Word: communist
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There was a time when no one in the U.S. would have had anything nice to say about Konstantin Feoktistov except maybe that he wasn't a communist. Feoktistov, who died on Nov. 21 at age 83, was part of that cursed group of Soviet cosmonauts who had a troubling habit of beating the Americans to all the great milestones in space: Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth before John Glenn; Alexei Leonov walked in space before Ed White. And Feoktistov, along with two compatriots, was part of the first group spaceflight, piloting the Voskhod 1 when it rocketed into orbit...
Feoktistov was different from other Soviet flyboys. For one thing, he was an egghead, a prominent spacecraft designer who also had the guts to fly the technology he helped develop. For another, he snubbed the Communist Party--professional suicide in the U.S.S.R. "I had many enemies who did not want me to make that flight," he famously told the Boston Globe in a 1998 interview. "Once we took off, I remember thinking, That's it. No one can get me off this spaceship...
...least the 10th film version of the Hua Mulan tale ("Hua" is the heroine's surname). Many of the previous films - like Mulan Joins the Army, released in 1939 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai - carried political messages during turbulent periods in the country's history. In 1956, after the Communist Party had banned American films and nationalized the country's film studios, a state-sponsored Hua Mulan was released, touting the party's egalitarian gender policy. After many Chinese filmmakers fled communist-controlled China, the Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong gave overseas Chinese audiences a vision of a unified China...
...Adding onto their concern is the fact that Thailand is today more deeply divided politically and socially than at any time since its communist insurgency ended in the early 1980s. In the past three years, the country has been rocked by demonstrations, a military coup, an airport takeover and riots. Since the early 1970s, King Bhumibol, a constitutional monarch, has served as a unifying figure and stabilizing force in Thai society, intervening on occasion to stop bloodshed between the military and democracy demonstrators and defusing political tensions.(See pictures of the 2008 protests in Bangkok...
...trade embargo against Cuba; yet even Latin leaders who scorn the Castros shake their heads at Obama's insistence on retaining that utterly failed and globally rebuked policy - a position he holds despite polls that show a majority of Cuban-Americans now favor letting U.S. citizens travel to the communist island, and which suggest they're also weary of the 47-year-old embargo...