Word: burnish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Godfather Cho has done as much as anyone to burnish the image of the gentleman gangster. He has had 21 books published, mostly thinly disguised autobiographical screeds with rosy depictions of gang life. Of course, the books are pure pulp?a sample chapter heading from one 382-page tome: "Oh, Finger Cutting! Such a Bittersweet Glory"?but readers lap them up. His Son of the Fire sold 200,000 copies. Cho chopped off his own pinkie in public in 1974 after an ethnic Korean gunman from Japan shot the wife of dictator Park Chung Hee. Called danji (finger chopping...
...were victims of this particular assault is uncertain, but by mid-November the death toll had climbed to 270, most of them Palestinians. The three participants in the earlier U.S. meeting found themselves caught in various binds: President Bill Clinton was desperate for a large foreign policy victory to burnish his legacy but had a very short deadline; Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who had sacrificed his coalition government when he sat down with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in July, was forced to hang tough against the Palestinians if he wanted to keep power at all; and Arafat was faced...
...explosion at the British Embassy in Sana'a, the Yemeni capital. The suspect list in both incidents would have to include the Osama Bin Laden network, in whose stomping ground it occurred, and whose leader might see Arab rage against Israel and the U.S. as an opportunity to burnish his claims to pan-Islamic leadership. Then there's Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese guerrilla movement that has previously demonstrated a capacity to operate abroad and has been expanding its influence among the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group, Hamas. The latter have refrained from attacking U.S. targets in the past, but with...
Jones went to Bankstown, Greene went to the beach; he wouldn't be caught dead where nobody could find him. He is a showboater, a character. He works hard to burnish a high-gloss image as the gum-popping, strutting leader of coach John Smith's Handling Speed Intelligently team, a stable of hip-hop athletes who train at UCLA's Drake Stadium and hang together in the off-hours. In a strategy similar to the Jones camp's, the honchos at H.S.I. sought to approximate L.A. in Sydney by renting a beach house in Coogee. Sharing it were four...
...blood diamonds"--stones unearthed in African killing fields that have helped fund conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. De Beers was rocked by disclosures that in 1992 the company bought $14 million worth of diamonds from Angolan rebels and has since scrambled to burnish its public image. In March, De Beers began selling stones with guarantees that they had not originated in war-torn areas. With its London announcement, the company went further, demanding that clients sign assurances not to buy diamonds from outlaw producers...