Word: berliner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. Markus Wolf, 83, suave spymaster known as the "man without a face" for his ability to elude photographers during most of his 34-year reign over the foreign-intelligence division of the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police; in Berlin. Rumored to be the model for John le Carré's shadowy Karla (a suggestion the author has denied), Wolf placed his 4,000 spies in such enemy territory as NATO headquarters, cannily converted West German agents to his team, and famously touted the "Romeo method"--the wooing of lonely government secretaries to gain access to confidential files. Among...
...never saw the need to. Markus Wolf was so clever a spymaster that the fact he worked for East Germany, a repugnant regime that rightly disappeared into history's dustbin, never dented the massive ego that had driven his success. When he died Thursday at 83, quietly in his Berlin apartment, on the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolf thought himself a victim of victor's justice that had denied him the esteem he deserved-and he took countless secrets to his grave...
...decades thereafter, I was unconditionally with Spector and Irving Berlin, on the "Merry Christmas" side of the debate - until the last few years, when some evangelicals and their media handmaidens made a big hairy deal about the meaning of Christmas. Like the stern secularists, they got it wrong too, insisting that Christmas was primarily a religious feast. Earlier, I was being a tad facetious about Halloween, but the professional Christians are dead serious. They want "Merry Christmas" to mean "Join with me in honoring the one true Redeemer...
...Republic." In fact, as Royal's staff noted in a quickly disseminated clarification, such popular juries are nothing new; Royal first voiced the idea back in 2002, and well before that it emerged from "Anglo-Saxon theories of empowerment." For years, such selective citizens' committees have been used in Berlin to steer municipal policies where citizens thought they ought to go, and in Scandinavia to get a handle on controversial issues like genetically modified foods...
Where recent international surveys have placed indigenous artists at the margins of Australian life (three years ago, Berlin's "Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia" included only one), visitors to "Prism" could be forgiven for thinking that Aboriginal art now occupies the center. Here, prominent non-Aboriginal artists such as Piccinini, Rosemary Laing and Fiona Hall, for once, become the minority. But because of the quietly considered way the pictures are hung, the Aboriginal upstaging appears neither jarring nor odd but perfectly natural. In this way it reflects both the heightened interest in Aboriginal art internationally, and its growing impact...