Word: ironical
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...into the brutality of his rule, in the most unexpected place - the compound of the Iraqi sports ministry. In one corner of a sprawling complex of offices and official residences, behind walls emblazoned with the universal symbol of the Olympic Games, was that most medieval of torture devices: an iron maiden...
...nearly eight feet tall and looked like a cast-iron coffin. At first, I thought it was somebody's grotesque idea of a joke - a gag gift, perhaps, for Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son and head of Iraqi's sports administration. But when I opened it, I realized its purpose was deadly serious...
...iron maiden confirmed some of the ghastly stories I'd heard about Uday's treatment of Iraqi sportsmen, especially the national soccer team. When they lost a game, they routinely received beatings and an imaginative range of punishments - like being made to kick concrete balls, or forced to run shoeless over shards of glass. Later, I would meet a coach who had spent two terrifying hours in the iron maiden - his torso was riddled with scars from the spikes...
Preserving that world was probably on Jeffs' mind when he decided in 2003 to move a large portion of his flock to the scrublands of West Texas. He perhaps imagined that on 1,300 acres of dusty ranchland behind barbed-wire fences and iron gates, his community would enjoy the fabled live-and-let-live world of the American frontier. After all, this was a wide-open land where good neighbors were neighborly but not nosy, where a man could turn a page and start anew with few questions raised about his past. "They thought they were safe behind those...
...then, to avoid billing squabbles, portrait sketches of the three: ALTYNAI ASYLMURATOVA. ''She was an Oriental beauty, and she dreamed of lying in bed being fanned--a modern Scheherazade. And so I bit her.'' That is Kirov Artistic Director Oleg Vinogradov's fanciful way of explaining how he put iron willpower into his prize ballerina. Asylmuratova (Ah-sil-mu-rah- tova) has an expansive, luscious quality. In a tantalizing way, she seems to represent the past and the future: her round face and small, full mouth recall a silent-film heroine's docility, yet her bold attack is as fresh...