Word: western
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...part of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), an island nation in the western Pacific Ocean that was formerly part of a U.N. trust territory administered by the U.S. after World War II. Under an agreement signed in 1986, the islands were granted independence but citizens were given the right to live and work in the U.S. and serve in its military. Initially, few enlisted. But these days, U.S. military recruiters visit local high schools annually and students sign up in droves. For FSM youths, military service means money, adventure and opportunity, a way off tiny islands with few jobs...
...earned more revulsion than support from ordinary Muslims. And yet even if terrorists have been reduced to wearing explosives in their underwear, they are still able to find aimless, religiously fired or underloved young men to carry out suicide missions. And while al-Qaeda scientists in Yemen and western Pakistan have not fully mastered the chemistry of high-temperature charges needed to detonate compact high explosives - or acquired deadlier weapons of mass destruction - it is reasonable to assume they eventually will. Security experts say the chemical packet Abdulmutallab carried was more than enough to blow a good-size hole...
...public support of the death penalty to justify its broad use of capital punishment. In online forums on Chinese websites, opinion over the Shaikh case tends to back the official stance. "We should stick to the Chinese law no matter what, instead of bending under the pressure from Western countries," wrote a commentator in a chat room on Tianya.com. "Otherwise, we would only damage the dignity of China's judicial system...
...author invoked the triumphalist narrative of the U.S. and its western Allies winning World War II and later toppling communism. First of all, the Soviet Union and the Allies won World War II in concert. The U.S.S.R. lost over 25 million people in WW II, whereas Americans half a million. Secondly, the U.S.S.R. was collapsing without very much external influence - succumbing to pressures unrelated to U.S. policy whatsoever. The greatest feats are not always American ones. Nodira Karimova Queanbeyan, Australia...
...against the Soviets in Afghanistan and - to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq - continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might...