Word: formality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leader of the free world, the agency's job originally was to stamp out counterfeiting in an era when one out of every three bills in circulation was fake. Though the Secret Service was tasked with guarding President Grover Cleveland's family in the 1890s, presidential security became a formal objective only after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. It wasn't until 1951--after a failed attempt on President Harry Truman's life--that Congress codified the agency's permanent protection of the First Family. Its duties also now include candidates for high office and visiting dignitaries...
...that includes three Egyptian fortune-tellers, a page, a lady-in-waiting, and a king, all of whom sing lengthy solo arias and pose and mime animatedly. This is meant to be very much in tune with the Baroque style, which suggests the way deep emotion arises out of formal gesture. Performance in the very idiosyncratic vein of “Baroque” was in fact the subject of a master-class hosted at the NCT last week. Soprano Ellen Hargis worked with six members of the cast of “L’Ormindo?...
...first formal public defense and explanation of his actions since the dust settled from the financial panic of late September and early October, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had clearly been thinking about it for a while. Normally a believer in brevity, especially at press conferences, he arrived in the Treasury press room Wednesday morning with a 3,500-word speech prepared. He then proceeded to read the whole thing, taking a few big swigs of water along the way, before hoarsely submitting to questions...
...press on Monday that the U.N. body's inspectors found traces of uranium when they inspected the site in June. Apparently, the amounts weren't large enough to make a definitive conclusion, but the IAEA is putting Syria - which has no publicly declared civilian nuclear program - on the formal agenda for its year-end meeting in late November. Diplomats at the IAEA say the Syrian government, which denies that it was trying to build nuclear weapons, has balked at the agency's requests for wider inspections...
...Rushdie, who, although he is not one of their faculty members, writes fiction that acknowledges the centrality of faith to culture without the author's pious participation. From his astounding breakthrough work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point of view of a highly-educated Muslim-born sceptic. This potentially flammable combination combusted in 1989 when Iran's then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, sanctioned Rushdie's execution by the faithful for alleged blasphemies in his fictional exploration of Islam's origins...