Word: contestants
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...bikini has arrived in the People's Republic. After a year of competing in demure, one-piece suits, the country's female body builders are creating a sensation with their new sports uniforms. The first blow for navel liberation was struck in September by four competitors at a provincial contest. "A sudden hail of deafening screams and whistles broke out," reported the biweekly Shenzhen Youth Herald. "The four girls trembled at the center of the stage and slowly lowered their heads." When the hall finally quieted and the athletes raised their heads to strike their poses, the 500 spectators went...
...denounced the trend as an "unhealthy wind." But puritanical worries quickly gave way to more practical considerations. Bluntly put, if Chinese women hoped to compete internationally, they would have to show a little more flesh. Peking finally came around and ruled that bikinis could be worn at the Shenzhen contest. The Chinese press soberly hailed the itsy, bitsy swatches as a "great challenge to the traditional concepts and remnants of feudal ideology." An appreciative whistle might have made the point just as nicely...
...earlier this year for control of the Distillers Company, makers of Gordon's Gin and Johnnie Walker scotch. Two companies were bidding for Distillers, Guinness and a supermarket chain called the Argyll Group. Both bidders had offered Distillers' shareholders a mix of stock and cash. But shortly before the contest was over, a sudden and mysterious flurry of trading raised the value of Guinness's stock while lowering Argyll's. Its offer thus sweetened, the giant brewery acquired Distillers in April for $3.8 billion...
...race is still tight: 52% of voters now say they would prefer Sarkozy to 48% for Royal in a head-to-head contest. But Socialists are more concerned by polls suggesting that their candidate's often random comments are undermining that ineffable quality of being "presidentiable," or enrobed with sufficient natural authority and gravitas for the top job. Her Socialist brethren used a version of that argument, often with a sexist undertone, to try to disqualify Royal last year, and it didn't work. But in France's relatively short campaign, mistakes are cumulative. Royal has inspired enthusiasm...
Hillary Clinton is the clear front-runner to win the Democratic Party's nomination for President in 2008, but the Republican race will be a close contest between Senator John McCain and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani - with McCain edging Giuliani by a three- to four-point margin. And a presidential face-off between Clinton and McCain, right now, would be close to a dead heat. Those are some of the key findings of a new TIME poll earlier this week that canvassed a random sample of 1,064 registered voters by phone...