Word: alie
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...with Ahmadinejad, the real headline was his apparent cluelessness. It was almost as if Obama's announcement had taken him by surprise. It is well known that Ahmadinejad doesn't have operational control over the nuclear program or Iranian foreign policy - that resides with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei - but the exact extent of his powers, beyond management of the domestic economy, remains a mystery. He did not seem very powerful to us. His answers to our questions were sometimes opaque, often blatantly false, though not confrontational. Almost every question brought forth a flurry of crib notes hastily scribbled...
...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...