Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Leon Panetta may not have an intelligence background, but his appointment as CIA director shows that Barack Obama understands the CIA's problems. As a former White House chief of staff, Clinton Administration budget director and eight-term California Congressman, Panetta knows his way around Washington better than most people, and that kind of knowledge is exactly what the CIA needs right...
...still based on color. People now wonder what the point is of educating their children to be a doctor or an engineer if the job will go to someone less qualified. They [the A.N.C.] have been unable to move on from the past: everything has a racial background. If I criticize Mbeki because of his disastrous policies on AIDS, it is because I am a racist...
...political crisis since a democracy movement toppled a military regime 17 years ago. A new government has been formed - the fourth in 2008 - but its Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was forced to delay his inaugural policy address because of protests by supporters of the previous administration. Hovering in the background is the PAD, which draws its ranks from the very middle class and élite that supported the 1992 democracy movement, and has as its ultimate aim a so-called "New Politics," whose fuzzy, oft-shifting aims have included the undemocratic step of appointing parliamentarians. "We're looking...
...June 22, 1956 to a wealthy landholding family in Murree, a hilltop region often used as a summer resort. According to the BBC, his family claims to be of saintly lineage. Qureshi's father was also governor of the Punjab region in the mid-1980s. With regards to his background, Qureshi has said: "Lineage is still important, but it is no longer paramount. Now everybody has to win the vote...
...went out on Friday evening, droves of people, patrons and employees, alike stood outside of restaurants, standing on the sidewalks of Honolulu, trying to fathom what had happened. Crowds and families at city hall enjoying the annual Honolulu City Lights found themselves wandering in the dark. But in the background, fireworks were going off in intermittent bursts, visible everywhere in the residential districts. They had gone on sale Friday in preparation for New Year's eve celebrations...