Word: burnish
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...Already this month, Shanghai has obliged 500 factories in the city to move their production to off-peak hours. Yet it still requires buildings in the top commercial districts to keep their interior lights on all night to burnish Shanghai's image as an international financial capital. According to one building manager from the Xujiahui district, this requirement has led to doubled electricity consumption, not only from the lights themselves but from the air-conditioning needed during the day to cool the overheated building. All in all, Shanghai's much-vaunted nocturnal skyline?100 times brighter than the Australian capital...
Answering these questions has been difficult because, unlike the bulk of my Kennedy School classmates—some of whom are younger than me by four decades—I did not come to KSG to burnish existing skills to do my current job better, nor to learn new skills in order to break from the past and embark on a new career...
...self-critical. When one of her movies is mentioned, she asks: "Don't you think I looked like I was trying a little hard?" She is ranked third on Forbes' China Celebrity List (after basketball superstar Yao Ming and actress Zhang Ziyi), yet such accolades have done nothing to burnish her image of herself. "Sometimes it's very difficult to get a sense of myself. I need other people to be my mirror...
...leadership cadre nonetheless proclaim their affiliation with al-Qaeda, because that association amplifies the meaning of a specific action - the bombing of a hotel in Istanbul or an embassy in Baghdad - by tying it to a global jihad. Claiming the "al-Qaeda" imprimatur also allows such groups to burnish their appeal among local malcontents, whose anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high...
...question, as Dairon suggested, is whether all this marks a tangible change in the way corporations behave or whether it's simply "greenwash," an elaborate public relations exercise designed to make firms appear more sensitive than they really are. Total, with sales of $125 billion, could certainly stand to burnish its image. Several former managers were just convicted in a sensational corruption case in France, and the company stands accused of using forced labor to build a gas pipeline in Myanmar, which it vigorously denies. Total's image at home was especially sullied by a devastating oil spill that polluted...