Word: blunders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...British--schools, courts, goods, even the English language. He believed mass noncooperation would achieve independence within a year. Instead, it degenerated into bloody rioting, and British soldiers turned their guns on a crowd in Amritsar, massacring 400. Gandhi called his underestimating of the violence inside Indian society his "Himalayan blunder." Still, villagers mobbed him wherever he went, calling him Mahatma. By 1922, 30,000 followers had been jailed, and Gandhi ordered civil disobedience. The British slowed the momentum by jailing him for 22 months...
...decision to bring Maher into the Safra household was the biggest blunder of all. The New York Times said Maher was offered the job after he returned a camera left by a close Safra associate. Bonnant says Maher had been carefully vetted through "in-depth background checks" and a personal interview with Mrs. Safra. "The fact that Maher is unstable became apparent to us only after the accident," Bonnant told TIME. "Nothing in Maher's files showed the slightest trace of mental instability...
...Americans had a few years earlier. Wresting political autonomy from a power across an ocean was not the same as toppling a thousand-year-old home-grown feudal system. But, the author argues, the French could have learned one lesson from America and thereby avoided a bloody philosophical blunder. Instead of following the Founding Fathers' careful protections of individual liberties, the French made the unity of their people the highest goal. "Curiously," Dunn writes, "all the qualities that had traditionally been attributed to the quasi-divine king--oneness, indivisibility, infallibility--were transferred to the revolutionary 'people.'" This formulation outlawed dissent...
CRAB Any kind of oar-blunder in which the blade gets "stuck" in the water...
...Tokyo, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's office wasn't informed for five hours. It wasn't until late afternoon--more than five hours after the disastrous blunder--that local authorities evacuated 160 residents to a community center. There, technicians in gray jump suits scanned bodies with wands to measure radioactive exposure. Chieko Kawano was told she shouldn't use her well water. "It's too late, you know," she replied. Later that evening loudspeakers in Tokaimura and eight nearby towns advised more than 300,000 people to stay inside, close their doors and seal their windows. "When we have more...