This surprised many people.

The win came as a surprise to many.

Syrian Shakeeb Al Jabri, who monitored Syria TV for reactions on the Arab League vote,writes LeShaque Caller on Addounia TV All 23 million Syrians resent the Arab League

And so, the local governor decided to come down hard.

The fall of the Tunisian regime had deep domestic roots, but the timing caught outsiders, including the US government, by surprise.

The question, she reports on www.opendemocracy.net, seemed to take him by surprise, and he did not support the idea.

Striking early in the morning during a holiday, the earthquake caught many by surprise. Hundreds of aftershocks of varying intensity also followed the main quake.

Likewise, Peretz, a rabble rousing but effective trade unionist, surprised all when he won the Labor Party s leadership primary and then chose the defense portfolio over the treasury.

This move came as a surprise to most observers for two reasons Samir Geagea was a candidate for the presidency himself Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun were on opposing sides during the Lebanese Civil War (1975 1990)

MADRID Twenty five years ago, at a summit in Rejkjavik, Iceland, US President Ronald Reagan stunned the world and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, by proposing global and comprehensive elimination of all nuclear weapons.

But he startled markets recently by saying that the FOMC s expected path of stronger growth could lead to a slower pace of buying later this year and an end to the asset purchases by mid 2014.

Most revolutionaries who did not want an Islamist dominated Egypt were alienated as well. Their votes went to Hamadi Sabbahi, from the left leaning Nasserist camp, who surprised observers by winning 5.4 million votes.

Two months ago, Bank President Paul Wolfowitz resigned amidst an extraordinary staff mutiny and governance debacle. Now, his counterpart at the International Monetary Fund, the former Spanish Finance Minister Rodrigo Rato, has shocked major stakeholders by announcing that he, too, will leave in October.

BEIJING On the eve of Chinese New Year, the People s Bank of China (PBC) surprised the market by announcing for the second consecutive time in a month an increase in banks mandatory reserve ratio by 50 basis points, bringing it to 16.5 .

Highly leveraged systems in finance dependent economies were the first to hit a wall, surprising many who had uncritically bought into the Great Moderation the idea that macroeconomic and asset market volatility had eased permanently.

So, while the Arab Spring has been a genuine popular uprising against decades of corrupt and oppressive authoritarian regimes, its rapid spread, which caught almost everyone by surprise, was due in part to the influence of Al Jazeera, which became the voice of the voiceless throughout the Middle East.

BERKELEY Last December, with Europe s financial system on the brink of disaster, the European Central Bank stunned the markets with an unprecedented intervention, offering banks across the eurozone essentially unlimited liquidity against any and all collateral for an exceptional period of three years.

Such fundamental changes in the supply side of the market naturally drove oil prices lower a lot lower. Prices plummeted by more than half in a period of just a few months last year, catching many oil traders and analysts by surprise.