Word: alphabet
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...rather separate wars, connected by the thuggish intentions of Saddam Hussein. War A, let's call it, is a nasty struggle for autonomy, power, money and influence among the fractious Kurds in northern Iraq and the sometime-friend, sometime-foe regional powers of Iraq, Iran and Turkey. An alphabet soup of rival Kurds locked in a cynical game of cooperation and betrayal want independence but fight each other more ferociously than anyone else. As the overseer of the Kurd safe haven established after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. is only tangentially involved, its main interest in the messy struggle...
Cinema Europe's hero is Abel Gance, who in the 1927 Napoleon harnessed an epic delirium unmatched before or since. "Here," Gance said, "was a new alphabet for the cinema." But with the entry of talking films that year, the language of silents became as obsolescent as Yiddish. Films got chatty, conservative; they still are. Most modern directors don't know Gance's "alphabet." They can barely spell...
...Naggar, an Egyptian who was formerly deputy director of research at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. But less gossipy flaws have been at least as damaging to the U.N.'s effectiveness and standing: bureaucratic confusion, duplication of effort, wasteful spending and lack of coordination--either among the alphabet soup of special bodies (around 100, according to one tally) or with the so-called central U.N. in New York...
...shot, two gravestones, a smile. The trial can be reduced to these emblems. Or to entries in a specialized gazetteer: Rockingham, Bundy, Brentwood. A bestiary: barking dog, white Bronco, blond Kato. Names on a list: Marcia and Johnnie, Darden and Shapiro, Fung, Lee, Scheck, Ito, Fuhrman. A weird alphabet: DNA, O.J., A.C., L.A.P.D., the N word. All are signposts to a greater geography, one uneasily contained on the premises of the California Superior Court. Television viewers saw the proceedings and were captured by the legal dramatics; and yet there were always hints of unseen details and untold tales...
Baseball star Hank Aaron told the class of 1995 that they have to "get to work learning the rest of the alphabet" now that they have earned an A.B. from Harvard and Radcliffe...