he on-off-on-again relationship between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his finance advisor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, has moved closer to reconciliation, after both leaders paid tribute to each other at the annual Labour Party conference in late September.
　　Blair underlined that New Labour and its three unprecedented election victories would not have existed without Brown, while Brown portrayed the epitome of the leadership role at the conference, saying Blair has been an exceptional Labour prime minister, to whom the party and the nation owe an incalculable debt of gratitude.
　　However, there is no hope that their rift over the leadership battle will be completely bridged, especially after seven members of the Cabinet, who are believed to be loyal to Brown, resigned earlier last month in protest at Blair’s refusal to give an exit date.
　　And now, as Blair’s fortunes decline, those of Brown ascend and with it, observers say, the end of any friendship that may have existed between the two.
　　The two fresh-faced politicians were both successfully elected to Parliament in 1983. In those early days, they shared an office, found they shared a similar political agenda and collaborated when the opportunity arose. At the party leadership election in 1994, both men were keen to grab power. The two reportedly struck an agreement: Blair would take first option, and hand the reins over to Brown in turn. Things didn’t quite work out that way. Since the 1997 general election, Blair has won three consecutive terms in office, testing Brown’s patience and creating tension within the party. Mounting party conflicts, from leadership to policy issues, both in the corridors and out in public, are now a daily occurrence.
　　The Conservatives, led by the youthful and charismatic David Cameron, have seen a new lease on life and pose the biggest threat to the Labour Party in years, even though the next general election is not expected until 2009.
　　Yet despite Blair’s popularity nosedive, Brown’s approval rating in opinion polls is still lower than his prime minister. And while the odds are in Brown’s favor to succeed his former office mate, there is no guarantee that other challengers will not emerge from within Labour.
　　“They hate each other―really, madly, deeply. It’s been a peculiar bad marriage. If so, the two have stayed a couple not for the sake of the children, but for the sake of a government they both want desperately to run.”
　　William Keegan, author of The Prudence of Mr. Gordon Brown
　　“What’s happened this week is that the Labour Party has got its eye back on the ball and showed there’s only one enemy, and that’s the Conservatives.”
　　Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former head of communications, commenting after the annual Labour Party conference
　　“I’m doing my best job to make the case to Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham that their bill wouldn’t help anything, and that’s not the right way to negotiate with China.”
　　U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, DC, before Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham agreed on September 28 to drop their legislation to levy tariffs on imports from China, a measure aimed at pressuring a quick revaluation of the renminbi
　　“It is quite preposterous that the DPRK, under the groundless U.S. sanctions, takes part in the talks of discussing its own nuclear abandonment.”
　　Choe Su Hon, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) rejected further talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program at the general debate of the 61st Session of the United Nations General Assembly
　　“Everyone thinks we have the country’s backing. Well, we don’t. We make our decisions as a company, and we operate like any normal company. People are making too big a deal of what we are doing abroad.”
　　Zhou Baixiu, Beijing-based head of Sinopec Group’s overseas oil exploration and production unit, defended his company’s overseas business with Iran and Sudan after criticism about state support and control over the deals
　　“We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalized cells [in Iraq] will grow in importance to U.S. counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the homeland.”
　　Excerpts labeled “key judgments” from an April National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus of intelligence analysts from 16 U.S. federal agencies, arguing that the war in Iraq has made the United States less safe
　　“China is speeding up the development of nuclear fusion and I think at the moment they are making considerable progress.”
　　Karl Heinz Finken, a senior scientist at the Institute for Plasma Physics in Juelich, Germany, after China reported the first successful test of its thermonuclear fusion reactor, a clean and limitless energy source

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