Word: conflicting
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...only surprise about this month's battle for Chad's capital city N'Djamena is that it was so long in coming. Every Chadian political dispute in the last 40 years has been settled by force of arms, and the latest conflict is running true to form. A coalition of Chadian rebels, backed by Sudan, made a lightning dash westward across the country from Darfur and assaulted the capital city. Hundreds of soldiers and civilians died in two days of bloody street fighting before Chad's President, Idriss Déby, with help from the French, rallied and pushed back...
...first time. Oil promised real wealth, even schools and clinics. But hopes soured when Déby fixed the 2001 elections and Transparency International ranked Chad as the world's most corrupt country (alongside Bangladesh). Déby faced down mutinies at home, but the fuse for the current conflict was lit with the 2003 insurrection in Darfur, led in part by his own Zaghawa tribesmen...
...bargain or a burden? The nation certainly doesn't feel as if it's engaged in a major war. Nothing is rationed, there are relatively few casualties, and the entire burden of waging the conflict falls on the shoulders of the 1% of Americans that serve in the professional military...
...media entrepreneur, and becoming Italy's richest man. Berlusconi came into politics in 1994 billed as the ultimate outsider, scoffing at Rome's stuffy establishment and passing his downtime singing Neapolitan love ballads and frequenting his palatial villa in Sardinia's Porto Cervo. His refusal to resolve a gargantuan conflict of interest, as owner of Italy's three main private television stations, made him controversial. So too did his frequent gaffes, unintended and otherwise, including telling Wall Street executives that Italy was worthy of investment for the beauty of its secretaries and calling a German politician "pefect for the part...
...initial hours and days of the rebel push into N'Djamena, Paris remained in close phone contact with Déby - at one point offering him asylum in France. But French public statements about the conflict were confined to assurances that French troops in Chad were involved only in protecting foreign civilians and evacuating expatriates, and that bilateral security accords between the two countries did not require France to intervene to save an embattled regime...