Word: fractious
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Should that happen--and Pakistan's democrats continue their fractious, venal ways, while its soldiers pocket aid and dream of fighting India--the U.S. would be back where it started. It would be limited, once again, to lobbing missiles at terrorist camps in Pakistan, inevitably killing civilians in the process, while uniting all Pakistanis in hatred of the U.S. for sullying their nation's sovereignty...
...Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan becoming one of the world's most unstable regions. There are genuinely illuminating sections, such as the one on the distinction between Deobandi and Barelvi Muslims and how an appreciation of those differences is vital to understanding the fractious debates about the nature of Islamic fanaticism that has sprung up in the West. It is a shame that the book is let down by a plethora spelling errors and inconsistencies, the lack of endnotes and bibliography, and numerous mistakes in the English transliteration of Urdu and Punjabi words. But then balti...
...Those pleasant achievements, or happy accidents, kindled hope for Bedtime Stories, the season's only live-action comedy with a kid-approved PG rating. Well, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose. The star and his director have surrendered to their old bad habits, in a movie that will nonetheless provide - as Sandler's character does - a balky babysitter for children in search of a new-style fairy tale...
...François Marin (François Bégaudeau) teaches - or tries to teach - French to 14- and 15-year-old students in a coldly modern school in Paris. His classroom is not quite a blackboard jungle, but it does contain a marginally middle-class, ethnically mixed, psychologically fractious group of kids, who constantly challenge him with their lolling indifference, their angry outbursts, their perpetual edge-of-insolence attitudes. To be honest, we do not witness very many heartwarming pedagogical triumphs in director Laurent Cantet's The Class, which tracks the activities of Marin, his students, their parents...
Though the thirst for solid action is palpable among Indians, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his ruling Congress Party do not want to undermine the growing relationship with their Pakistani counterparts, which, until the attacks, promised to be one of the more fruitful ententes in South Asia's fractious history. In the days after the events of Nov. 26, New Delhi never explicitly pointed fingers at Pakistan - let alone massed troops along the border or escalated tensions the way a preceding government in 2001 had done after militants struck the Parliament building. "You have to take action without undercutting...