Word: beiruters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Beirut March 14 Madness Lebanon's ruling March 14 alliance won a surprise majority in the country's hotly contested June 7 parliamentary elections, upsetting an opposition coalition led by the Shi'ite paramilitary group Hizballah. The pro-West, anti-Syria alliance's victory was lauded by the U.S., which had threatened to withhold financial aid to Lebanon if the Iran-backed opposition triumphed. Negotiations on the creation of a national-unity government are set to begin in the coming weeks, though Hizballah's insistence on retaining legislative-veto power is expected to be a source of contention...
...four years that followed, many Iranians bitterly regretted their decision not to vote. I was living in Beirut in 2005, and failed to cast my ballot at the Iranian embassy there. When I moved to Iran later that year and began to suffer the slowly emerging consequences of Ahmadinejad's victory, I scolded myself daily. Ambivalence and laziness had gotten the better of me, and I deserved to suffer the consequences. I also scolded all my friends and relatives who hadn't voted. When they complained about double-digit inflation, a real estate price hike of 150%, five-hour lines...
...four women chatting at an outdoor restaurant in an old cobblestone courtyard would draw little notice in Tehran, perhaps, or Beirut or Amman. But with their heads wrapped in tight scarves, concealing every strand of hair, they stand out against the secular traditions of modern Sarajevo. Friends since childhood, the four women, all 23, laugh when asked how their mothers reacted after they became intensely religious and began wearing head scarves. "It was very strange for them," says Saudina Husic, a student of Arabic and Persian, her legs covered by a pea-green robe that matches her veil. "But they...
...first year working in Lebanon, I met with an American official at a café in East Beirut. Embassy officials can't easily leave their compound, on a hill outside the city, thanks to security procedures that treat this normally fun-loving Mediterranean country as if it were Iraq or Sudan. That's because the previous embassy was destroyed by a suicide car bombing in 1983, an attack that the U.S. blames on Hizballah, the Shi'ite Muslim Party of God that had been formed a year earlier to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. But this café meeting...
...Iran; they have been in a sort of low-level war for 30 years. After the hostage crisis began in 1979, the U.S. seized Iranian assets and cut diplomatic relations. U.S. officials have alleged that Iran was behind the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, the U.S. tilted toward Iraq. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea in an "axis of evil," embraced a policy of regime change in Tehran and rebuffed Iran's offer of talks...