Word: almost
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mujahedin would almost certainly refuse a power-sharing deal anyway. The official rebel position is that Najibullah can have an amnesty but his surrender of power is a precondition to peace talks. In their view, he is the enemy, and Afghans have little inclination to forgive foes. "How can you expect the people to forget the blood loss of families, the destruction of entire villages?" asks a guerrilla leader in Peshawar. "How can you expect them to give up that feeling and say, 'Fine, let's sit down and talk'? It is like asking the Jews to pardon the Nazis...
...number of Egyptians increases, people have spilled out of the cities in search of housing. The Giza Plateau, once far from urban sprawl, now lies almost in the shadow of modern apartment buildings. Nearby factories and old vehicles spew forth noxious clouds of particulate-laden exhaust, which becomes corrosive when dissolved by rain. Vibrations from traffic produce cracks in the monuments. More serious still is the damage caused by water. An estimated 80% of Cairo's incoming water supply escapes from leaking pipes into the ground. And the aging sewerage system, built 75 years ago to serve a population...
...University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of Southampton, claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, at room temperature. Because the experiment produced much more energy than it consumed, said the chemists, it could lead to the development of an almost limitless power source. Physicists were skeptical, but they scurried to their labs to see if the seemingly impossible could be true...
...American presidential elections, it is unthinkable for an ambitious politician to call on the citizenry -- or any sizable subset of it -- to make the slightest sacrifice for the good of society or its own future prosperity. Thatcher, by contrast, positively delights in delivering bad news and stern sermons. "After almost any major operation, you feel worse before you convalesce. But you do not refuse the operation." That typical bit of Thatcher rhetoric is not the kind of metaphor that comes out of the Peggy Noonan poetical-presidential-puffery machine. Nor is it sheep-in- wolf's-clothing mock toughness...
...week Shevardnadze confers with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow, then flies to Bonn to meet with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Early next week he heads to Beijing for the long-awaited summit between Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The swift pace of change during Shevardnadze's almost four-year tenure at Smolensky Square has left foreign diplomats, to say nothing of his weary staff in Moscow, a bit breathless...