Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dressed as Iraqi police commandos slipped into Samarra's shrine of two revered leaders of Shi?ite Islam, set up explosives and blew it up this morning, causing the golden dome to collapse and with it, perhaps, American hopes for a national unity government in Iraq...
...While there has been no claim of responsibility, suspicions immediately fell on al Qaeda in Iraq, and their Sunni allies in the insurgency. Shi?ite reactions were swift and violent. Mobs from the predominantly Shi'ite Shu'lah neighborhood in western Baghdad attacked Sunni mosques in Ghazaliya, a nearby Sunni area. Gunmen were out on the streets of Sadr City, home base for rebel cleric-and parliamentary power broker-Moqtada al-Sadr. In Basra, there were reports of heavy street fighting between Sunni and Shi'ite gunmen. Elsewhere, Sunni political party offices were attacked...
...Americans, the collapse of the golden dome could also deal a damaging blow to the political process of forming a broad-based new government. Since the main Shi?ite coalition in Parliament renominated the widely disliked Ibrahim al-Jaafari for the position of prime minister, the U.S. has been edging away from its Shi?ite allies in the government and lining up with secular parties, Sunnis and Kurds, all in an effort to bring more Sunnis into the cabinet. This is the key part of their plan to undermine the Sunni insurgency and begin the withdrawal of American troops...
...Like the author herself, Li's characters seem free to reinvent themselves only when they've left China behind. In the title story, a retired scientist named Mr. Shi goes to the U.S. to visit his newly divorced adult daughter and discovers, as he hears her speaking to a man in English over the phone, that she has become someone else. (When he finds out his daughter's new boyfriend is from Romania, Mr. Shi tries to stay positive: "At least the man grew up in a communist country.") In their reborn American selves, father and daughter achieve a level...
...Last fall when the negotiations over the new Iraqi constitution almost collapsed because of Shi'ite intransigence, the U.N. issued a vehement objection, and remarkably, the Shi'ites compromised. The stakes are higher now, and it will take more than U.N. pressure to win Shi'ite concessions. In the end, it may take a high-profile presidential or Condoleezza Rice-led diplomatic campaign-like Henry Kissinger's in the Middle East or Richard Holbrooke's in Bosnia-to force a deal that could salvage George W. Bush's legacy in the desert...