Word: whether
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Political dialogue tends to the maximalist in a country that until recently saw things in black and white. But at the heart of the hysteria about Zuma was genuine concern about whether a man who had faced trial for both rape (he was acquitted) and corruption (the charges were dropped) was fit for office. So many African liberation movements have gone from triumph to tyranny, hope to corruption. Even with the saintly figure of former leader Nelson Mandela in the wings, would Zuma and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), do the same? (See pictures of South Africa after...
Regardless, Obama’s stated rationale in support of the given timeline is sound enough. A drawdown date, however definite, will certainly incentivize the Afghan government to get its act together and try to take more responsibility for its own security. But given its current weakness, whether it can begin to effectively do this in just 18 months is far from a given...
...World News had already been conjuring bizarre creatures, unusual sightings, and freakish situations for 13 years, and if Hollywood hadn’t already put the public through the ringer of supernatural scenarios, then WWN was probably coming scarily close to filling any gaps in the collective imagination. But whether it was the strangely sympathetic, glassy round eyes or the face that rivaled Macaulay Culkin’s “Scream” impression, Bat Boy, who made an appearance for the first time that month, caught the attention of shoppers and soon became the sweetheart of supermarket tabloid...
...have imagined to be a philosophical question has now revealed itself to be a question of science. When they speculated about the consequences the Large Hadron Collider would have for human civilization, physicists probably didn’t expect to answer the question of free will as well. Whether the world’s largest particle collider will ever succeed in creating a Higgs boson effect, it has already made a hefty contribution to the field of philosophy...
...smaller scale, that's what Obama is trying to do with Iran and Syria today. By reaching out to both regimes simultaneously, he's making each anxious that the U.S. will cut a deal with the other, leaving it out in the cold. It's too soon to know whether Obama's game of divide and conquer will work, but by narrowing the post-9/11 struggle, he's gained the diplomatic flexibility to play the U.S.'s adversaries against each other rather than unifying them against...