This year in TAL Afar, it was a very different story.

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It was in the northern town of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, that American and Iraqi army units recently attacked Sunni insurgents, claiming to have killed 157 of them and capturing 440 more.

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Substitute Mame Biram Diouf played the ball one side of Tal Ben-Haim and collected it round the other but then blazed his shot over.

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But there's a lot of positive foundation in Tal Afar in my view and it would not take much to get that thing back on the right course again.

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To that end it's created the TV Application Layer (TAL), which uses the latest web technologies, like HTML5, to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible for would-be hardware makers.

ENGADGET

The mistake was that, you know, we left Tal Afar to its own devices, and it's not surprising that they had the opportunity to get back in there.

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The delay cannot be blamed on the Iraqi politicians, anyway: it is the direct result of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) which was agreed last year by hand-picked Iraqi politicians under the strong guidance of the Americans and British.

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TAL unsurprisingly, seeing as they largely wrote it.

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