Word: flashpoint
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...water to irrigate their crops and then the Spaniards will sell their crops back to us," says Diogo Morgado, president of an agricultural association on the south bank of the river. In the long term, consumption will have to be scaled back if water is not to become a flashpoint in Europe, where governments "still try to manage the supply rather than solving the demand problem," says Michael Scoullos, chairman of the Mediterranean section of the Global Water Partnership. Golf courses are an obvious target, but agriculture, which soaks up more than 70% of supply in the region...
...Congress debates the fate of key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the legislation continues to serve as a flashpoint for criticism of the Bush Administration. Yet, when opposition groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union make accusations that the act threatens or tramples our cherished First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, they stoop to the level of misinformation and fear-mongering that they claim their opponents inhabit. In reality, the statute sensibly closes loopholes that tied the hands of counter-terrorism agencies in the pre-9/11 world. One need not support Bush nor his anti-terror policies...
...included in their domain on the basis that much of its Arab population was settled there after Saddam had forcibly removed a large segment of the Kurdish population. That demand is fiercely resisted by the city?s Arab and ethnic Turk populations. Tensions are running high in the flashpoint city, with neighboring Turkey threatening to intervene to stop a Kurdish takeover - reconciling Kurdish and Sunni interests in Kirkuk at the national level could prove immensely challenging...
...Flashpoint Kirkuk...
...outside official polling stations, a movement demanding a referendum on Kurdish independence collected signatures with permission of the main Kurdish political parties, whose voters proclaim their desire for independence even as party leaders look to arrange the next best thing in the form of maximum autonomy from Baghdad. The flashpoint, of course, comes in cities where Kurds and Arabs (and in some cases Turkmen) compete for control, none more so than Kirkuk - the mainstream Kurdish parties are claiming as their own a city forcibly "Arabized" by Saddam Hussein, setting up a clash not only with resident Arabs and Turkomen...