Word: frets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...four months in office, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has seemed out of touch with the national mood. While Japanese say they're most worried about stagnant wages, a fragile pension system and growing social disparities, Abe has chosen to prioritize plans to revise Japan's pacifist constitution. While parents fret about declining academic standards, Abe's response has been to pass a reform bill that will attempt to make children more patriotic, and may bring back physical punishment to schools. "I'm not sure that constitutional revision should be the No. 1 issue," says Sadakazu Tanigaki, a former Finance Minister...
...those who fret that America has lost its way, that all the good jobs are being outsourced to China or India, that regular folks can't get ahead anymore, Loudoun and its neighboring counties seem to offer a resounding corrective. From 2000 to 2005, the Washington metropolitan area, of which Loudoun is part, added 359,000 jobs--much more than even such Sun Belt boomtowns as Phoenix, Ariz., and Dallas...
...Jewish leaders also fret about a two-part Armageddon scenario. The first part is that, according to Evangelical prophecy, all the Jews are either forcibly converted or killed in the last reel. The second part is that Evangelicals are trying to bring on Armageddon as a necessary condition for the Second Coming of Christ. Yet both parts are red herrings. First of all, we Jews don't believe in the Second Coming. Either we are right about this, or we are wrong, in which case we'll have some 'splainin' to do to Jesus. Either...
...industry hopes--prays--that audiences believe all the hype for these threequels. Movie people know that for every Spider-Man, there's a thudding Hulk; for every Shrek, a wildly off-orbit Treasure Planet. They also fret that with so many seen-it-before films clogging the May-June release schedule, sequel fatigue may set in. Pandya suggests this could hurt the June 15 opening of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a follow-up to the 2005 film Fantastic Four...
...irony, of course, is that Israel set out to destroy Hizballah last summer and ended up making its leader, Nasrallah, only stronger. In Beirut, Lebanese politicians fret that it's only because Hizballah came out of the war with Israel relatively unscathed that Nasrallah is attempting his current power play of bringing down the Siniora government. Given the current tumult in the Middle East, the outcome of a second fight to the finish for Israel could prove even more unpredictable - and possibly disastrous...