Word: backgrounding
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...earnest environmental theme sounds like the kind of high-handed p.r. directive that might be satirized on, well, The Office. Even Begley--formerly of St. Elsewhere--notes that the movie Chinatown worked because it kept the subplot about the water supply in Los Angeles well in the background: "It's a story about getting away with murder, and the water story is woven...
...made is putting a shirt on when driving. The worst thing they've caught him doing is kissing his High School Musical co-star, Vanessa Hudgens, on a beach in Hawaii; Efron won't even say she's his girlfriend, even though he has her on the background screen of his iPhone. His biggest scandal is that his voice was overdubbed with another guy's singing in High School Musical (he rectified that in the second). Efron tries to say nothing worthy of a gossip-column item. "I don't have much to worry about," he says, "because my personal...
...Japanese politics, he returns to the subject again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation, bushy eyebrows bobbing as he worries about "politicians who rewrite history," and the growing tendency in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Japan to forget about wartime atrocities. Japanese history has always been in the background of his works - and his best novel, 1994's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, dissected the groupthink that led Japan into a catastrophic war - but now he wants to act. "Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer," he admits. "But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil...
...charged are staged like motion-picture galas. State and local press, weaned on the daily flow of announcements and tips, are none too anxious to bite--by critical analysis of conduct or budget--the law-enforcement hands that feed them. Staged press conferences, featuring a speaking prosecutor and a background of stern-looking, silent officials and assistant prosecutors, have become ubiquitous. In terms of the age-old question of who's watching security, the answer is, Davis--and not enough others...
...Jamaica are using the nursing-school slot shortage as a selling point to recruit American students. The pioneer of this movement is an 88-year-old entrepreneur named Robert Ross. He made his mark in the 1980s when he founded medical and veterinary schools in Dominica, despite having no background in either medicine or education. Ross University grew into a profitable institution with more than 2,000 students, and Ross sold it for $135 million in 2000 to a private-equity firm. He has reapplied his winning formula to nursing, and IUON welcomed its first class in 2005. Ross admits...