Word: fray
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...Khamenei likes to project the image of a magnanimous grandfather, selflessly staying above the fray to guide the country in a virtuous direction ... in reality he is notoriously thin-skinned. Criticism of the Leader is one of the few remaining redlines in Iranian politics, almost a guarantee of a prison sentence." - Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a March 2008 report...
...order of the day. Revelations of the tawdry behavior of modern MPs - expensing everything from improvements to second homes to their spouse's porn - have led to popular outrage in Britain and claimed the scalp of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a supposedly above-the-fray symbol of Parliament's reputation. The scandal has exposed what anyone who has spent time in the House of Commons knows well; that many of its members are has-beens and never-will-bes, self-important rhetoricians inebriated (as one truly great parliamentarian said of another) with the exuberance of their...
...Entering the electoral fray will be an ironic development for PAD, as its platform dubbed "New Politics" once called for denying the nation's rural majority the right to vote on the basis that they are uneducated and sell their votes to corrupt politicians. The movement's positions range from reasonable - such as reforming corruption in politics and pushing for an unbiased state-run media - to questionable at best, with one PAD leader recently praising North Korea's land reform program, saying that although North Koreans were starving, they had pride of small land ownership...
Then an unlikely figure entered the fray: Angela Merkel. German Chancellors don't usually weigh in on church matters, she said. But when the Vatican gave "the impression that it could be possible to deny that the Holocaust happened," she felt compelled to demand that the Pope repudiate the idea, lest it affect relations with "the Jewish people as a whole." In essence, Merkel (a Protestant) was tutoring the German Pope on his responsibilities to the Jews...
...Vatican has a tradition of remaining largely above the fray while allowing - sometimes even encouraging - local bishops to be more aggressive in challenging political leaders. In Italy, for instance, both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have given communion to pro-choice politicians while letting Italian church leaders take the role of lecturing those Catholics on their dissent from church teaching. And this is particularly true of the Vatican's relationships with foreign leaders, whom the Pope views as fellow heads of state. Some observers have interpreted Cardinal George's Oval Office meeting with Obama on St. Patrick...