Word: fractiousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Running Indonesia?a fractious nation of 240 million people from more than 350 ethnic groups spread over some 17,500 islands?is a tough job at the best of times. But the country's new President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is taking over at a particularly difficult juncture. Terrorism is a constant threat. Among Asia's major developing economies, Indonesia's is growing the slowest. Recent years have witnessed a net outflow of foreign capital, frightened off not just by bomb blasts but corruption, red tape and a capricious legal system. The authorities have yet to resolve the stubborn separatist insurgency...
...ordinary, slightly fractious lower-middle-class family knows nothing about her secret life, which she has pursued for some 20 years, until one day when a patient of hers nearly dies after submitting to her "procedure" and she finds herself in the law's clutches. It is as gentle as it can be, considering her saintly demeanor. But it is also implacable in its need to punish her--indeed, to crush her spirit...
...best examples of religion as social organizer, according to Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity, was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the city's deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might...
...ugly work (you may want to avert your eyes while she is endlessly swallowing the drugs)--and dangerous too. If a packet breaks, the heroin will kill the carrier. But, of course, the money is great--thousands of dollars for a week's unpleasantness, enough to lift Maria's fractious family out of poverty and pay for the birth of the baby she is carrying...
...standoff between the Americans and Moqtada Sadr's men at Najaf, and has lately been mediating between the Interim Government and the Kurdish leadership over the fate of Kurdish autonomy. Although he has no substantial constituency of his own, an ability to mediate and therefore help manage the fractious politics of post-Saddam Iraq could ensure continued influence for Washington's erstwhile favorite - precisely because the U.S. is now ceding its formal political control over Iraq, leaving the Iraqis to settle their own differences...