Word: firebrands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Hugo Chavez took power and the world was first taking stock of the new leader in Venezuela, U.S. diplomats there counseled that the firebrand's bark was worse than his bite. "Pay attention to what Chavez does, not what he says," was the message to Washington from its people in the field. But after Chavez last weekend withdrew a controversial intelligence law in Venezuela, and told Colombia's FARC rebels that the age of Marxist guerrilla warfare in Latin America is over, many may be wondering if even the bark of the hemisphere's most prominent anti...
...Letizia Ortiz married Prince Felipe in May 2004, the former journalist not only catapulted herself into the glossy pages of Spain's hungry gossip magazines, but took her unsuspecting family members with her. None of them, not Letizia's teddy bear of a divorced-but-dating father, nor her firebrand of a grandmother, nor even her tragic youngest sister Erika, who killed herself in February 2007, got as much attention as Telma. Young, pretty, apparently good-hearted (she works for the Red Cross) and best of all unattached, Telma made perfect fodder for what the Spanish call "the pink press...
...three U.S. defense contractors who have been held hostage by the FARC since 2003. Chavez has, this year, mediated the release of a handful of high-profile Colombian hostages held by the guerrillas, and sources familiar with the case of the U.S. captives acknowledge that the Venezuelan firebrand could play a similar role in their freedom. It's an admittedly slim hope, but one the U.S. probably won't want to jeopardize at this point...
...Over the past six months, Chalabi has focused a lot of attention on delivering services to Sadr City, the northeast Baghdad Shi'ite slum that is a major stronghold of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. To do this required close coordination with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has over the past month been locked in fierce battles with U.S. and Iraqi government forces. The U.S. alleges that elements of the Mahdi Army have received training and weapons from Iran. "We talk to the Madhi Army," says Chalabi spokesman Mohammad Hassan al-Moussawi, "because the Madhi Army...
...father offered the twenty-minute Pastor's Prayer," he recalls in "Cuckoo on the Witness Stand." Elsewhere in the poem, he recounts that "I sang in a church choir during one war/ American TV made famous." Lee also likens his own poetry to "a mission," but he's no firebrand proselytizer. His tone throughout this collection is that of the soft-spoken, ecumenical humanist. A mini-aubade in "Become Becoming" likens dawn ("the air's first gold") to "that color of Amen." In the Emersonian "Evening Hieroglyph" he compares flitting birds to "decimals or numerals reconfiguring/ some word which, spoken...