Word: downplaying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Senior officials in Shaanxi downplay the dispute. Governor Chen Deming told foreign reporters in May that the peasants were fairly compensated based on their oil income, which he suggests they under-reported to escape taxes. "They say they earned more, and we say prove it?and pay the tax on it," he asserts, adding that only 10% of investors rejected the government's compensation offer. Yulin mayor Wang denies that anybody is complaining about anything these days. "There was no conflict with private oil enterprises," says Wang, because "most were happy with the compensation." The city's Communist Party vice...
...only dissonant note relates to security issues. Large parts of southern Afghanistan are still too dangerous for foreigners, where fighting continues between U.S. forces and remnants of the Taliban, and bomb attacks have taken place in Kabul. At times, the authors' enthusiasm for their subject appears to make them downplay these issues, as when they assert somewhat too dismissively: "Kabul is a city of several million people ... and the percentage chance of being a victim is tiny." But Omrani and Leeming also do the country a service by pointing out what ought to be more widely known: most of Afghanistan...
Last month, as if to emphasize the point, Exxon hired Philip Cooney, the ex--White House staff member accused of revising government science reports to downplay the link between emissions and global warming. He will work in public affairs on the "issues group." You can guess which one. --By Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas
...decades, African Americans had not only remembered Lincoln kindly but also invoked him as a present-day force. "The rise of Jim Crow segregation in the South," explains Allen C. Guelzo, "occurred hand in hand with the efforts of Southerners to downplay the significance of slavery both for the war and for Lincoln, and blacks battled back by keeping slavery and Lincoln's image as the Great Emancipator at the forefront of the nation's memory." A common folktale in the mid--20th century South--which Leadbelly poignantly rendered in a song he recorded in the early 1940s...
...part, the contrast in styles reflects a contrast in goals: the Soviets sought to play up the summit as a historic occasion, while the Americans tried to downplay it as a low-key business session. But it meant that the Soviets seemed to outmaneuver the U.S. in the battle for spin control. "Yes, I'm perturbed," said a U.S. official. "Not at their side--that kind of p.r. is perfectly within the rules. I'm perturbed by the lack of it from our own team...