Word: branches
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...Then there is Dhani's self-professed interest in Sufism. The Sufis make up a mystical branch of Islam that conservative Muslims dismiss as unconventional at best, and deviant at worst. "The fact that he is a Sufi is already going to be controversial with most Indonesian Muslims," says Hamid Basyaib, director of the Liberal Islam Network, a Jakarta-based organization promoting a moderate version of Islam. So will Dhani's admission that he does not pray five times a day-one of the religion's cardinal commands. Says Shofwan Chairul of the University of Indonesia's Islamic Students Association...
...same day that the CIA announced it will soon release hundreds of pages of once-classified documents that detail some of the agency's most closely guarded - and controversial - secrets of old, it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting even his own Executive Branch's efforts to find out what kind of secret material his office has been stashing away over the last four years...
...attempts by a tiny federal agency to compile information - in accordance with an executive order signed by George Bush himself - on the classified documents being held by the Vice President's operation. Cheney's office argued that the Vice President's office, because it has both executive and legislative branch duties, is exempt from the order...
...Cheney's resistance to oversight by anyone - congressional or executive - isn't new. It dates to the mid-1970s, when a Democratic Congress, emboldened by the excesses of Watergate, reined in the executive branch in a variety of ways: imposing a new budget regimen on the Presidency, passing a war powers law that tied its hands overseas and holding months of oversight hearings of agencies like the FBI and CIA, which had run amok in the Nixon...
...classic confrontation more than 30 years in the making, and it will continue until the Bush era ends: One side is completely comfortable with using its subpoena power against an executive branch, while the other is utterly content to ignore...