Word: bente
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What is it with France? It is one thing to oppose American policy on Iraq. Germany, China and many others have done so. France, however, has gone beyond mere opposition. France has been bent on organizing a worldwide coalition - a coalition of the unwilling - to stop the U.S., not just lining up other major powers like Russia but even sending its Foreign Minister on a tour of Africa to persuade three members of the U.N. Security Council to vote against the U.S. and ensure an American defeat...
Ribat Qila is at the point of a triangle where Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan meet. It is a forbidding place, a desert ringed by crimson and black mountains, where laws can be bent or broken for a few rupees, and safe passage across any frontier is easily secured. The men who pass fleetingly through Ribat Qila are smugglers, heroin traffickers, bandits and, lately, al-Qaeda fugitives...
...daring the French to veto the U.S. resolution on their own. At a closed-doors lunch after Friday's meeting, Powell made an emotional last appeal for support, telling the other ministers that the U.S. would never have come to the U.N. to begin with if it were hell-bent on war. Powell appeared to be personally hurt by French intransigence; it was France, after all, who in October demanded that the U.S. return to the Security Council for a second resolution before going to war. Powell's speech may have softened the hearts of wavering member states...
...ball and a makeshift hoop hung on a tree or the side of a house. In Mexico, there is scarcely a town that doesn't have at least one court, and even in impoverished Nigeria, many homes have a rim at the back, sometimes fashioned out of a bent tire iron. Basketball is the most popular school sport in China, where an estimated 250 million players shoot the ball with an NBA-influenced aggressiveness and flash that were seldom seen just a few years...
...Dune saga made a good fit in that it's a space opera with a philosophical bent. Dune tells of the rise to power of Paul Atreides (Alec Newman), a young noble and psychic who is adopted by the Fremen, a nomadic warrior people, as their messiah. The Fremen have been exploited for centuries because their desert planet (Arrakis, or Dune) is the sole source of "spice," a substance that makes hyperspace travel possible, expands consciousness and extends life--it's oil, LSD and Botox all in one. (Spice is an excretion of Dune's giant sandworms, but people ingested...