Word: ironized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Smith fought as a young mercenary in wars across France, the Netherlands and southeast Europe to the edge of the Ottoman Empire. Captured and sold into slavery, he wound up at a remote Black Sea military outpost, where a Turkish officer shaved Smith's head and riveted an iron ring around his neck. "A dog could hardly have lived to endure" the routine beatings and starvation rations that followed, Smith wrote in his colorful and epic autobiography...
...September 1608. Chief executive, military commander and political leader of British America, Smith, at 28, had found a place at last where a man might thrive on bravado and wit. No title, no patron, no ruff-throated pretensions of nobility were required in Smith's Virginia, just an iron will to prevail--and a hornful of powder and shot...
...That poverty may be ubiquitous, but so is the energy. Teeming, corrugated-iron slums surround decaying Art Deco mansions. Lush bougainvilleas peek from behind high stone walls trimmed with barbed wire. Chapels hear confession in the middle of decadent shopping malls, and hand-painted billboards advertising movies like Brazen Women overlook vendors touting T-shirts that read JESUS OF NAZARETH. At stoplights, peddlers tap on your window proffering newspapers and Marlboro Reds, while children wave garish feather dusters and delicate lace handkerchiefs. And wherever you go, there is music, in the endless strips of "videoke" lounges, pouring forth from bars...
...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...