Word: focusing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...terrorists are now freelancers and self-starters, which means that while we're going to see more duds like the car-bomb attacks, we are also likely to see a lot more attempts, period. The key is to think in a more nuanced way about the threat rather than focus exclusively on young men from the Middle East or homegrown radicals. The more that authorities target a particular group, the more terrorist groups will recruit outside that category...
...best way to protect civilians from terrorist attacks is to prevent them from being planned. One goal is not separate from the other. But governments still tend to focus much of their time and money on our last lines of defense--explosives sniffers at airports and haz-mat suits for firefighters. That's the equivalent of building a really deep castle moat and waiting for the invaders to arrive. "Unless you can arrest [terrorists] before they get to execution stage, your chances of averting bloodshed and death come down to luck," says a French former counterterrorism official...
That approach has frustrated opponents like the Roman Catholic Church--some U.S. dioceses have stopped adoption services altogether rather than comply with state funding rules that require them to allow gay adoption--and the conservative, Colorado-based group Focus on the Family. Bill Maier, Focus' vice president and chief psychologist, insists the practice "hurts children because it intentionally creates motherless or fatherless families," and he accuses child-welfare agencies of "a real biased push to normalize same-sex parenting." He adds, "I don't see any shortage of heterosexual parents willing to adopt." Although they say it's not linked...
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain's reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can dampen the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug's hold...
...seen as an eccentric Auntie Mame; your worst fear was to grow old like Miss Havisham, locked in her cavernous mansion, bitter after being ditched at the altar. Not anymore. "We've ended the spinster era," says Philadelphia psychotherapist Diana Adile Kirschner, who has made single women a focus of her practice. "Women used to tell me about isolation, living alone, low level of activity, feeling different. Now there's family, lots of friends, they're less isolated and more integrated into social lives...