Word: spelling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Johann Heinrich Heine. His most famous poem, "Lorelay," set to music by Friedrich Silcher, has some of the melancholia (if not the elfin wit) that marked many Hart lyrics: "I do not know what haunts me,/ What saddened my mind all day;/ An age-old tale confounds me,/ A spell I cannot allay." And a quatrain Heine wrote for his wife Therese - "You're lovely as a flower,/ So pure and fair to see;/ I look at you, and sadness/ Comes stealing over me" - is echoed in Hart's pathetic, lifelong obsession with women. His need for them was exceeded...
...Details, of course, are sketchy, but it appears that Padilla converted to Islam after a prison spell in Florida, and eventually made his way to Afghanistan or Pakistan to make common cause with al-Qaeda. According to the government's account, he approached them with the idea of detonating a "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city, and they obliged by teaching him to wire a bomb. The impression, in the government's own account, is of a former street hoodlum desperate to join a new gang - and being kept at arm's length. An outsider taught to build a bomb...
...being transferred out of the criminal justice system and into military detention - a move that raised legal eyebrows, since al Mujahir was an American citizen, born Jose Padillo in Brooklyn, NY, and was raised in Chicago. President Bush has deemed the former gangbanger who converted to Islam after a spell in prison (and changed his name) an "enemy combatant." The reason is that al Muhajir had allegedly been trained by al-Qaeda in Pakistan to build a radiological bomb, and sent to the U.S. to reconnoiter possible targets. He'd been arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport...
BOTTOM LINE: Four or more of these symptoms in at least two discrete episodes could spell trouble...
When Pascal Khoo Thwe was a baby, his grandmother spat three times on his head while muttering tribal incantations to protect him "from evil people and all misfortune." With all respect to the Padaung people of remotest Burma, the spit-and-spell routine didn't do much good. Poverty, dictatorship, sickness, war: Khoo Thwe had to overcome all manner of evils before finally escaping Burma to study at the University of Cambridge?the first Padaung tribesman to do so. Khoo Thwe tells the story of this escape in From the Land of Green Ghosts (Harper Collins; 304 pages), a memoir...