Word: backwardness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite a sound trouncing in last May's elections, Burma's military junta has yet to move forward on its promise to cede control of the country, which it now calls Myanmar, to the "largest party." Last week it actually took a step backward. Citing "security reasons," government forces in Rangoon and Mandalay arrested six top leaders of the National League for Democracy, the opposition party that won 80% of the seats in the national legislature. The arrests came a week after the junta said it would release N.L.D. leader Aung San Suu Kyi if she agreed to leave...
...coasters are safer than ever. Unlike old coasters, which speed out and back over often predictable sets of hills, today's rides careen through tight turns, 60 degrees plunges and dark tunnels, sometimes spinning riders upside down. There are coasters on which passengers ride standing up, others that run backward and still more featuring cars that are suspended below the tracks. At Houston's AstroWorld, the outrageous Ultra Twister hurls its riders headfirst from nine stories up, then barrel-rolls them back and forth through a winding tunnel of steel pipes...
...Bryan Key, a witness for the two families. In the case of the Judas Priest album Stained Class, Key claims to find the repeated injunction "Do it," which he interprets as encouraging suicide. Attorneys for the plaintiffs also maintain that satanic incantations are revealed when the music is played backward. Testifying last week, Vance's mother, a born- again Christian, described how her son threw away rock records after attending a Christian camp in 1983, only to revert to former habits. "He couldn't do both at the same time," she said. "He was either true...
...spent the past year and a half distancing himself from Ronald Reagan. His White House press room is used for press conferences, not games of hide-and-seek; his First Lady prefers gardening in slacks to hostessing in a designer dress. Even the phrase "kinder, gentler" was a covert, backward-looking rebuke: Kinder and gentler than...
...Education is the most backward single institution in all the U.S. I don't know of an industry that spends less money on research and development. It is not for lack of money. It is a lack of intelligence and will and competence. It is a bureaucratic inertia that is unbelievable and inexcusable. Between 38 cents and 41 cents of our education dollar gets to the classroom. That is an act of irrationality. We are not putting our resources where the kids are. In the city of New York there are more school administrators than there...