Word: blancos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...always glorious, but it has a singular sting for Spanish athletes who stand up to receive their gold medals and championship trophies: their national anthem has no lyrics. "For years we've been hearing from athletes that they feel a little lame up there on the podium," says Alejandro Blanco, president of Spain's Olympics Committee. "All they can do is sing along with 'la la la.'" In an attempt to rectify the situation, the Committee, working with the Society of Authors and Writers, has opened a contest to put words to the Spanish national anthem. The winning entry will...
...Olympic Committee, however, takes a more benign view. "No song is going to win over everyone," Blanco admits. "But sports bring people together." So far, over 5000 entries have been received - proof, he says, that "Spaniards have really taken to this idea." After the deadline for submissions closes on October 26, a jury of specialists will convene in November to decide the winner. "It's possible we could be hearing them sung in Beijing," says Blanco...
...only serious obstacle could be the same thing that helped Blanco edge out her upstart opponent in 2003 - the impression that Jindal is an overachieving bureaucrat who has little empathy for the poor in a largely poor state. A Rhodes scholar whose parents arrived in the U.S. from India just months before he was born, Jindal was selected to run the state's Department of Health and Hospitals by Blanco's predecessor, two-term Republican Mike Foster, at the ripe old age of 24. The Baton Rouge native guided the bloated department through a rough period of cutbacks, both...
...Blanco used the image of Jindal as a cold-hearted numbers cruncher to her advantage with ads that many say turned the tide in the last election, and it has surfaced again in an emotionally charged spot produced by one of Jindal's challengers, Democrat Walter Boasso. In the ad, a middle-aged woman named Lynn McNiece, in a calm voice, barely concealing her grief and rage, tells of her mentally disabled brother who was evicted from a nursing home during Jindal's tenure at the state health department. "Bobby Jindal threw my brother out on the street...
...greatest unknown is the degree to which voter apathy will affect the race. With Vitter recently shamed by revelations that he had previously paid prostitutes for sex, U.S. Congressman William Jefferson facing trial for corruption in January, and Nagin and Blanco considered by many to be irrelevant at best and outright failures at worst, voters may have decided that the entire electoral process is pointless. "I would contend that we're headed for a historically low turnout, which is the opposite of what we would have expected in Louisiana in 2007," says Shreveport demographer and political analyst Elliott Stonecipher...