Word: ironic
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...this transformation is neatly illustrated by the marvelous “Goodbye Lenin” story of Jan Grzebski, who woke up from a 19-year coma four days ago. When the former Polish railway worker suffered his horrific accident in 1988, millions of people languished behind the Iron Curtain, Americans practiced nuclear shelter drills, and students had to navigate the Dewey decimal system—a life unimaginable today. In Jan’s words, “When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol...
...gray space. Joy, a 43-year-old Malay, needed to seek permission to legalize her conversion from the Shari'a court, which considers forsaking Islam a crime. And since she is still classified as a Muslim, she could not use the civil-law system. The Federal Court failed to iron out this catch-22, ruling that it had no jurisdiction over her religious conversion. With no further legal recourse left, only Joy's faith can give her solace...
...what was the biggest city in the 17th century Swedish empire? (Hint: it wasn't Stockholm.) For centuries, the stately medieval port on the shores of the eastern Baltic Sea served as the bustling gateway between Russia and the West. Then, following World War II, it withered after the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, cutting it off from the outside world. But Riga is now experiencing a renaissance. It may not have re-established the prominence it enjoyed 400 years ago, but as any of its trivia-wielding residents will tell you: it's getting there...
...container and passenger terminals sprang up. At its low ebb, in the early 1990s, only 1,000 ships entered the port each year; now more than 3,600 do so. Hermanis Cernovs, a naturalized Latvian born in Russia, has witnessed the transformation at first hand. When the Iron Curtain fell, he was commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine. Today, he organizes joint sea-rescue exercises with France, Sweden and the U.S. as the head of the Latvian coast guard. "The changes of the past decade were very, very fast," he says in English, the region's new lingua franca. "They...
...Carter, also 83, praised Graham as a boundary-breaking preacher who had the greatest influence on his own spiritual life. Graham was the "first evangelist of any stature" who penetrated the Iron Curtain, starting with a crusade in Hungary in 1977 and eventually preaching four times in the Soviet Union. Concluded Carter, "I'm just one of tens of millions of people whose spiritual life has been shaped by Billy Graham...