Word: act
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tourist haven 100 miles (160 km) from the national capital Islamabad, militants burned down the country's only ski resort and torched 21 girls' schools. A spokesman for Mullah Fazlullah, the local Taliban leader who used to work the resort's chairlift, said their group was forced to act because government security forces were using some of the schools as bunkers. In the forbidding tribal zone of Waziristan, followers of Baitullah Mehsud, the physical-education teacher turned assassin (both the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agencies say he is behind the attack that killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto...
...This combination of slowing growth and soaring inflation turns economic policymaking into a tricky tightrope act - one with potentially ugly consequences for Asian governments that get the balance wrong. In the past 40 years, rapid price rises contributed to the collapse of two Indonesian regimes; inflation was also a factor during China's Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Consumer price inflation stirs up the middle classes because it can quickly erase years of hard-won personal gains. And inflation can be particularly cruel to the poor, because families are forced to spend a larger share of their meager incomes...
With Lessing entering the twilight of her life, it's hard not to read Alfred and Emily as an act of atonement. Drawing on decades of hindsight, she accepts that her mother's war wounds, though less visible, ran as deep as her father's - and she endeavors to heal them. In the novella, she envisions her mother as what she could have been, a teacher and philanthropist, not the "demented" woman that war had made her. The memoir honors that potential, too. "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books," Lessing writes...
...that's precisely what he learned to do: pretend and, through the act of appearing fearless, inspire others. It was a pantomime Mandela perfected on Robben Island, where there was much to fear. Prisoners who were with him said watching Mandela walk across the courtyard, upright and proud, was enough to keep them going for days. He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear...
...Mandela believed that embracing his rivals was a way of controlling them: they were more dangerous on their own than within his circle of influence. He cherished loyalty, but he was never obsessed by it. After all, he used to say, "people act in their own interest." It was simply a fact of human nature, not a flaw or a defect. The flip side of being an optimist - and he is one - is trusting people too much. But Mandela recognized that the way to deal with those he didn't trust was to neutralize them with charm...