Word: descent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...often that you see a product made in Afghanistan. The country is the world's biggest opium producer, but that's not an export government officials shout about. Yet before its descent into chaos in the late 1970s, Afghanistan was famous for its pomegranates, grapes, apricots and other fruit. Since then, as war cut the old trade routes and Afghanistan became isolated, traditional markets have been lost. So what were these pomegranates doing in my local fruit shop? And if they were available in Delhi, why aren't they in North America or Europe, where pomegranate popularity has boomed thanks...
...Annapolis has been met with understandable skepticism, and concern that failure to achieve anything might actually trigger a final descent into a darkness. Yet, there are reasons to hope that Annapolis instead could be the peace conference to end all peace conferences, if success is defined as the launching of a serious new round of comprehensive negotiations based on a solid consensus for realistic solutions...
...sympathy and our grateful laughter. It is a low-key, commercial comedy, but its people are believably eccentric instead of unbelievably nutsy, it offers an interesting twist on the basic dilemmas of romantic comedy and it finds a way of satisfying our hopes for a happy ending without descent into implausibility or travesty...
...that was the message behind an event at Winthrop House last night in which two House residents discussed the results of genetic testing that traced their roots to distant, and in one case unexpected, corners of the globe. Pedro Jorge Gomes Castelo-Branco, a Winthrop House tutor of Portuguese descent, and House Master Mandana Sassanfar, whose family is from Iran, presented the result of the tests as part of a race and diversity event that focused on the “interconnectedness of the human population.” The pair had sent cheek swabs to the Genographic Project...
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian...