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...shadow of these giant alliance shifts, Southeast Asian nations, too, are scrambling. Vietnam, for one, is fortifying its outposts in the Spratly Islands and wooing its old enemy, the Pentagon. Singapore has become a de facto base for the U.S., and the Philippines has welcomed back American forces after booting them out in the early 1990s - mainly to fight local terror groups, but also possibly as a bulwark against China. Nations from Singapore to Malaysia have upgraded their submarine fleets, and Indonesia just signed a $1 billion weapons deal with Russia...
Welcome to Diego Garcia--6,720 acres (2,720 hectares) of restricted military base on a depopulated atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the nearest continent. Back in 1966, the U.S. signed a secret agreement with Britain allowing the Pentagon to use the territory as an air base in exchange for a big discount on Polaris nuclear missiles. Five years later, hundreds of Navy Seabees arrived by ship and began pouring the 12,000-ft. (3,600 m) runway that would become a bulwark of American cold war strategy...
Unfortunately, construction of the base in 1971 crossed the line from efficiency to cruelty. First, the British and Americans had the islanders' dogs loaded into sealed sheds and gassed, according to Professor David Vine of the American University in Washington. Then the British packed the inhabitants, known as Chagossians, onto ships and sent them off to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to the west across the Indian Ocean, where many live to this day. A court case seeking right of return is under way in Britain, and last year the Chagossians were allowed to visit...
...films fit snugly into genre classifications. The 1992 Belgian film Man Bites Dog was a brutally dark fakeumentary; Tokyo Decadence from the same year was a study of degenerate Japanese sex. But they were peculiar and edgy enough to build a base of acolytes. One of these was Geddes, who can be seen on the TIFF Midnight Madness blog in video footage of the audience from 1990; he's the one with the gothic cross. In 1992 he published a Hong Kong fanzine called Asian Eye, concentrating on action movies by the likes of Jackie Chan and John Woo, which...
Rove's 2004 strategy was to focus on Hispanic voters in swing states like Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Ohio. "Those groups are now firmly back in the Democratic camp," Gamarra said. Republicans "are losing their base, so they're much less concerned with solidifying what they gained with Hispanics in 2004." And the Democrats have been quick to pick up on Rove's strategy: All four of the top Democratic candidates have aggressively been courting Hispanic voters in those states, Gamarra said...