Word: shotting
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Your chances of being involved in a plane crash are pretty slim. By some estimates, they're as low as 1 in 11 million. But should you live through one - possibly as a gesture toward cosmic compensation - your shot at a book deal goes way up. There are two new memoirs out by survivors of plane crashes: Ollestad's Crazy for the Storm (Ecco; 272 pages) and Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight (Viking; 214 pages). Starbucks has picked Ollestad's memoir for its book program, and you can see why: plane crashes are usually unknowable, secret events...
...powers of the Islamic republic, the mainstream media tracked the stream of consciousness produced by new media. Some of the material is powerful, even indelible. Particularly haunting is the 40-second YouTube video that shows a young woman, wearing jeans but otherwise dressed conservatively, suddenly falling to the sidewalk, shot in the heart. Her eyes turn to what must be a cell-phone camera, wide and shocked and dying as we stare at her. Men rush to her side and try to stanch the wound, but blood trickles from her mouth as an older man - later described as her father...
...shot her? A soldier? A member of the notorious Basij, the volunteer militia that supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Were they aiming at her? Could this have been an accident or a random act of violence...
Iran's revolution has now run through a full cycle. A gruesomely captivating video of a young woman - laid out on a Tehran street after apparently being shot, blood pouring from her mouth and then across her face - swept Twitter, Facebook and other websites this weekend. The woman rapidly became a symbol of Iran's escalating crisis, from a political confrontation to far more ominous physical clashes. Some sites refer to the woman as Neda, Farsi for "the voice" or "the call." Tributes that incorporate startlingly up-close footage of her dying have started to spring up on YouTube...
...Although it is not yet clear who shot Neda (a soldier? a pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. The cycles of mourning in Shi'ite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat - a way to generate or revive momentum. Shi'ite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the Shah's security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles. (See pictures...