Word: kingdoms
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Vacationing in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan last week, I received the question people inevitably ask when they hear I live in China: Do the Chinese really eat dogs? The answer to this question - as I told my worried Bhutanese guide, who like many in the staunchly Buddhist country considers canines to be only slightly below humans in the karmic heirarchy - was yes, but. Yes, Chinese, particularly in the south, do have a taste for fresh dog meat. But in recent years, urban pet ownership has skyrocketed, as yuppies (or Chuppies, as they're locally dubbed) find a poodle...
...dung-and-sawdust scented world of bull riding, the verb ride is precisely defined. It does not mean "to sit atop a bucking, spinning, hurtling, heaving beast that wants nothing more than to throw you to kingdom come." That is merely to get on the bull. To ride it you must get on and stay there-for eight seconds. Which, in layman's time, is about six seconds longer than impossible...
...kingdom, with a subpar system of telephone landlines, is the land of the cell phone. And not cell phones that were being judiciously discarded and replaced, a technique of the more skilled jihadist operative. Saudis love their "mobiles." That love meant that the sigint was strong...
...more specific conversations, as well. Tucked inside the sigint chatter in April 2003 of possible upcoming attacks inside the kingdom was evidence of a tense dialogue between al-Ayeri and another, less senior operative in the gulf, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, over whether the Saudi al-Qaeda operation had enough men, weapons and organization to truly challenge and overthrow the Saudi regime. Al-Ayeri said no, it was too soon, the organization had not yet matured, while al-Ghamdi strongly recommended pushing forward. Al-Zawahiri, who managed the discourse, sided with al-Ghamdi...
...waters. That test shocked Japan, and was a powerful impetus for the government to increase its intelligence efforts, missile defenses and military cooperation with the United States. More recently, Japan has been frustrated by North Korea's refusal to provide information about perhaps dozens of Japanese citizens the hermit kingdom abducted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Japan, the emotional issue of abducted citizens has become almost as large an issue as North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In the past few years, Japan has passed several laws that would make financial sanctions on North Korea easier to implement...