Word: tal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crew of Palestinian laborers chops the long green stems from Michael Goldschmidt's amaryllis bulbs in his stuffy hothouse. Goldschmidt, 57, sells the bulbs, grown in the Ganei Tal settlement in the Gaza Strip's Gush Katif bloc, for a dollar. After export to the U.S., the plants go for almost $70. With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza set for next month, Goldschmidt is taking as many of his 300,000 bulbs out of the ground as he can, in spite of his desire to stay in the place he's lived for 28 years. ?I absolutely...
...Bremer's Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) looks likely to create a relatively weak central government in Baghdad, that was its intent - restraining any one ethnic or religious group from dominating others on the basis of a simple majority. But the price of that restraint has been to give the Kurdish minority the means to blackmail the majority, which in turn sets the scene for an acrimonious aftermath. The Kurds want to resolve such contentious issues as Kirkuk while their power is at its peak; the Shiites insist it should be done on the basis of a consensus achieved...
...moderate Islamist parties with historic ties to Iran. The UIA, which has nominated Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, won 140 of the 275 seats in the Assembly, giving it the simple majority required to pass legislation, but not the two-thirds required under the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution bequeathed by former U.S. administrator J. Paul Bremer, to choose a government. That means the Shiites have to negotiate a deal with the parties that will give them the votes required to create a government. And that requirement has made kingmakers of the Kurds - 3 million...
...sticking point in negotiations between the Shiite and the Kurdish lists has been less over the makeup of the executive branch than over broad guarantees demanded by the Kurds for secularism and adherence to the TAL (which is rejected, in principle, by Sistani, among others) - and more importantly, over Kurdish separatist demands. The Kurds are using the kingmaker status granted them by the TAL to demand not only that they maintain the autonomy they have enjoyed for over a decade under the protection of the Allied ?no-fly? zone, but also that their domain be extended to include the fiercely...
...Sistani's objections to the TAL are that it offers minorities veto power over majority decisions, for example in allowing a two-thirds no-vote on a new constitution in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces to strike it down. And it's not hard to envisage a situation where if the provisions of the U.S.-bequeathed law are used to deny the Shiites the majority power they believe they won in a democratic election, Shiite opposition to the TAL - and to the influence, even the continued presence of the U.S. in Iraq - would harden...