated in clear terms that the IRA was prepared to shoot the people directly involved in the killing of Robert McCartney," according to a statement from the group.\nThe McCartneys dismissed the IRA statement as irrelevant to their needs -- to get the killers and accomplices convicted in a court.\nThey also accused the IRA of continuing to understate its involvement in the crime, citing confidential witness claims that up to a dozen IRA members held the pub patrons hostage while they swabbed up evidence. McCartney was initially attacked inside the pub, then had his neck and stomach fatally slashed outside it.\n"It was that cover-up which prevented those who murdered Robert from being brought to justice," said a statement read by Claire McCartney, one of his sisters.\nThe British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, both denounced the IRA's offer as bizarre.\n"It's an extraordinary statement and a shock to the system," Ahern said in Dublin.\nReiss specifically chided Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for his remarks during his speech Saturday to the party's annual conference. Adams, reflecting traditional IRA-Sinn Fein policy, claimed the movement wouldn't tolerate criminals in its ranks. He immediately qualified that position, arguing that the IRA wasn't committing crimes when it broke laws "in pursuit of legitimate political objectives."\nAnalysts say that view justifies virtually all of the IRA's activities, including its robberies, fuel smuggling and policy of maiming petty criminals within the IRA's Catholic power bases.\nReiss said he found that comment "particularly worrisome. ... You can't sign up for the rule of law a la carte."\nAhern said the IRA had a history of using death threats as a way of maintaining order. "But when you actually see it in written form ... it's horrific," he said.\n"The IRA statement yesterday frankly defies any description," Blair told the House of Commons in London.\nBlair said the IRA had revealed why both governments and every other political party in both parts of Ireland were demanding the IRA fully disarm and disband.\n"We have made considerable progress in Northern Ireland," he said, referring to the peace process and the Good Friday peace pact of 1998. "But we now have an impasse because of the refusal of the IRA to give up violent activity of whatever sort"
(02/04/04 4:11am)
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Northern Ireland's political enemies sat down Tuesday to discuss reviving a joint Roman Catholic-Protestant administration, the central goal of the 1998 peace accord for this British territory.\nBritain and the Irish Republic hope the coming months of scheduled talks will resurrect power-sharing. But their task appears daunting given the recent triumphs of extremists in Northern Ireland elections: the Democratic Unionists on the British Protestant side of the fence, and Sinn Fein on the Irish Catholic side.\nAs Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley exited Stormont Parliamentary Building, the would-be seat of power in Northern Ireland, he declared that his party would not negotiate with the Irish Republican Army-linked Sinn Fein.\nPaisley's negotiating team did break new ground by sitting, for the first time, at the same negotiating table as Sinn Fein -- but he insisted this was because the parties only delivered prepared speeches.\n"There is a difference between sitting in the room and negotiating your life, territory and all your liberty away," said Paisley, 76, whose party wants to forge a local government for Northern Ireland that minimizes Sinn Fein's role.\n"There were no negotiations today."\nPaisley's party defeated the moderate Ulster Unionists in the Nov. 26 election to seize control of the Protestant half of Northern Ireland's legislature, which has the power to form or block any local administration.\nNorthern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy, the British governor, and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said the Democratic Unionists' decision to participate was a hopeful sign.\n"No one pretends that it's going to be easy, but at least everyone was in that room," said Murphy, a key British negotiator during the negotiations that produced the landmark Good Friday agreement of 1998.\nThe Democratic Unionists boycotted those talks because of Sinn Fein's involvement.\nSinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said the Democratic Unionists still represented only a minority of Northern Ireland opinion, while most newly elected lawmakers -- including all the Catholics -- backed the agreement. He said their will must prevail.\n"To be effective, this review must defend and accelerate the process of change promised in the Good Friday agreement," Adams said. "And we sitting around this table must not lose sight of the fact that the agreement -- which as the culmination of an enormous effort by the two governments and the parties to tackle the causes of conflict -- continues to hold the promise of a new beginning for everyone."\nThe new U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, State Department official Mitchell Reiss, also met Democratic Unionist leaders for the first time Tuesday.\n"You always have to be optimistic," he said.\nThe British and Irish governments hope by Easter to determine whether they can move ahead with unfinished sections of the landmark Good Friday pact.\nThe accord proposed several controversial goals designed to underpin stability in this British territory of 1.7 million people -- including police reform, British military cutbacks and freedom for imprisoned members of truce-observing paramilitary groups.\nThe bloodshed over Northern Ireland that claimed more than 3,600 lives since 1969 has largely abated, but the outlawed paramilitary groups responsible for most of the carnage remain active, armed criminal organizations -- the issue that repeatedly undermined the previous power-sharing administration.\nThat coalition, which was led by moderate Protestants and Catholics but included minority roles for both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists, suffered several shutdowns over the IRA's refusal to disarm as the peace accord intended.\nPower-sharing collapsed in October 2002 after police accused a top Sinn Fein aide of gathering intelligence on potential IRA targets.