Word: fig
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...advocacy groups strongly reject the WTO's right to overrule measures intended to protect the environment or public health, arguing that the organization puts the narrow interests of business over those of society in general. But countries disadvantaged by such measures often charge that they're invoked as a fig leaf for old-fashioned protectionism. For example, Washington has dismissed European health concerns over the import of hormone treated beef as an attempt to protect less competitive European farmers...
...Next to Fig Newtons, there's nothing I like better than a good longitudinal study. I especially enjoy ones with fancy titles that use lots of charts and graphs to tell us what we suspected all along. The latest, entitled "The Nature and Predictors of the Trajectory of Change in Marital Quality for Husbands and Wives over the First 10 Years of Marriage," was published this month in the Journal of Developmental Psychology. Cutely subtitled "Predicting the Seven-Year Itch," this extensive research charts the decline in the quality of marriages of more than 500 Midwestern couples, surveyed over...
...handed down in Denver, two weeks ago, that it claims gives telephone companies the right to peddle data on customers to a third party without their permission. "We tried to give consumers a meaningful cloak of privacy," said Kennard. "But what we have today is nothing more than a fig leaf...
...Vedder has seen it all a thousand times before. Gazing into a jungle clearing, she watches as a lumbering group of gorillas approaches. Brushing through rain-forest shrubs, knuckle-walking past a strangler fig, they push their way into the open. While the adults forage, the juveniles climb the trunk of a fallen tree and play king of the mountain. From somewhere above, hornbills and blue monkeys sound an alarm...
...patch of untamed forest is, like the stadium, located squarely in the Bronx. Recently built into the southwest corner of the sprawling Bronx Zoo, the 6.5-acre range is a magnificent exercise in environmental illusion. The leaves the gorillas are munching are willow, native to the U.S.; the strangler fig is really catalpa, a local species; the understory plant is butterbur, native to Japan; the fallen tree is made out of metal, mesh and layers of epoxy; and a few hundred yards from the recorded sounds of hornbills and monkeys, Latin music blares from a picnic on a sweltering June...