Tripoli is home to many members of Lebanon's small Alawite minority population, the same Shiite offshoot to which Mr. Assad belongs.
Politically, the Alawites here have long been close to the Assad regime, whose leadership belongs to the same Shiite offshoot sect of Islam.
But not if that means living with Alawites, members of the same minority offshoot of Shiite Islam as Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad.
Tensions are high in Tripoli, Lebanon's gritty second city, where Alawites, belonging to the same Muslim offshoot as the leadership of the Syrian regime, have a long history of armed conflict with their Sunni neighbors.
Politically, the city's Alawites, who belong to the same Shiite Muslim offshoot sect as Mr. Assad and many of his close supporters, are loyal to Damascus, while the Sunni Muslim community has mostly come out in support of Syria's rebels.
What made the claim of a massacre in the village unusual were the accounts of witnesses, identified as survivors of the atrocity on rebel YouTube channels, who said that the victims were Alawites — members of the same minority sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, as President Bashar al-Assad and most members of the shabiha militia.
Naturism (or nudism), instituted in 1903 in Germany, was a controversial offshoot of this same search for health and freedom from the inhibitions of modern civilization.
An offshoot of the same Albanian military and political organization that waged the war in Kosovo in 1998, the N.L.A. took up arms in February with Mr. Ahmeti at its head.
Coverage of last month's arrests of militants belonging to an offshoot of the same Michigan militia that McVeigh belonged to omitted to mention the bomb, days away from its 15th anniversary.
Another chapter attempts to account for the University of Malaysia's failure to keep pace with the accomplishments of the University of Singapore — two institutions that both began as offshoots of the same British colonial university.
