Word: contraction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Efficient, capable and well paid, Haruko (played by the 33-year-old actress Ryoko Shinohara) is a contract worker who has been dispatched to a struggling Tokyo food-manufacturing company. Efficient and deadly capable, she is totally lacking in interpersonal skills - which in Japan, even more than in other countries, are at least as important as actually being able to do the job. The comedy in Haken - which at times resembles a Japanese version of The Office, minus the meanness - comes from Haruko's clashes with her often incompetent full-time colleagues (one of whom is ironically played by Koutaro...
...export their oil after paying the government a minimum 12.5% royalty, although there are usually also cash signing bonuses to the government, and most "profit oil," extracted after operating costs are met, would likely go to Baghdad. Regional governments - only Kurdistan has one right now - can sign their own contracts under the law, a dizzying change from decades when Saddam dictated the terms and stifled oil production in Kurdistan. A Baghdad-based Federal Council on Oil & Gas will be formed; it will have 60 days to appoint a team to arbitrate a contract, if it has strong concerns...
...firing rockets for the next generation of spaceliners and lunar landers near Dallas. In California, Jim Benson, founder of Compusearch, is developing a space taxi with a motor that runs on rubber and laughing gas. (Don't laugh. It works.) PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who has a NASA contract to build a robotic Pony Express to the International Space Station (ISS), is pouring his own millions into a ship for galactic travelers at his factory south of Los Angeles. Robert Bigelow, founder of Budget Suites of America, already has a small-scale, inflatable space station--hotel in orbit...
While most of his competitors have shunned the bureaucratic NASA, he bid for and won a $278 million NASA contract to develop a delivery service to the ISS. For Musk, 35, space travel is a childhood dream, not just for exploration but as a logical next stage in man's evolution from the primordial goop. "To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it's gone," he says. "I think we should establish life on another planet--Mars in particular--but we're not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that...
...because they are new, young, and attractive (Marisha Pessl). When books are competing with so many other media sources, good looks and a marketable image are as important as the work you produce. Rarely do you see an author that can get a deal and remain a hermit. Contracts now come with book signings, public talks, and television appearances as a required part of the package. It used to be that writing a book made you a celebrity; now, being a celebrity gets you a book deal. Bookstores abound with middling memoirs that made it through publishing houses because...