Word: branch
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...recite poetry, because it is so easy to sound pretentious or uncomfortable and thus to ruin it, but my friend recited in a low clear fine voice. “Oh, lovely,” I said. High above us, the tire swing rope creaked against the tree branch, sighed, and creaked again. He said: “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world...
...Saturday in October, several dozen of China's most outspoken men and women converged on an artists' colony in the mountains outside Beijing at a meeting of the unofficial Chinese branch of the global writers' association PEN International. The occasion: the awarding of a literary prize to author Zhang Yihe for her account of the traumatic anti-intellectual purges of the late 1950s. Such a gathering shows how far contemporary Chinese cultural life has come from the brutal days described in Zhang's book, when participants in similar events were sent to prison...
...last week, three of the PEN attendees were detained by Beijing police, including the branch's two founders: Yu Jie, a prolific essayist and frequent critic of Chinese political culture, and social commentator Liu Xiaobo. The police questioned the three about their writings and copied material from their computers. Yu's wife Liu Min says police told her that her husband was suspected of "endangering state security," and that she should "tell her old man to quit writing." All three men were later released, but as of Thursday night, Yu said police were still stationed outside his door and following...
...latest incarnation of the rental-car wars--a fight to grab neighborhood business from market leader Enterprise Rent-A-Car. For years, Keenan was a loyal promoter of Enterprise rentals to customers who needed a replacement car. Then he got a call from Hertz, which was looking to branch away from Philadelphia's airport and downtown and into the local market. After thorough negotiating, including a driving tour to show a Hertz executive the locations of his stores, Keenan leased Hertz space in or adjacent to four of his shops. Now almost all his customers drive away with loaners from...
...nice bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden, various pols (including the President) get to take credit, but nothing really changes ... except for the accretion of another sedimentary layer of semi-powerless bureaucracy. In truth, it is impossible for Congress to reorganize the inner workings of the Executive Branch without the full support of the President, and I'm not so sure George Bush really favored either one of the attempted reforms...