Word: constantions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Will troops start coming home? Petraeus is likely to recommend that troop levels remain constant at around 160,000 soldiers and Marines until April 2008, when a gradual redeployment will begin. The drawdown process will seem agonizingly slow, and that's because it will be - one 3,500-strong brigade and its supporting personnel a month. The timing is strategic and political. Pentagon personnel predict a massive drop in recruiting and retention in April if troops overseas aren't given long-promised breaks to go home. The political clock is ticking too. A partial springtime withdrawal would permit the White...
...widening wealth gap. The country's military leaders are leading ever more ostentatious lives, their wallets fattened by gas-pipeline deals with neighbors China, Thailand and India. The ruling class cruises around in luxury cars and cloisters itself in compounds ablaze with lights, even as most Burmese face constant electricity rationing. A samizdat video circulating in Rangoon shows junta chief Than Shwe's daughter, decked out in jewels, getting married in a lavish ceremony - this in a country where the average annual per capita income is just $225. Even more galling, the junta turned a thicket of jungle into...
...favors. And he promised active French diplomacy in Iraq and Lebanon while pledging that France would help prevent the emergence of an Islamist ministate in the Gaza Strip. No U.S. President should ever expect his French counterpart to agree with everything he says, but the old days of constant enmity between Washington and Paris seem to be over...
...sunny outlook carried into the next week and was seemingly reflected in the changing billboards adorning Tehran. For years religious murals have lent the city a dismal air, a constant reminder to Iranians that they are living under an Islamic theocracy that is hostile to everything it considers Western, including beauty. Now the billboards display attractive black-and-white photographs of grinning revolutionaries and Islamic calligraphy that resembles urban graffiti. One morning a white van with PEYK-E KHORSHID (MESSENGER OF THE SUN) emblazoned on its sides rolled into my neighborhood, and two women in powder blue chadors opened...
Since there was no electricity or refrigerators to keep perishables fresh, Maponya opened a distribution system with 100 bicycle delivery boys, who hauled milk to the families of Soweto exactly when they needed it. The dairy grew to a general provisions shop and, despite police raids and a constant battle to win licenses - for example, he needed a special license to sell soap on Sundays - a small conglomerate bloomed. By the mid-1970s, Maponya's businesses included a chain of general stores, a butcher shop, a restaurant, a Coca-Cola plant, filling stations and a GM and BMW car dealership...