Word: alie
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...bizarre coda to an episode that seemed resolved, the Dutch government last week stepped down over Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk's treatment of controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For Prime [an error occurred while processing this directive] Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, it was his second coalition break-up in only four years in office. In May, "Iron Rita" Verdonk took away Hirsi Ali's passport because the Somalian-born woman had entered the country and requested asylum in 1992 under a false name, as she had openly admitted. Many considered Verdonk's handling of the dossier excessively harsh...
Where Ayaan Hirsi Ali goes, controversy seems to follow--and linger. The Somali-born activist, named to 2005's TIME 100 for her campaign against Islamic extremism, quit the Dutch Parliament in May after being told she would be stripped of citizenship for lying on her 1992 application for asylum. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk flip-flopped last week, saying Hirsi Ali's citizenship was safe. But the Dutch coalition government was not, and collapsed amid discord over Verdonk's original move. Hirsi Ali, 36, regrets that the citizenship issue was politicized and not debated more seriously. "This is absurd...
...most powerful man in Iran avoids the gilded trappings of office. While many of the officials who serve under him build Caspian Sea villas and travel in caravans of shiny new SUVs, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme religious leader, conducts himself with the modesty of a small-town mullah. He receives visitors in spare, undecorated offices in downtown Tehran and often runs meetings seated on the floor and wearing a plain black robe. Billboards with his portrait are ubiquitous in the capital, depicting Khamenei more as a rumpled civil servant than a revolutionary, with thick glasses and rough...
...Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijiani, told Britain's Guardian newspaper this week that the Iranian counter-offer will address what he said were "ambiguous points" in the Western offer. "These ambiguities persist from the beginning to the end of the package," he told the paper. "The package is more like a statement. If we are going to get agreement, we do not need a sermon...
...they appear likely to reject the Western demand that Iran suspend its small-scale enrichment experiments before any talks can be held. Instead, pragmatic elements close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have indicated a willingness to accept a deal in which Iran agrees, for a defined period of years, to refrain from industrial-scale uranium enrichment and instead acquire its reactor fuel from Russia or elsewhere. Nonetheless, they hope to come away from the table with an agreement that allows them to continue enrichment experiments, under international monitoring, with a cascade of centrifuges too small to create weapons-grade...