Word: contestable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lecture from a dictator, but an appeal from a politician for the votes of citizens. For the first time in Egypt's history, the President faced not a yes-no referendum on his presidency, in which he'd be assured of 99% or so of the tally, but a contest in which he had to defend his record before the citizenry against rival candidates. Mubarak has been hop-scotching around the country, telling crowds, "I stand before you asking for your endorsement." Close on his heels, nine challengers have been giving raucous speeches, sometimes accusing him of tyranny and corruption...
...Lebanon this year, as a further crumbling of the edifice that has guarded authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for half a century. They hope that Egyptian elections in November will produce a more representative parliament, and that voters will have a real choice in the next presidential contest, in 2011. After surveying the overflow crowd of 5,000 people at a rally in the northern city of El Mahla El Kobra, Maram Mazen, 19, a law student volunteering with the Nour campaign, was left brimming with hope. "It's a big step to have someone challenge the president...
...With its beauty pageant, parade, speed shucking contests and, of course, mountains of fresh oysters, the International Oyster Festival (galwayoysterfest.com) in Galway, Ireland, is four days of fun and feasting, guaranteed to satiate the appetites of even the most ardent bivalve lover. Now in its 51st year, the mouth-watering event runs from Sept. 22-25. Proceedings kick off with the Irish oyster opening championship, but the highlight for most visitors is the international shucking contest, when contestants from as far afield as Singapore and Estonia compete for the world title. Scandinavians have held the top spot in recent years...
...grass hut making Black Harvest (1992), the third in their trilogy set in the wildly beautiful Highlands of Papua New Guinea. A planned book on their experience was never finished, waylaid by other projects, such as their celebrated 1996 take on the overheated jostling during the mayoral contest in an inner-Sydney city council, Rats in the Ranks. So when Connolly took up the book again 12 years on, it was a way of revisiting a time he remembers as "our high point, our year on the edge ... Days when we edged along rope bridges spanning churning rivers; or listened...
Consider: in the first few minutes of the two-hour pilot, Scofield, a structural engineer, holds up a bank, although he has no criminal record or need for money; waits for the police to show up; pleads no contest to armed robbery; asks to be sent to the same maximum-security hellhole as his sib; and, the better to look the part, gets a massive tattoo all over his torso. That tattoo might as well read, HELLO, I AM GOING TO BREAK MY WRONGFULLY IMPRISONED BROTHER OUT OF JAIL...