Word: importantly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...large farm owned by the company was used for training courses in explosives. The witness also said that Salim, who allegedly received a monthly salary of $1,500, helped run bin Laden's Al Hijra Construction company, which ostensibly built roads and bridges but also had a permit to import explosives for construction use. The same witness said that Salim took him on a trip to a chemical-warfare-training facility in Sudan and was a critical link in the negotiations for an attempted $1.5 million purchase of South African uranium...
...temperatures became erratic. What water remained was a concentrated cocktail of salt, minerals and pesticide runoff from the cotton fields upstream. Moynaq, the nearest town, watched its livelihood drain away with the parting Aral. The former bustling port used to can 70 million tins of fish a year and import millions of tons of grain and coal. Now Moynaq's fleet lies beached in the desert just outside town, 100 km from the shore, its masts rusted sentinels in a fog of dust. The town is desiccated and almost deserted. The 2,000 people who remain strip the ship hulks...
Here's the case for being worried: we import far more of our oil than we used to do. In 1973 imports accounted for 35% of U.S. consumption. Today the figure is 50%, and analysts expect it to rise to more than 60% by 2020. About two-thirds of the world's proven reserves are in the Middle East. Iran and Iraq already have poor relations with the U.S. If Saudi Arabia and Kuwait fell under regimes hostile to Washington, would the lights go out on Broadway--and everywhere else...
...border town of Chaman, I went to talk to a merchant who owned an import-export business. It was a dusty shop front with a very large carpet and no furniture other than a few bolsters. It didn't look like much, but appearances in this part of the world can be deceptive. Ostentation attracts envy - and trouble. It turns out this merchant, Haji Amanullah, and his brothers are very rich and very famous around these parts. They live in a 130-room palace outside Chaman and have offices in Tokyo, Dubai, Quetta and Karachi. He's going to Paris...
...fact that we in the Muslim world have not been able to overcome the trauma caused by colonialism. We could not open up to the tools that modernity suggested, for the simple reason that they were introduced by way of colonialism. Our oil wealth allowed us to import the most expensive consumer commodities, but we could not overcome our suspicions of outside political and ideological goods: democracy, secularism, the state of law, the principle of rights and, above all, the concept of the nation-state, which was seen as a conspiracy to fragment our old empire...