Word: communist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Angela Merkel, the front runner to become Germany's next Chancellor, developed her style early. As a 12-year-old growing up in the communist eastern part of the country, she was asked by a swimming teacher to experiment with a low diving board at the local pool. She edged to the end and stopped. Forty minutes passed before she jumped in. "I need a lot of start-up time," Merkel told a local journalist. "I am not spontaneously courageous...
...quiet revolution in European politics. If elected, she will become Germany's first female Chancellor, a big accomplishment in a political culture in which women still struggle against a glass ceiling. And she'd be the first Chancellor in a unified Germany to have grown up in the communist east. "Ten years ago, the idea that we'd have a female Chancellor from East Germany would have raised nothing but laughs," says political analyst Alfons Söllner. "Today it will make people proud...
...imposing legacy of global outreach. John Paul not only racked up the miles-104 foreign trips during his 26-year papacy-he also had a natural gift for leaving both spiritual and political footprints almost anywhere he touched down (and kissed the ground): subtly undermining the Communist regime with emotional sermons in his native Poland; challenging breakaway priests of Latin America's "liberation theology"; reaching out with an old man's wisdom at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall...
...been in a hundred battles, but this is the only place I've had to fight ghosts," says policeman Samrid, a veteran of Thailand's anti-communist campaigns of the 1970s. The decree will not make the enemy any clearer. "We don't know who they are," he says. "So how can we win?" Meanwhile, wanted posters multiply at police and train stations and other public places. The Thai word for "dead"-that is, shot by security forces-has been scrawled over some mugshots, but most suspects are still at large despite the promise of hefty rewards...
...Shanghai. The idea of keeping pets - naughty or otherwise - had long been taboo in the People's Republic of China. During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao's Red Guards killed pet dogs by the tens of thousands, seeing them as symbols of the pampered bourgeoisie his Communist regime was out to eradicate. Even dogs being bred for their meat in southern China were exterminated, and gourmets dissuaded from tasting the rich flesh lest they become infected by class depravity...