Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Business magnate Salah Ezzeddine was known as a pious, generous man. Hailing from a small Shi'ite Muslim town in southern Lebanon, he was a success story among the country's poorest, historically marginalized religious sect. With his reputation for generosity (he built a stadium and a mosque for his hometown of Maaroub, sponsored pilgrimages to Mecca and published children's books), few were suspicious when Ezzeddine promised investors a share of his business with the lure of outstanding returns - from 20% to 40% - and few details of how the plan worked or guarantees or paperwork. Still, what he seemed...
...businesses went bankrupt, ostensibly from the effects of the global financial crisis. But rumors swirled in the press of a pyramid scheme of more than $1 billion, and the local media dubbed Ezzeddine the Lebanese Bernie Madoff. Last weekend the Lebanese government charged him with fraud. All across the Shi'ite-populated regions of Lebanon, thousands of small investors - many of whom bundled small sums of money with their neighbors to give to Ezzeddine - feel betrayed by both the man and the organization. "I inherited $100,000 from my father to continue my studies. I invested them with Ezzeddine...
...concealed Jesus' marriage and the nice faction consisting of startlingly liberal first-wave feminists. In other words, The Da Vinci Code recasts the history of Christianity into something that looks a lot more like the history of ... Islam, wherein an early schism took place between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. Could the book's passionate following in a predominantly Christian America express a secret, even unconscious sympathetic identification with Islam? Or a repressed desire for Christianity to have a less boring, more Islamic history - richer, darker, riven at its root by an exciting sectarian war? (See the 100 best...
...least 20 in the border town of Zahedan. Iran and Pakistan have also been at loggerheads over Afghanistan - Tehran has backed the Karzai government, and Pakistan is seen as continuing to covertly support the Taliban - and over the perception that Pakistan is not doing much to stem anti-Shi'ite sectarian terrorism by extremist groups on its own soil...
...enemies. Already struggling with a militant campaign that has ravaged the northwest and the tribal areas and terrorized major cities, Pakistan, analysts say, can ill-afford a revival of sectarian violence that plagued the country during the 1980s, when Saudi-backed Sunni militant groups clashed with Iranian-backed Shi'ite ones as part of a regional proxy war. Says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent security analyst: "It isn't just Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan where Iran can create trouble if it wants...