Word: cleric
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hostage situation ruined the image of the resistance [against Israel] and the image of Islam," he says. The stern, no-nonsense cleric is not given to naming names and recounting anecdotes. He keeps his many secrets to himself. But he did offer one intriguing episode from the hostage-taking era. In early 1986, Toufeili says he was in regular telephone contact with the Lebanese kidnappers, urging them to release their captives. In May of that year he says he extracted a pledge that all the hostages would be released within a week. A day later, he was visited...
...white walls and guard towers of the hilltop Sheikh Abdullah military barracks are clearly visible from the home of Sheikh Sobhi Toufeili. As one of the founding fathers of Hizballah and its first secretary-general, the gruff 60-year-old cleric knows the barracks well - during the turbulent 1980s, it housed fighters from his organization and a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, as well as several Western hostages, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who died in captivity. But that was then...
...Such views have little traction in the Shi'ite villages of the eastern Bekaa Valley where Toufeili lives. Local residents openly mock the stubborn cleric, accusing him of being on the payroll of Hizballah's opponents. Small wonder, then, that he rarely leaves his home, and that his bodyguard rarely leaves his side...
...cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr, who pulled his 32-man delegation from al-Maliki's shaky coalition last week, has opposed the law. So too have several independent politicians. And the Kurdish Regional Government has cooled on the law, arguing that too many of the oil fields will fall under the control of the state-run Iraqi National Oil Company. The KRG's spokesman Khaled Salih says Kurdish politicians told Iraqi officials at the Dubai meeting: "It's not agreed yet." Now, if Sunni areas hold huge untapped oil and gas, it might draw Sunni politicians closer to Baghdad's energy...
...Eighteen months ago, one Rome-based progressive cleric had said he was "surprised to see that [Benedict] seems to be open to hear new ideas." But today, the same priest is disappointed. There has been no sign of any of the hoped-for reforms: overturning the ban on communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, reconsidering the celibacy requirement for priests, allowing gays in seminaries, or a softening of the condom ban to allow for distribution in AIDS-ravaged Africa. The release last month of the Pope's final document on what had seemed to be a convivial and intellectually open...