BRITAIN: Was Mother a Virgin?

Under a huge oil painting of King George VI's coronation, nine peers of the realm gathered last week in a paneled committee room of the House of Lords. Ranged around a horseshoe table, the lords listened intently as, one by one, bewigged barristers rose to argue the fine points of one of the oddest cases in British legal history—the sort of legal conundrum that could exist only in a country that still has titles and a nobility.

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They Had A Plan

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it

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SYRIA: Revolution

Tall, dignified Shukri el-Kuwatly had been called the George Washington of his country, but as Syria's first elected President, ailing, aging El Kuwatly acted more like a traditional, feckless Arab politician. He failed to stamp out corruption, stood indolently by while food prices soared

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