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...company has relied on its partners to achieve. Indeed, HP and Microsoft in January announced a new $250 million pact to sell their hardware, software and services bundled. While the deal itself was not groundbreaking, the notion that Microsoft and HP salespeople will now push one another's products almost exclusively is sure to aggravate the likes of Dell, Cisco and IBM. And maybe that...
Catholic and Protestant lawmakers reached a power-sharing milestone on April 12 by jointly choosing Northern Ireland's first Justice Minister in almost four decades. Not everyone was pleased. Just hours before the agreement, an army base that houses the local branch of Britain's MI5 spy agency was bombed. At his swearing-in the afternoon of the attack--which caused alarm but no deaths--the new minister, David Ford, vowed to work toward political stability...
...monthlong conflict between protesters and the Thai government exploded on April 10, when more than 20 civilians and soldiers were killed (and at least 800 wounded) in the worst political violence the country has seen in almost 20 years. The Red Shirts continue to press for the dissolution of the government led by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. On April 12, Thailand's election commission cited the misuse of campaign donations in its call for the ruling party to be disbanded...
Martel writes with a smooth, almost stoned detachment, cool to the touch, which gives a distant, unreal feeling to a story that's already dangerously weird and abstract. The taxidermist's play turns out to be a Beckettian affair about a monkey and a donkey, Beatrice and Virgil, who live on a giant shirt (yes, a shirt). Beatrice and Virgil are lost, shell-shocked survivors of a massacre of animals by humans, an "abomination" they can refer to only as "the Horrors." Thus the Holocaust, denied entrance at the front door, sneaks in through the window...
Beatrice and Virgil is a true oddity. Its subject is violence and the impossibility of describing it: violence is an atrocity that immolates language itself, turns us into dumb animals and brute flesh. But Martel's story is so arbitrary and oblique that its savage truth almost misses making itself felt. There may be no way to approach the unspeakable other than sneaking up on it with a winding story like Henry's and toylike nonsense characters like Beatrice and Virgil. But Beatrice and Virgil falls victim to its own paradox: speaking of the unspeakable is a dangerous game that...