Word: closely
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...then turned around and agreed to a joint venture in iron ore with global rival BHP Billiton. Together the two control about 75% of the world's iron ore, which China's steelmakers consume ravenously. "That deal is China's worst nightmare," says an investment-banking source with close ties to the global mining industry. (See pictures of China's infrastructure boom...
Keller finds herself at this pass because of a four-word sentence she uttered on Sept. 25, 2007: "We close at 5." According to a newspaper interview with Keller in October 2007 and pretrial testimony last year, she said those words to Ed Marty, general counsel for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). As the court's logistics officer, Marty had called the judge at the behest of lawyers for Michael Richard, 49, who had been on death row for two decades and whose execution was scheduled for that evening. The lawyers were allegedly having computer trouble and problems...
...issue is whether Keller was emphatically rejecting any pleadings to the court, or simply noting that the clerk's office closed at 5 p.m., as required by state law. Keller's attorneys will most likely argue the latter, saying everyone knows that Texas appellate law provides for after-hours filings directly to judges. Friends say Keller was bewildered by the fallout. In the days just after the event, she told the Austin American-Statesman that she was not informed why the attorneys wanted the clerk's office to stay open. "They did not tell us they had computer failure...
Meanwhile, the IRGC has been cleaning house. According to an opposition adviser who maintains close ties to the Guards leadership, at least five commanders sympathetic to the reformists were put under house arrest in the aftermath of the election. These purges within Iran's security apparatus consolidated power in the hands of the top Guards commanders, who form a united hard-liner bloc that is opposed to reconciliation with the opposition or the West. The IRGC, then, is the most effective power bloc in the country, certainly more cohesive in its top leadership than the conservative political faction, which...
While Ahmadinejad has always had close ties to the Revolutionary Guards - 14 of his 21 ministers in his first-term cabinet were said to have been veterans of the force - his current position suggests that it is now he who must pay homage to the Guards. When he appointed a seemingly moderate in-law as his Vice President last month, in defiance of the Supreme Leader, the Revolutionary Guards quickly put him in his place, warning that his political future was "dependent on his acceptance of velayat-e faqih [or rule by the clergy, the founding tenet of the Iranian...