Word: commoner
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...barrel-chested rugby fan, Rajapaksa, 63, will need that common touch to bring Sri Lanka to a true and lasting peace between the island nation's Sinhalese majority (which is mostly Buddhist) and Tamil minority (mostly Hindu). The civil war began in earnest in July 1983, after nearly 3,000 Tamils were killed in several days of systematic anti-Tamil violence. It was the low point of what Sri Lanka's Tamils felt had been decades of official discrimination and military repression in Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. The LTTE took up arms in the name...
...That's a common conclusion, echoed in the lunchrooms at the Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park, home to Taiwan's tech industry, and in the office of President Ma Ying-jeou. Government and business leaders believe Taiwan needs to become more diversified and integrated into the regional economy, which is increasingly dominated by China. "The main lesson we learned in the financial tsunami is that we are only dependent on our export industry, in particular IT," says San Gee, deputy minister of Taiwan's Council for Economic Planning and Development. The idea is to "transform our overall economy...
Finally, the law also legalizes what, in fact, is an already common (albeit illicit) practice in shops and malls clustered around Paris, Lille and Marseille - though limits it to those areas. The text calls for Sunday work to be left optional for employees and paid higher than other days, but opponents say those stipulations will be ignored once bosses start ordering employees fearful of losing their jobs to take on dominical work behind closed doors, and on management's terms...
...larger lesson of that day was that everyone in this vast land had instant, common access to the same information on events large and small. And there was no shortage of large ones: Vietnam, the civil rights movement, assassinations, the counterculture, space shots, Watergate...
...Most striking, perhaps, was Obama's failure to address head-on some of the most difficult issues. Such evasions are a common practice for Presidents, of course, but Obama is usually more straightforward, and prides himself as being too self-aware to engage in the artful dodge as comfortably as some of his predecessors...