Word: blunderer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...self-employed man who hired a lawyer to sort out a blunder by tax authorities has been left facing a €2.2 million bill in legal fees. The man had received a €290 million tax bill on his €17,000 annual salary - a mix-up that took the attorney just an hour to resolve. But under German law, the lawyer is entitled to a fixed percentage of the reduction in tax obtained. Of course, it's nice for the tax man to know that, for once, there is someone less popular than...
...intelligence world, was arrested by federal agents. The diplomatic gaffe was surprising enough: the U.S. keeps contacts with Taiwan at arm's length out of deference to China, and visits to the island by key diplomats are very infrequent and require top-level approval. But the intelligence blunder?exposing himself to blackmail by making the secret trip?was even worse. "Even if he pulled [the trip] off," says one shocked former colleague, "he would then be totally in Taiwan's pocket because they could threaten to go public with it at any time...
...middle-class civil servant's family in Bhubaneswar, a dirt-poor city in eastern India that is usually given a wide berth by tourists. "Even in Indian terms, it's really remote," she says. Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child?or, as she puts it, a "contraceptual blunder." In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent his wife Praveen to a clinic for an abortion, but she couldn't bring herself to go through...
...there, as fans can attest, is a timeless, effervescent cocktail of comic juxtapositions, smoothly musical prose and exuberant generosity. "Behind the Drones and the manor house weekends," writes McCrum, "is a sweet, melancholy nostalgia for an England of innocent laughter and song." An England that Wodehouse, after his thoughtless blunder, never saw again...
...They are also being press-ganged into something else: national service. Last year, the regime ordered civil servants to undergo a month of military training. Teaching a restive, resentful population how to fight seems a tactical blunder, but trainees are only given sticks, not rifles, and I hear that those with 15,000 kyat (about $17) can buy themselves out. The Burmese military is stronger than ever?nearly 40% of the national budget goes to the armed forces, making them the second largest in Southeast Asia after Vietnam's?but also more paranoid than ever. The state-run media...