Word: doubtfulness
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...does not feel like patronizing director Marc Forster's film. One feels more like cheering it along. Yes, it is full of contrivance and coincidence. Yes, it comes to an uplifting ending that is not entirely plausible. And yes, we somehow never doubt that the good people of this tale are somehow going to triumph, even when they lose everything and are immersed in historical darkness. That's because they have the only qualities that count in stories of this kind - pluck, decency and resilient spirits...
...Even Giuliani, the national front-runner - a title that normally means something in a G.O.P. race but this year is the equivalent of "honorary chairman" - is slumping in polls. Republicans have no experience with chaos like this, except in history books. "It is without a doubt," says G.O.P. strategist Ralph Reed, "the most unpredictable roller-coaster ride we've seen in a Republican primary since the rise of the primary in the 1960s." Party-history buff Newt Gingrich went further: he called the G.O.P. contest the most wide-open race the party has held since 1940 - the year Wendell Willkie...
...here, repeatedly naming Hillary Clinton in debates as the real threat facing the nation. But Sanford warns that there are limits to this approach. Sounding the alarm about Democrats may not work, he says, because the electorate is "fairly ticked off at Republicans." But he adds that Republican self-doubt is so marked that if Jesus came back as a candidate, "people would say, 'You know, I don't like his beard...
...Serious historians do not doubt that the massacre took place. But there is much disagreement over the details. Were 200,000 people killed or 300,000? Were 20,000 raped or 80,000? The whole truth may never be known. According to Samuel Yamashita, a professor at Pomona College in the U.S., details of the massacre and other atrocities were swept under the rug in postwar Japan, because the U.S. needed a strong Japanese nation on their side to counterbalance the growing threat of Communist China. "Execute a few heinous individuals and forget about everything else." That's how Joshua...
...seeds of doubt about what happened in 1937 have sprouted into enduring enmity between modern China and Japan. Throw in semantics, language barriers, differing collective memories, and national pride, and you start to get a sense of why the two countries cannot agree on the "facts." This lack of consensus plays into the hands of demagogic politicians. Japanese nationalists know their constituents respond to downplaying and denial of the massacre. A vocal and powerful minority, they fan the flames of other incendiary political issues, such as visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the general who commanded forces in Nanjing...