Word: firebrands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When union firebrand Amir Peretz snatched the leadership of Israel's Labor Party last week, he sent a shock through the country's political system. Labor, the traditional bastion of the Israeli élite, has been in sharp decline since its last Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, was defeated by Ariel Sharon in 2001. Now Peretz, a Moroccan-born resident of one of Israel's poorest towns, promises to revitalize Labor by shaking things up even more...
...forgive conduct toward himself and all South African blacks that his own moral code tells him is unforgivable. That he bowed to such compromise is testimony to the fact that the Nelson Mandela who walked with such dignity out of prison in February 1990 was not the same firebrand who had been placed there 27 years before. Born into the royal family of the Thembu, a clan of the Xhosa tribe based in the Transkei, Mandela was trained as a boy to rule someday as a chief. Instead he became a lawyer and an A.N.C. militant. It was just...
...ites, and therefore the Bush Administration has hopes for two other possible leaders. One is Adil Abdul Mahdi, said to be among the more pragmatic religious Shi'ite leaders. And then there is Chalabi, who has built a formidable network of Shi'ite associates that includes the radical firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Of course, Chalabi has serious downsides as well-aside from the greasy residue on his resume. The Sunnis don't like him. He has been an advocate of the most extreme and injudicious de-Baathification proposals. When asked how Chalabi might bring the Sunnis back into...
...environmental policy was ranked next to last, registering with just 8%. "Young Germans tend to let their belly decide who they vote for," says Stefanie Wahl of the Bonn-based think tank the Institute for Economic and Social Research. They have also embraced the traditional family values that their firebrand elders rejected. Not for them the lifestyle of Fischer - married four times and now divorced with a girlfriend half his age - or Schröder, who has a similar record. In a recent poll by the Forsa agency in Berlin, 87% of young people aged 18 to 30 said they...
...thrive on the type of open debate, rousing speeches, and out-and-out polemics that are held to be a valuable tonic to democratic institutions. The Fellows of Harvard College need consensus, good faith, calm deliberation, and open minds. It would not be sensible to recommend putting a radical firebrand on the Corporation. But the amicable consensus that permits the Corporation to run the University as it judges fit, out of the harsh glare of the public eye, need not be a rigid unanimity that threatens to blind the Corporation to the nature of the many problems that Harvard...