Word: bent
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When MIT President Charles M. Vest stepped to the podium last Friday to address more than 100 researchers and one White House advisor, his mien counterbalanced a series of pat presentations by the fast-talking colleagues who flanked him. Bent over the MIT-crested lectern, he cracked a few self-deprecating jokes in a West Virginia drawl and keyed through some Powerpoint slides bearing droll titles...
...says he's always been fighting the same adversary: "the will to purity," whether political or racial. In a long career of public causes, he has seen that ill will on the faces of Nazi sympathizers, the Soviet nomenklatura, Pakistani generals fighting against Bangladesh's independence, and Serb paramilitaries bent on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Now he sees it in militant Islam - which he believes is perilously close to acquiring nuclear arms. Lévy's latest book was not prompted by political theory, but brute fact: the murder of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan...
...administration bent on keeping its conservative base happy, though, tacking way right on judicial nominees and clashing with the opposition has no real downside. Proof that Bush isn?t changing course: his nomination earlier this month of Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to an appellate court seat. Pryor, besides being vigorously anti-abortion and plenty willing to smudge the line separating church and state, last year criticized a Supreme Court ruling that state corrections officers could be sued for tying prisoners to hitching posts for long periods because they should have known that it was cruel and unusual punishment. Pryor...
...first bingo is called. The winner is Christine Thai, a short MIT senior dressed like a male high school debater. Her prize: a box of “dirty” fortune cookies that comes in a takeout container bearing a picture of a grinning, slanty-eyed coolie bent in a deep bow. She passes the fortunes around the table. Mine: “Tight buns drive me nuts...
...Regardless of the tone taken in Washington, however, North Korea appears bent on ratcheting up the confrontation. Many Korea analysts had long viewed Pyongyang's nuclear brinkmanship as part of a pattern of extortion - acting in a menacing way, and then promising good behavior in exchange for economic assistance. But many fear that Kim Jong Il may have decided that a nuclear deterrent is the only way to ward off the threat of U.S. military action to smash his regime, and that while pressure from neighbors such as China - which is North Korea's economic life-support system right...