And Imad Khadduri posts a picture of some typical black humour

This sparked the brief but bitter civil war.

Hence the bitter experience of frequent reverses in peace efforts.

Most victims also use various excuses to bottle up their memories.

It is against this bitter backdrop that a new Afghan president will be elected and the withdrawal of forces carried out.

The bitter irony of Gu s high speed trial is that she was a true believer in China s legal system.

As we know from bitter experience, waiting only makes a peace settlement harder to achieve.

The severe impact of natural disasters will constantly remind us of the harsh experiences and the critical development challenges confronting many island countries.

But renaming it a struggle or a strategic challenge has not changed the grim realities on the ground.

Americans are accustomed to thinking that their country s bitter experience in Vietnam taught certain lessons that became cautionary principles.

The lamentable reality is that securing 22 billion in annual funding by 2015 will be practically impossible.

Germany s current policy is all the more absurd in view of the bitter political and economic consequences that it would face.

But, while Cameron should know from grim experience what is looming, it seems that he has abandoned rational considerations.

After its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade, the US can hardly afford a Syrian quagmire.

In the wake of the repeated Russia Ukraine dispute, indeed, Europe must react with the same decisiveness to diversify its energy supplies that it demonstrated in the 1970 s in meeting OPEC s challenge.

There is no indication that Bush will begin to grasp this bitter reality during the remaining months of his term.

Since the war, the bitter enmities between Al Qaeda and other Salafist and Sunni Arab nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even mergers.

And that, in turn, has triggered a round of bitter political squabbling that threatens to negate the entire idea of a much more powerful European voice on the global stage.

t's fourth months away from the March 19, 2008 Five Year Anniversary of the launch of the US invasion of Iraq, and over that time we ve had to endure an unfortunate number of sobering experiences.

In the Machiavellian tradition, lying is sometimes justified by reference to the higher needs of political statecraft, and sometimes by the claim that the state, as an embodiment of the public good, represents a higher level of morality. That tradition is once again in the spotlight, as the question of political untruth has recently resurfaced in many bitter disputes.

Though the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties were bitter foes, there was consolation in that both were members of a confederacy of despotisms.

We know how difficult it is, after arduous years, to make conciliatory gestures, but such gestures are necessary if we want to hasten the solution of the last conflict in the heart of Europe.

At that time, Assyria riven by a series of bitter civil wars being fought for control of the kingdom after the death of its last great ruler, Ashurbanipal.

Mr. Dapkiunas (Belarus) (spoke in Russian) In the history of humankind, remembrance and reconciliation, the bitter memory of past wounds and losses, are often an insurmountable wall in the minds of individuals and entire peoples.

To be sure, if this new truce is merely technical, if efforts are not made to stabilize and consolidate it, it could become just one another in a long string of bitter episodes.

Moreover, the armed forces have become a shadow of their former self, and still have human rights legacies hanging over them from the country s bitter civil war.

It has never been easy for a nation to face up honestly to the bitter fact of having committed war crimes, genocide, unjustified foreign aggression, or having mistreated and killed its own people.

These countries can perhaps learn from the bitter experience of Detroit, which issued 1.4 billion worth of municipal bonds in 2005 to ward off an impending financial crisis.

But it has also lost sight of the 1990 s the first of its so called lost decades when the authorities did all they could to prolong the life of insolvent banks and many nonfinancial corporations.

If the international community collectively succeeds in helping Iraq to seize the moment, we will, at the same time, succeed in bringing to an end the bitter divisions caused by earlier actions related to this question.

That bitter memory of oppression and exploitation lingers in the minds of too many Chinese like the afterimage of a bright light long after it has been turned off.

The bitter irony is that, at this suddenly inauspicious moment, Europe and the US are launching their most significant joint project since the creation of NATO a transatlantic free trade agreement.

Over the years avoiding the ultimate consequences through limitations butted against the bitter legacy of the surprise attacks suffered by both the US and Russia in World War II.

In Myanmar, despite bitter resistance from the military regime, Ban pressured the authorities to let in humanitarian aid after Cyclone Nargis devastated the country last year.

Sri Lanka's bitter war of terror one that practically invented the infamy of the suicide bomber had been showing signs of abating of late. But a bitter power struggle between Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, and a schism among the rebel Tamil tigers, now threatens to reignite the violence.

In the past, anguish at home and abroad about the quality of US governance its apparent arrogance, mindless parochialism, and incapacity to deliver coherent, credible, and decent policy outcomes has for the most part proved short lived.

The foreign minister of the Philippines, which is also currently engaged in a heated territorial conflict with China, called on Japan to rearm itself to balance China militarily, notwithstanding his country s bitter legacy of Japanese occupation.

Last year, with the stroke of his pen, Obama ended his predecessor s global war on terror. But renaming it a struggle or a strategic challenge has not changed the grim realities on the ground.

One thing is certain a breakup of the euro and the EU would entail Europe s exit from the world stage.

One central concern is that, unlike Europe s bloody wars of the first half of the twentieth century, which made war there unthinkable today, the wars in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century only accentuated bitter rivalries.

Instead of starting at the beginning of his presidency, with all those dodgy Florida voting machines, and plodding on to the bitterly unpopular end, he intends to concentrate on the 20 most consequential decisions he made in the White House.

Putin s promise to restore national self respect, shattered by Russia s bitter loss of superpower status in 1991, is centered around cowing Europe into submissively accepting Russia s sphere of privileged interest in the post Soviet nations.

However sudden the initial displacement, the impact can last for generations, together with a long term need for clean water, shelter, health care, and other basic services, as victims of Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998 know from bitter experience.

But, whereas the Europe s bloody wars in the first half of the twentieth century have made war there unthinkable today, the wars in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, far from settling or ending disputes, only accentuated bitter rivalries.

That is far from a foregone conclusion in Azerbaijan, where the last stint in power by some of the opposition leaders in 1992 1993 still evokes bitter memories of a time of war and crisis that few can recall without horror.