Word: clear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pentagon has made clear that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan when the ragtag Afghan security forces have been beefed up to the point at which they can keep the peace without help. "Significantly expanding [Afghanistan's national security forces] is, in fact, our exit strategy," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told U.S. troops in Kandahar last week. But that's a strategy that could leave U.S. forces in Afghanistan for quite some time to come. The economy of impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to be able to sustain an army big enough to guarantee the country's security...
...last day of the two-week-long U.N. climate-change summit in Poznan, Poland, which concluded on Dec. 12, the Nobel laureate warned delegates from over 190 countries that the time for idle talk on global warming was over. "We now face a crisis that makes it abundantly clear that increased CO2 emissions anywhere are a threat to the integrity of this planet's climate balance everywhere," he said. "As a result the old divide between the North and South, between developed and developing countries, is a divide that must become obsolete...
...Gore received warm applause from the crowd, but it's not clear his message really got through. Though expectations for the annual summit weren't high, thanks in part to a leadership vacuum in the U.S. and the nagging distraction of a worldwide financial meltdown, neither were its accomplishments. More optimistic observers pointed to pledges from individual developing nations to cut their carbon emissions; under the Kyoto Protocol, those countries aren't actually required to take any concrete action on climate change. Mexico should take a bow - America's significantly poorer neighbor promised to cut carbon emissions 50% below...
...Ultimately, the immediate future of global climate-change action won't be decided in Brussels or Poznan but in Washington, D.C. - where there really is cause for hope. While President-elect Barack Obama (and his top emissaries) steered clear of the Poznan summit - understandable, since the Bush Administration's negotiating team was still in charge - at home the names of his climate and energy teams have been revealed. Lisa Jackson, a respected state official in New Jersey, will head the Environmental Protection Agency, while Carol Browner - head of the EPA under President Bill Clinton - will take a new position...
...been Minnesota instead of Florida in 2000, this is what we would have found out: Voters are idiots. You make a clear, statewide ballot with neat little ovals to fill in? Some voters will put in check marks and X's. They'll fill out two ovals. They'll mark one candidate's oval in ink, try to erase that mark and then put their initials next to their correction, even though there's a law on the books forbidding voters to sign their ballots, to prevent voter bribing. They'll scrawl something about taxes in that oval, or about...