Word: alie
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...emerged to save a struggling franchise, like Michael Jordan, who proclaimed his 1995 return to the Chicago Bulls after a failed bid at pro baseball with a two-word press release: "I'm back." The deathless Rocky franchise aside, the "sweet science" seems to specialize in sequels: Muhammad Ali re-entered the ring three years after the New York State Boxing Commission revoked his license for his refusal to fight in Vietnam, while George Foreman, who quit boxing in 1974, became the oldest fighter to win a major heavyweight title 20 years later. And it's not just athletes...
Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini's death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards' fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves...
Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, continued to show the guards love, ensuring they got the latest military hardware and best facilities. They even set up their own university. Now the guard - sepah in Farsi - has evolved into what a study by the Rand Corp.'s National Defense Research Institute describes as an "expansive socio-political-economic conglomerate whose influence extends into virtually every corner of Iranian political life and society." Its commercial interests run into the billions of dollars and range from massive infrastructure projects to laser eye surgery. And in addition to the Intelligence Ministry, guardsmen...
...Scotland in the Spotlight I think the release of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi was unprincipled and shortsighted [Sept. 14]. But Americans, before getting steamed up about it, should remember that for 30 years the U.S. gave a safe haven to scores of Irish terrorists implicated in the murder of innocent British civilians. Irish terrorists sincerely believed that their cause justified murder; so do Islamic terrorists. And it's natural for Americans to feel that the deaths of Americans matter more than the deaths of Britons - but they cannot expect Britons to agree with them. David Watkins, Cardiff...
...refused to say what he had done during the national trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, whether he had seen combat or lost friends. When I asked his opinion of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's famous 2001 Quds Day speech, in which he called for an "Islamic bomb" to counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, Ahmadinejad denied that Rafsanjani had ever made such a speech. I said that I'd been there, using an official Iranian translator, and that the speech had made headlines worldwide. "None of the Iranians here around the table recall such a statement," he said...