Word: habit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mahdi Army's boss. I met Moqtada al-Sadr in November 2003 at his office down a narrow alleyway in Najaf. We sat on pillows on the floor and he answered my questions with short, perfunctory statements. Barely 30, he had a round face, broad shoulders and a habit of glaring at guests beneath his thick, black eyebrows. He came across as menacing yet dull. At the time, he was holding massive Friday-afternoon prayer rallies that he populated with poor workers bused in from the slums of Sadr City in Baghdad 100 miles to the north. I was hearing...
...response to incidents like those, the Spanish government passed legislation last summer that imposes stiffer penalties on those who foment racism within sports. But even this new law may not be enough to combat a larger problem. "The real issue is that Spaniards have a habit of not taking this kind of thing seriously," says Esteban Ibarra, president of the Movement against Intolerance, a watchdog group. "There's a banalization, a permissiveness in the face of racist incidents that worries me more than the incidents themselves. As long as society as a whole continues to see these crimes as insignificant...
...President Nicolas Sarkozy has always made a point of insisting he won't be hog-tide by ideology, popularity polls, or enduring taboos in his efforts to reform France. But pundits have begun asking whether in reserving himself the right to say anything, Sarkozy hasn't gotten into the habit of contradicting himself by uttering just about everything. Indeed, in the past two weeks alone, various declarations by the president have proven so starkly at odds with one another that some observers are beginning to wonder if he isn't a touch, well, Sarkotic...
...What Lévy didn't pounce on was another Bruni-related case of Sarkozy contradiction: his blatant inconsistency on just how public he wants his private life to be. During a Jan. 8 press conference, for example, Sarkozy high-handedly defended the habit of leaving his private life open to scrutiny by the press, proclaiming he and Bruni "have decided to own up to" their relationship because "we don't want to hide". But as press reports began swirling the following week alleging the couple had already secretly married in Paris, Sarkozy decided maybe he did have something...
When Love Becomes a Habit...