Word: year-old
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Jiranan Phedsri confesses that she has "one true friend." The 51-year-old Thai housewife strokes the object of her affection, caressing its cool curves. The recipient of the devout Buddhist's ardor? A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol Jiranan carries wherever she goes in Thailand's troubled deep south, where a Muslim insurgency has resulted in roughly 4,000 deaths since it gained momentum in 2004. The handgun, though, isn't Jiranan's only trusted companion. As a volunteer in the Iron Ladies, an all-female civilian militia designed to protect Buddhists from Islamic extremists, she received military training...
...grounds where they peer through monsoon downpours with shotguns at the ready. One morning at the temple of Chang Hai Tok village in Pattani province, a batch of Iron Ladies, outfitted all in black, runs through military exercises. Surveying the training from behind a trio of Buddha statues, 60-year-old abbot Pracharoonkittisophano shrugs his shoulders when asked whether women twirling rifles, along with a shooting range behind his sleeping quarters, elicits any spiritual discomfort. "Guns are normal things in our world," he says. "I see them on TV all the time, and the types of guns used here...
Murder is among the most heinous of crimes, but the slaying of Marwa el-Sherbini, a pregnant 31-year-old Egyptian, was more terrible than most. During a July 1 hearing in Dresden, Germany, Russian-born Alex Wiens, in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at el-Sherbini, leaped from the defendant's dock and stabbed her to death. Wiens then turned his knife on el-Sherbini's husband, who was mistakenly shot by police in the scuffle. (He survived.) Recognizing a "special burden of guilt," the court sentenced Wiens to life in prison...
...story begins with a dream. It wasn't the Great American Dream - Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn't sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream...
...learn just how well Carver knew the worlds he wrote about. He grew up mostly in blue collar Yakima, Wash., where his father worked in a sawmill, changed jobs frequently and drank heavily, patterns he passed on to his son. Carver was barely 18 when he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, but he had already dedicated himself to life as a writer...