Word: blunting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chain reaction, the Bush Administration is trying to dissuade the republics from making proprietary claims to whatever weapons of mass destruction remain within their borders once the latest arms-cut agreement is implemented. When traveling to the U.S.S.R. or receiving Soviet visitors in Washington, American officials issue a blunt warning: U.S. political and economic support for the republics will depend on their willingness to leave control over all nuclear forces firmly in the hands of the central government...
...Fifth Man," the British spy for the Soviet Union who worked with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt during and after World War II? For four decades, espionage fans have had no shortage of suspects. Last year Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky published a book, KGB: The Inside Story, in which he fingered a scholarly Cambridge graduate named John Cairncross as the mystery man. Cairncross admitted long ago that he spied for the Soviets, but at the level of a footsoldier and in an effort to aid a wartime ally. The British government believed...
What is significantly new about New Joy is a foreword: "The Implications of AIDS" (which "totally alters the sexual landscape") and a revised, thoroughgoing chapter on health, which the reader ought to study and absorb before moving on to the rest of the text. In blunt fashion, Comfort describes the ways in which people can become infected with AIDS and discusses methods of avoidance (none of which are without their dangers). Comfort's keynote: / "If your newly found love won't use a condom, you are in bed with a witless, irresponsible and uncaring person...
Tactics that raw have disappeared from Harkin's script, but he often declines to let accuracy ruin a witty line or blunt a political dart. Angry that Bush may provide emergency assistance to the Soviet Union if food shortages worsen, Harkin says that G.O.P. niggardliness toward elderly Americans will force many of them "to choose this winter between heating and eating." Harkin dismisses the possibility of starvation in the Soviet Union: "I keep seeing these pictures of Russians. I've never seen a picture of a skinny one yet." When he argues for rapid reduction of U.S. forces in Europe...
Many Choice proponents, like Chester Finn -- whose proposals for reform appear in a new book, We Must Take Charge -- do not believe school competition will cure all the ills of urban education. Still, Finn asks the blunt question: "Under Choice, would the kids attending inner-city schools be any worse off than they are today?" There is something irredeemably tragic about the question. But equally sad is the difficulty of framing either an affirmative answer or a plausible alternative vision for dramatically uplifting disadvantaged students...