Word: cult
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Matters Late last summer, his father, 68, suffered a stroke, and that brush with mortality apparently concentrated his mind. North Korea was founded by Kim Jong Il's father, the so-called Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who has become, in the decades since, the focus of a dynastic cult of personality like no other. (Dead for 15 years, Kim Il Sung is still North Korea's "President for life.") Kim Jong Il has three sons from two wives. The eldest embarrassed his father in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport. His father thinks...
...notes that while she and many fellow Muslims opposed the headscarf ban as meddling in private matters of choice, she is relieved at action taken on the burqa. "Imposition of this garment on women is one manner Salafists get individuals to renounce their individuality and submit to the extremist cult thinking that masquerades as Islam - but which is an abomination of it," Bouzar says. "That Salafist influence and activity is spreading, and if it takes political action to prevent their cult from leading Muslims astray of Islam...
...Neither side has shown the will or ability to rise above their power squabble. Nor have they called to account the killers in their ranks. Crippled by biased police investigations and prosecutors, Kenya's courts have convicted no one for their part in the violence. A mystical and criminal cult called the Mungiki has replaced the government in many slums, providing water, housing and dispute-settlement along with drugs, prostitutes and protection. The police, endemically corrupt, fight the Mungiki for turf, and have executed nearly 500 in the last few years, according to a February report by Philip Alston...
Others apply methods familiar to psychologists and those who deprogram cult members. James Fitzsimmons, a retired FBI interviewer who dealt extensively with al-Qaeda members, says terrorism suspects often use their membership in a group as a psychological barrier. The interrogator's job, he says, "is to bring them out from the collective identity to the personal identity." To draw them out, Fitzsimmons invites his subjects to talk about their personal histories, all the way back to childhood. This makes them think of themselves as individuals rather than as part of a group...
...dusting off the 1974 television show Land of the Lost, director Brad Silberling's goal was not to craft a PG-rated romp through the educational terrain of Sid and Marty Krofft's original series, but to tweak and distort all the various elements that made the series a cult sensation in the first place. The movie, which hits theaters Friday, reimagines the space-time of this alternate universe with an eye toward the absurd. The story still centers on disgraced paleontologist Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell), but instead of his family he buddies up with scientist Holly Cantrell (Anna...