Word: bents
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...fortunes prospered, Asahara seems to have grown more reclusive and obsessed with danger. The religion, nominally Buddhist but really a hodgepodge of ascetic disciplines and New Age occultism, focused on supposed threats from the U.S., which he portrayed as a creature of Freemasons and Jews bent on destroying Japan. The conspiracy's weapons: sex and junk food. The guru's sermons predicted the end of the world sometime between 1997 and 2000, and began citing the specific peril of poison-gas attacks...
...used to be known who the "terrorists" were: a handful of Middle Eastern or leftist political movements, sponsored and protected by governments, bent on achieving their well-advertised ideological goals through death and intimidation. The next generation of terrorists is more obscure, an assemblage of disparate fanatics pursuing unique or mysterious agendas, with only the capacity for random violence in common. While governments have them under fairly good control and international terrorist incidents are relatively few (321 last year, down from 432 in 1933), it looks to the experts as if the 1990s rise of apocalyptic sects and Islamic extremism...
...least at first. Those who join become part of a close-knit body of believers who are convinced they understand the meaning of history and what the future holds. That was true of David Koresh's Branch Davidians, and it applies to certain extremist Christian white-supremacist groups bent on "purifying...
...asks Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for welfare issues at the Heritage Foundation. "What does a hot school lunch offer two 16-year-olds in D.C. who are shooting each other in the school halls with semiautomatic weapons? ... Go into any housing project and you don't see kids bent over with rickets. You see strong healthy young men who are a danger to themselves and their community...
...despite its many commonalities with the U.S. -- including its phone system -- does things its own way. ``Are we any different?'' asks David Sutherland, head of computing and communications at Ottawa's Carleton University. ``The answer is typically Canadian: yes and no. Because of our cultural differences, we seem more bent on local activity than on reaching across the country.'' In that spirit, Canadians have more local ``freenet'' connections per capita than their southern cousins -- a total of nine community services that provide free local access to the Internet. Canadians also claim a computer culture that is both more open...