Word: persian
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...clerics and their treatment of Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei as a shah. Hard-liners feel particularly threatened, explains newspaper commentator Akbar Gangi, because the reformers have impeccable revolutionary credentials too and thus cannot be lightly dismissed or called traitors. Says Gangi: "We have a saying in Persian, 'Only stone can break stone...
Regular and irregular verbs today have their roots in old border disputes between words and rules. Many irregulars can be traced back over 5,500 years to a mysterious tribe that came to dominate Europe, western Asia and northern India. Its language, Indo-European, is the ancestor of Hindi, Persian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Gaelic and English. It had rules that replaced vowels: the past of senkw- (sink) was sonkw...
...example, the 22-year-old Macedonian King Alexander charged with his cavalry into the ranks of Persian forces at the Granicus River in what is now Turkey. A Persian soldier clubbed Alexander with an ax, but before he could deal a second and fatal blow, the King's bodyguard killed...
What if Alexander had died at Granicus? Goodbye to all the conquests of Alexander the Great, says Princeton historian Josiah Ober. The Persian Empire would have overtaken the known world. The great promise of Hellenism would have lost its way; the growing Roman Empire would have atrophied; Judea would have remained a backwater, Jesus merely "a local religious figure," and Christianity and Judaism insignificant provincial oddities. There would have been no need for a Martin Luther, no Reformation, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Western culture...
...this post-Vietnam age, most Americans are wary of sending troops overseas. But Buchanan's opposition is sweeping. He is, of course, outraged by Clinton's Kosovo policies ("We have no vital interest in that blood-soaked peninsula..."). But he also attacks the Persian Gulf War, waged by Republican President Bush and backed by 80% of Americans. And the moral quandary of whether, as the world's only superpower, the U.S. has a duty to stop genocide is for Buchanan a no-brainer: unless vital interests like oil are involved, we should mind our own business and let those marked...