That excursion, like one last year to Arunachal Pradesh Indian territory claimed by China as "south Tibet"—seemed designed to arouse Chinese ire.China has certainly been doing its bit to provoke the ire of the Indians.
President François Hollande's timid attempts to free them up a bit is provoking the current trades union militancy in which unemployed workers and their parents – by 60%, so polls suggest – are siding with the strikers, as they usually do.
Michael Kinsley, always a provocative thinker, has done quite a bit of provoking in his just-published New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald's new book "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State". (Disclosure: We haven't read Greenwald's book). It's a pan, all 1,600 words of it.
But I can never guarantee whether or not, bit by bit, he can be provoked.
His father used to provoke bit by bit, but this young leader is making all these outrageous threats just to show something to the world.
This provoked a bit of marital banter: "Lying here doing nothing... this is the best job in the world," said Phillipa, trying to jolly him out of his grump.
Her son Jed, a lawyer, availed himself of the room in Manhattan more than a decade ago during a brief period of career and geographic transition and said his arrangement provoked a bit of jealousy.
Even Babe Ruth provoked a bit of a backlash by holding out for a higher salary in 1930 all of $80,000.
The AKP's success provoked a bit of a backlash.
Moving her into a gritty Market Street neighborhood last summer provoked a bit of culture shock.
