Word: hamas
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...Syria's population, the Alawites are looked at by extremist Sunni Muslims as heretics, fallen-away Muslims, usurpers who should be put to the sword. In the late '70s and early '80s, the Sunni extremists came close to getting their way. During a February 1982 Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Hama, Syria's third largest city, Hafez al-Assad felt compelled to flatten it in order to stay in power...
...Look, they even got Osama bin Laden to talk," quips Gula Hama Amin, one of 30 women watching the film in Nura, a village 100 miles north of Sulaimaniyah, referring to Gaznei's luxuriant beard. The others tell her to quiet down. All have been circumcised for reasons hovering somewhere between religious belief and tradition: locals say the food an uncircumcised woman cooks is unclean, or that the operation makes a girl more affectionate to her family...
...civil war, Syrian stability will be undermined. Lebanon has had a Sunni fundamentalist element in the north for more than 25 years. As I've written before in this column, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood used northern Lebanon as a rear base to seize the Syrian city of Hama in 1982. Lebanese Sunni, including fundamentalist Palestinians, were instrumental in the attack. In 2000, a Qaeda-affiliated group in northern Lebanon attacked the Lebanese army. Iraq and Afghanistan have only exacerbated the problem...
...according to the Japanese Health Ministry - and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - the side effects that Hama has seen are more likely caused by influenza itself. In rare juvenile cases influenza can cause brain inflammation - encephalitis - that can lead to neuropsychiatric events. In fact, it was in Japan in the mid-1990s that pediatricians first began reporting such cases, which led to intense nationwide surveillance of pediatric influenza...
...Hama notes, however, that it was around that same time that Tamiflu became widely used in the country. (Tamiflu is taken far more often here than in any other country; Japanese doctors prescribed the drug 24.5 million times between 2001 and 2005,compared to just 6.5 million prescriptions in the U.S.) Cases that included neurological side effects seemed to spike at the same time that Tamiflu prescriptions rose in Japan. Nevertheless, it is possible that the side effects accompanied the disease and that more such extreme cases were seen because doctors were looking harder...