Word: english
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit and paid for it in cash. He left no contact information with the airline. He checked no bags. Seven months earlier, he had earned himself a spot on a security watch list in Britain after applying for a visa to attend a dubious English university. And when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab broke off contact with his family in October to join the war on the West, his own father reported him as a possible threat at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, where he met with a CIA officer. (Terrorism on Flight 253: Does...
This gap in the English language shouldn't come as a surprise; the debate over what to name the first decade of this century has been going on since the middle decades of the last one. The 1900s never got a name beyond vague constructions like the turn of the century. One popular term--the aughts--has proved too archaic (and tricky to spell) to be broadly revived. Wordsmiths tried new coinages starting early: in 1963 a New Yorker writer suggested "Twenty oh-oh" for the far-off year 2000, a "nervous name for what is sure...
...Qaeda claim was translated into English by yhe Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI...
...have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town. Also known as Wren Day, the tradition supposedly dates to 1601, to the Battle of Kinsale, in which the Irish tried to sneak up on the English invaders but were betrayed by the song of an overly vocal wren - although this legend's veracity is also highly debated. Years ago, a live wren was hunted and killed for the parade, but modern sentiments deemed it too gruesome...
...English grandmaster Nigel Short says that chess computers, which now regularly beat the top human players, are taking away some of the mystery of the game. He likens them to "chainsaws chopping down the Amazon." What do you make of that? I can see his point. Any amateur can look at top-level games, and instead of appreciating the mystery behind the moves they will simply look at the evaluation of the computer. I'm not afraid the computer will find all the ideas and leave no room for imagination...