Word: commitment
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Kofi Annan dominated the headlines this week, showing once again in his uniquely unassuming way why he may well be the world's best-loved and most widely respected political figure. First, the dulcet-voiced U.N. Secretary General ever-so-gently persuaded the governments of the world to commit to a global strategy to fight an AIDS pandemic that has killed 20 million people and has already selected its next 30 million victims...
...Still, isn't this insistence on an extended period without violence an invitation to the naysayers to commit outrages? After all, if you're an Islamic Jihad leader, your objective is to stop any resumption of the peace process. And it's very easy to do, because one dramatic terror attack may be enough to derail it. Back in the early years of Oslo, Yitzhak Rabin factored that in by uncoupling terrorism from the future of negotiations. He famously said, "We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace...
...constant isolation from one another in cells infested with scorpions, rats, cockroaches and fleas. Their possessions, including family photos, were destroyed by sadistic guards in a bonfire. After 15 years of misery came the "Night of the Long Knives": Malika's mother Fatima and her eldest son tried to commit suicide, and Malika slit the wrists of a sister in a frenzied but failed attempt to end her suffering. More striking than the cruelty the Oufkirs endured, however, is their heroic will to overcome it. Despite their weak state and a formidable force of prison guards, they spent years planning...
...initial choice for the role of Jen, the young beauty who steals the sword, the center of the kung fu epic's plot. "Physically, she's incredible," Lee enthused at the time. Shu Qi was on board?for eight weeks. Then manager Wong pulled her because he had committed her to a Japanese tea commercial for Coca-Cola. "She was supposed to shoot from April to November," Wong says, "but it turned out she had a previously existing contract." Lee told Wong his big-budget film required the cast to be on hand every day and couldn't release...
...pittance. Han Dong Jun and his older brother Dong Shik raise herbs and medicinal plants on a patch of cleared forest land for a Chinese farmer in a remote stretch of mountainside frontier. They say he won't pay them until the the crop is ready or commit to how much he'll give them. As illegal immigrants, they have nowhere to turn...