Word: mecca
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...continued to go up in flames long after their arrival. "That's not our job," was the bored comment from a soldier watching a house being torched in the regional capital Palangkaraya. The government of President Abdurrahman Wahid was characteristically supine. Wahid himself went on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca three days after the killing began and has yet to return...
...flush with oil revenues, and he allocated many millions of dollars to upgrading the Holy sites in Saudi Arabia to make them more accessible to pilgrims. Using oil revenues, the capacity of the great mosque at Medina was expanded almost tenfold, while the capacity of the mosque at Mecca was doubled - it can now hold about 2 million pilgrims, compared with a capacity of 1 million before...
...China has held an allure for religious emissaries since Ricci in the 16th century, then today's Mecca is Yunnan province, which abuts Burma. It attracts Christian workers for its distance from the country's political medulla in Beijing, its poverty and its large number of isolated minority hill tribes. So many Christian families have located in Yunnan that they have set up a school for their kids. The Kunming International Academy, nestled against an apartment complex in Yunnan's capital, Kunming, began with two families in 1994 and now has 100 students from 18 countries. It is run like...
...Challenge No. 3: Defining terrorism. The U.S. put the Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon's Hizballah on its black list, but Arabs see these anti-Israel groups more as freedom fighters than as terrorists. Islamic scholars meeting last month in Mecca came up with a terrorism definition of their own: "all acts of aggression committed by individuals, groups or states against human beings, including attacks on their religion, life, intellect or property." That's a sweeping explication which could easily include the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan or Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes and exclude the activities of Hamas...
Like California's Silicon Valley and Massachusetts' Route 128, Montgomery County, Md., has been transformed in the past decade from a sleepy suburb into a bustling scientific Mecca. The 15-mile stretch of Interstate 270 that runs from Bethesda to Gaithersburg now houses one of the world's largest and smartest collections of genomic firms. The chief draw is the NIH, which dispenses $14 billion a year in research grants. But there are other attractions--proximity to Johns Hopkins, a start-up-friendly local government, an abundance of office space; and most of all, a critical mass of like-minded...