Word: acte
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...While the industry has largely cleaned up its act, it is still plagued by the occasional scam artist. Most recently, shady sales brokers have been preying on would-be sellers, charging up-front fees of $500 or demanding a 30% to 40% commission. Stewart and Peggy Spangler of Pawleys Island, S.C., have already spent more than $800 trying to sell their property near Fort Lauderdale...
...year ago, as the U.N. weapons-inspection program in Iraq collapsed, President Clinton announced that the U.S. would not only "contain" Saddam's threat to the rest of the world but also work to "change" the brutal regime in Baghdad. Clinton also signed the Republican-sponsored Iraq Liberation Act, which allowed him to supply Iraqi opposition groups with as much as $97 million worth of military equipment and training. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appointed veteran foreign-service officer Frank Ricciardone to be her czar for overthrowing the Iraqi dictator, and in January took him along on a Middle East...
Success and failure are harder to measure on the second front. A TIME investigation found that little if any of the $8 million Congress has already appropriated (in Economic Support Funds, separate from the Liberation Act money) to oust Saddam has ended up directly in the hands of Iraqi opposition groups. Rather, Capitol Hill investigators complain, much of the money has gone to high-priced public relations experts and consultants. A somewhat less than ferocious outfit called Quality Support Inc., of Springfield, Va., for example, has received $3.1 million to book hotel rooms, airline tickets and conference halls for opposition...
...Intimate History of Killing, Joanna Bourke asserts that when ordinary men and women are freed from conventional social constraints, they find intense pleasure in the act of killing and that the structure of war allows for primal joy and even erotic satisfaction in intimate combat. Although Bourke writes lucidly and engagingly and argues with evident conviction, she comes up short on the evidence that would be necessary to support her daring claims...
...Killing itself could be seen as an act of carnival: combat gear, painted faces, and the endless refrain that men had turned into 'animals' were the martial equivalent of the carnival mask." Such radical interpretations might fit certain situations and the experiences of individual soldiers, but when Bourke tries to generalize, her argument collapses. The quotations she cites often seem to be taken out of context and deformed by her interpretations...