Word: el
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Murder is among the most heinous of crimes, but the slaying of Marwa el-Sherbini, a pregnant 31-year-old Egyptian, was more terrible than most. During a July 1 hearing in Dresden, Germany, Russian-born Alex Wiens, in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at el-Sherbini, leaped from the defendant's dock and stabbed her to death. Wiens then turned his knife on el-Sherbini's husband, who was mistakenly shot by police in the scuffle. (He survived.) Recognizing a "special burden of guilt," the court sentenced Wiens to life in prison...
Even when the energy took a dark turn, the wave of emotion may have still served the interests of the 27-year-old Egyptian regime. "Football is the opium of the people," says Hossam el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger, journalist and activist. "Both Egypt and Algeria have been going through severe economic turmoil recently, in addition to political crises. What better way to divert the people's attention than a football...
...Salvadorans have responded positively to the idea. Some 70,000 students visited the Route of Peace last year. And, especially because Washington played such a large role in El Salvador's bloodletting, the site has also become an important educational tool for some U.S. university students. Christopher White, assistant professor of Latin American history at Marshall University in West Virginia, has brought students to El Salvador for the past four years, and says the Route of Peace has had a profound impact on them. "The students become immersed in the civil war, which means that they leave informed about...
...issues," Marquez says. "Now I remember it like a movie or a dream." For others, the memories are still more like a nightmare. "This is something we still haven't gotten over yet," says a soft-spoken Maria de la Paz Chicas, one of the few survivors of the El Mozote Massacre, in which the military murdered 1,700 villagers on Dec. 11, 1981. Chicas, who was 11 at the time, went into the nearby mountains to help pick coffee that day. She returned home to discover that everyone she knew - including playmates, neighbors and 17 family members - had been...
...El Salvador's civil war officially ended with a peace accord in 1992. But this month marks the 20th anniversary of the conflict's last major battle, a 1989 FMLN attack on the capital San Salvador. As part of its counterattack, the Army murdered six Jesuit priests and two of their housekeepers; but the rebels' actions during that urban offensive, which killed scores of civilians and injured hundreds more, weren't particularly admirable, either. If the Route of Peace can help to keep Salvadorans, and foreign governments like the U.S., from repeating the mistakes of that dark decade, then...