The Warped and the Wonderful: Volume 1
1. "Last week's unprecedented celebrations following Iran's qualification for next year's football World Cup are a stark reminder of the unifying and healing power of sport. Football in particular is capable of harnessing the kind of blind loyalty among supporters that politicians desperately crave."
2. "Kuwaiti women will make their debut in legislative elections in 2007 and will vote and contest the next municipal polls, due in 2009, after parliament voted on May 16 to grant them full political rights."
3. "Progressives of my generation became anti-anti-communists because the powers-that-be in the United States, for decades and decades, used the sins -- real and (often) fabricated -- of the Soviet Union as a justification for US foreign policy. "
4. "(Sean Penn) told a film student . . . in Tehran Monday that the "Death to America" slogan chanted each week at Friday Prayers hurt Iran-U.S. relations. "I understand the nature of where it comes from and what its intention is," he said. "But I don't think it's productive because I think the message goes to the American people and it is interpreted very literally."
5. "With extraordinary speed, democracy is taking hold in the Middle East. Not in the sense that any society there is yet democratic, or near to it. But in the sense that democracy has become the litmus test for political legitimacy and modernity."
6. "We know you finance radical religious schools that breed generations of young people to hate America. These kids are brainwashed that terrorism against Americans is their religious duty. Your ordinary citizens do not benefit from your ill-gotten oil gains. Your repression of women's rights is unconscionable. Without our oil money, you will be forced to learn to live within the moral codes of the modern world."
7. "The evidence in this case shows that delays in (Canada's) public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care," the Supreme Court ruled. "In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services."
8. "His website has been emblazoned with the words " Vindication" and "Innocent" and a dateline highlighting the birth of US civil rights leader King, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Mandela's release from prison."
9. “We all know that African countries used to have a tradition of eating their own adversaries. We don’t have such a tradition or process or culture and I believe the comparison between Africa and Russia is not quite just.”"
10. "The impetus for a future foreign "reaction" doesn't need a genuine U.S. "action" - it only needs the near-hysterical ranting from American newspapers, from lobby groups posing as "information centers" but having long-familiar agendas, and from foreign nations eager to score cheap propaganda points."