Word: ago
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bath--he has an eerie feeling. He wonders whether he trained the hit man. At times, he says, he imagines himself sitting next to the killer, checking his technique as he carries out the hit. Alexei--a pseudonym--is still in his 30s and was until a few years ago a senior officer in the Spetsnaz, the secret Russian special-forces units modeled on the U.S. Delta Force. When it comes to killing, Alexei knows of what he speaks: he was a specialist in the "physical elimination" of adversaries...
...discipline at all can survive the headlines about the extra $1,000,000,000,000 the government expects to find under the mattress. So much depends on the projections' being right, when the happiest news of the year has been how wrong they turned out to be. Five years ago, the deficit for 1999 was projected at $207 billion. Last February the budget office announced instead we would run a $79 billion surplus; just four months later, it was $99 billion...
Equally striking is the way the public's view of the Spetsnaz has changed. Ten years ago, the special forces were regarded as the country's secret weapon, the men who had overthrown the President of Afghanistan in his own palace and would strike deep inside Western Europe if a new world war broke out. This has changed. The most popular video in Russia last year was Schizophrenia. An unremittingly bleak portrayal of modern Russia, it tells the story of a Spetsnaz-type officer who is framed by the security police and then forced to assassinate a banker planning...
...nicotine is so addictive that even doctors who know they should quit can't do so, the plaintiffs argued. They added that the industry has muddied the waters about smoking's risks. For example, six tobacco CEOs told Congress a few years ago that nicotine isn't addictive. Yet tobacco companies also argue that everyone knows cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer...
Between 1968 and 1972, however, nine of Apollo 18's brother rockets did fly astronauts to the moon, six of them taking crews straight down into the powdered-sugar soil of the ancient lunar surface. Thirty years ago, Apollo 11, the first of those historic missions, took off from Cape Kennedy carrying space veterans Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. Four days later, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin actually set their ugly, leggy lunar module down on the plains of the Sea of Tranquillity, becoming the first two men to walk on another world. Over the next...