Word: britain
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...first the OED, Britain's dictionary of record, explained that it merely recorded words according to their popular usage. A statement from a company official said it was not their role to redefine meanings assigned those words according to the preferences of interest groups...
...McDonald's is hardly the first interest group to challenge the OED's chronicling of unflattering slang. Last year, Britain's Potato Council complained that the definition of couch potato implied that the nutritious tuber was inherently unhealthy, thus driving down business. Instead, the Council campaigned for the term to be replaced by couch slouch, even staging protests outside the OED's Oxford headquarters - but to no avail...
...officials voted last month to reopen a refugee center in September near the city's ferry dock. Immigrants will receive hot meals and showers there, but, unlike the shuttered shelter in Sangatte, no one will be allowed to sleep in the building. The plan has outraged some politicians in Britain, where, as in Sarkozy's campaign, immigration is a hot issue. Conservative Party immigration spokesman Damian Green has said he fears a fresh stampede of illegal immigrants from a new Calais center. The Calais mayor's spokesman Bernard Barron counters that his city has no choice. "Calais has been abandoned...
...Trojan e-mail attacks. These infect a PC by e-mail, using a program that runs undetected in the background. Free to perform tasks usually reserved for the system's owner, the invader can remotely swipe passwords, upload documents and transmit new attacks. In a report published in 2005, Britain's government-backed National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre released details of a series of Trojan e-mail attacks on U.K. government IT networks, which it claimed to have traced to the Far East, including China. Since then, a spokesperson says, the frequency of these attacks has speeded...
That should be good news for some of the poorest countries in the world's poorest continent. After all, Norway and Britain used North Sea oil to underwrite their welfare states, while small oil powers like Oman and Brunei found themselves catapulted out of subsistence living in a generation. Likewise, Alberta's burgeoning petroleum industry has transformed the province into a major driver of the Canadian economy. But oil is not always a boon. What if it fuels corruption rather than development, and creates the same combustible mix of great wealth, relative poverty, grievance and instability...