Word: ironic
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...Toufeili wears the Shi'ite clerical garb of white turban and black full-length robe, and sports a thick white beard. His tiny black eyes, glinting like chips of anthracite, are almost hidden in the fleshy folds of his chubby, tanned face. A man of cast-iron principles, Toufeili is a product of the eastern Bekaa, an area notorious for its lawlessness, its feuding Shi'ite clans, smuggling and narcotics production. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, Toufeili was in Tehran and helped organize the deployment in Lebanon of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recruited and trained hundreds...
Riot cops looked on attentively as the loud, rowdy crowd surged, shouting slogans outside the barred iron gates of a sprawling Parisian townhouse. Tension in the street gradually increased until the inevitable explosion shook the entire street - a detonation preceded by an eerie silence punctuated only by the hiss of thousands drawing a breath in anticipation. But the screaming outside the French Socialist Party headquarters on the Rue Solferino weren't the expressions of horror and despair heard five years earlier, when the right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen beat then Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin into the runoff against President...
...beguiling mix of upscale comfort (don't miss the hammam) with social and environmental sensibilities. Spacious rooms come stocked with Berber robes and slippers, but if you need to clean your clothes, the staff - all of whom are employed from surrounding villages - helpfully show you the washbasin and iron. Visitors are encouraged to remember they are "guests of the local inhabitants." Indeed, the Kasbah's quiet, natural setting either makes it, as one visitor wrote in the guest book, "a great place to make babies" or, judging from a po-faced couple we overheard, a breathtaking spot in which...
...jail wastes a body quickly. When I entered Cell 6 at Gwanda police station, I was fit. After five days in a concrete and iron-bar tank, with no food and only a few sips of water, my skin was flaking and my clothes were slipping off. A prison blanket had given me lice. The water I had palmed from a rusty tap in the shower had given me diarrhea. Under a 24-hour strip light, I hadn't slept more than a few minutes at a time. And I stank. So many men had passed through Cell 6 that...
...only feature in my cell aside from walls and bars was an iron shackling ring in the floor. Prisoners at Gwanda are paraded every morning before the station's officers and, one by one, interrogated and slapped, humiliated. Some of my fellow prisoners had been arrested for trapping porcupines in the forest, selling gasoline, stealing--petty offenses committed in desperate efforts to feed their families. A piece of graffiti on the wall read, P. MOYO WAS HERE FOR STANDING...