Word: cull
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June is nail-biting time at Enron Corp., a Texas energy and trading giant, at which managers assemble twice a year to evaluate and cull employees as if they were head of cattle. Wrangling behind closed doors for up to two days at a time, the bosses compare and contrast the performance of workers over the prior six months and rate them on a five-point scale, with the top 5% designated "superior" and the bottom 15% labeled "needs improvement." In between are "excellent" (30%), "strong" (30%) and "satisfactory" (20%). You don't want to be in the cellar: anyone...
...highly infectious disease restricts the movement of people as well as livestock. Draconian slaughter, perhaps, could contain and defeat the infection before May. But Labour's strength among rural voters, never great, had diminished over the party's drive to ban fox hunting and will plummet further with the cull. "There will be many tears in the British countryside today," said Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers Union. "Our farms should be starting to jump to life with newborn lambs and calves. Instead, many will feel that spring has been canceled, and their farms are simply dead...
...news will only get worse as Tony Blair's government prepares to send army marksmen into the fields to join the exhausted men known as sleepers, who kill livestock with bullets, bolts and lethal injection. The emergency cull is being called for all animals that live within two miles of a confirmed infection. Blair already faces charges of incompetence and the possibility of a revolt by farmers whose herds are healthy. None of this makes a terribly picturesque backdrop for the election he would like to call...
...often via open demonstrations in Pakistani cities of militants working out, scaling walls and showing other martial tricks. Generous donors are invited to visit the not-so-secret camps to see how their money is spent.) Phase two is designed to push each volunteer to his physical limit and cull the weak from the strong. In the final weeks, recruits use live ammunition, construct actual explosives and perfect ambush techniques. The final exam lasts three days. A group of trainees, sometimes as large as 100 individuals, hikes and climbs through high-altitude, wooded terrain for three days without food...
...five small groups). Whom do we remember from "Survivor 1," anyway? Just the last few: Richard, Sue, Sean, Rudy, Kelly (one was named Kelly, right?). One of the reasons I found that early "Survivor" excerpt so dull was that there were way too many people doing way too little. Cull the herd a little before we go on the air, let us know up front who the stars are, and let's get down to business...