Word: boast
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace of the 1960s, and its citizens still have to stand in long lines for such minor amenities of life...
Today, Sichuan is a national showplace for the policies of its homegrown boy. In a field where dozens of commune workers once listlessly toiled, a family now energetically tills the land. Villages whose fortunes once depended entirely upon crops now boast small plants that make products such as shoes, radios and billiard balls. Free markets enliven every town's main street, attracting peddlers from all around who bring their wares by bicycle. (What can be tied up and carried on two wheels would have amazed even Ripley: live pigs and goats and 20-ft.-long bamboo poles...
...skylines could talk, Shanghai's would echo that judgment. While Peking and Canton boast modern hotels and office towers, Shanghai looks frozen in time, a black-and-white photograph from the 1930s. The buildings along the Bund that housed the great British trading firms and banks before the 1949 Communist take-over still stand, but now they are sooty and decrepit, ghosts from another...
...could boast of a bloodless triumph in October, when U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters accosted an Egyptian Boeing 737 (by coincidence, the same one that ended up as a charred hulk in Malta) and forced it to land in Sicily. There it disgorged four young Palestinians who had hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro and, before giving up, killed Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a semi-invalid U.S. citizen. An Italian court has already convicted the four men of illegal weapons possession; in the spring they are due to go on trial for piracy and murder...
...Resistance (M.N.R.) set off two car bombs in the capital of Maputo, injuring some 50 people, three of them critically. Despite its army of 15,000 men and a steady flow of military equipment from East bloc countries, the government has been unable to fight off the insurgents, who boast 10,000 men under arms and are suspected of receiving clandestine backing from South Africa...