Word: confab
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...heads into its May confab Tuesday, the economy's prospects for dodging a recession are actually looking pretty good. On Friday, encouraging reports for April on retail sales (up), consumer sentiment (up) and wholesale inflation (pretty tame) put a dent in the unanimous expectation that the Fed heads would chop another 50 basis points, or a half-point, off the short-term interest rate that is the Fed's raison d'etre. Theoretically, Fed cuts take 6-18 months to work their magic in the economy (though the stock market "wealth effect" has in recent years been credited with speeding...
...reporters at a press conference last week and asked, "Where's Stretch?" it revived interest in D.C.'s hottest parlor game: Guess the Nickname. "Stretch" is an easy one, if not especially original--it can apply to either David Gregory of NBC News or, as at the press confab, Richard Keil of Bloomberg. Both are about 6 ft. 6 in. Other nicknames are being overheard at photo ops, D.C. dinners and Cabinet meetings. While Bush's method appears scattershot, we have--eureka!--discerned a pattern to the moniker madness...
...Even before President Clinton's fruitless confab with Arafat, Prime Minister Ehud Barak appeared to be circling the wagons in Israel, warning that the Palestinian leader was not serious about concluding a deal and once again urging his army to prevent attacks on Israelis by any means necessary - a directive that has been interpreted in recent months as license to carry out a systematic program of assassinating selected Palestinian militants held responsible by Israel for planning or committing acts of violence. Having failed to secure a peace agreement on which to campaign, Barak's best hope for winning reelection...
...talk, aides report, centered on reconciliation and the now-familiar theme of "healing the wounds" left by a bitter election and post-election cycle. They could have talked about peanut brittle, of course, and it wouldn't have made much difference. The healing was all in the pre-confab photo...
Where the Dons come from, mountains are deities. When last week's Millennium World Peace Summit, the grand religious confab affiliated with both the U.N. and Ted Turner, sought South America's purest practitioners of Incan and pre-Incan pantheism for its environmental panel, it turned to the Q'ero nation. The Q'ero, who live at an altitude of 15,000 ft. in several villages south of Cuzco, were amenable. They had had a prophetic vision about traveling to a far land to discuss the world's growing disharmony: pollution in the clouds that wreath their peaks, bizarrely early...