Word: abdelal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Compassion, says the Oxford English Dictionary, means "suffering together." There has been plenty of that among politicians in London and Washington since Scotland's Justice Minister freed Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" Aug. 20, citing doctors' reports that he was dying of prostate cancer. Al-Megrahi, the sole person jailed for the deaths of 270 people in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, had served just eight years of a 27-year sentence. After all their grieving, the victims' loved ones had to watch al-Megrahi land in Tripoli, Libya...
...under a deluge of facts. So the British government in Westminster and the semi-autonomous Scottish administration in Edinburgh could reasonably have expected the torrent of documents they published on Sept. 1 to kill off the wilder conspiracies surrounding last month's release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. And those documents - letters among Westminster, Edinburgh and Tripoli; minutes of meetings; and reports on everything from al-Megrahi's failing health to the hefty policing costs that would be incurred if he were released in Scotland - certainly did illuminate the decision-making process that...
...Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bloodless coup that brought him to power. And it might have been, had the world's longest-serving ruler not been wrangling for nearly two weeks with British and U.S. officials over the rapturous homecoming of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi after his release from a Scottish prison...
...Italy's sports pages duly took note of other Muslim players who observe Ramadan with varying degrees of strictness, including Siena's Abdel Kader Ghezzal, an Algerian who scored a goal against AC Milan on Saturday. Though a practicing Muslim, Ghezzal says he does not fast on training and game days during Ramadan. Inter's Muntari is more observant, though he reportedly ate pasta at lunch on Sunday, while refusing water before the match. Most imams say there are just a few groups of people exempted from the daytime fast, including pregnant women, the sick and the elderly. Though...
...Lockerbie trial may be over, but the standoff it was designed to resolve between Libya and the West continues. U.S. and British leaders responded to Wednesday's conviction of Libyan intelligence operative Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am 103 by insisting that sanctions will not be lifted until the Libyan government accepts responsibility for the attack and pays compensation to the families of the victims. The response from Tripoli, in the words of its foreign minister: "Never." Well, never say never - Libya's ambassador to London hinted Thursday that Tripoli may indeed be prepared...