Word: givens
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Merkel has spent decades being underestimated. There are still plenty of observers of the German political scene who regard her myriad achievements as flukes. "Merkel has never given a speech that stayed in the memory," wrote her most recent biographer. She can indeed seem reserved and self-effacing at times, but there should be little doubt that she has confidence and ambition aplenty. "You could certainly say that I've never underestimated myself," she says with a smile that in another context could only be described as kittenish. "There's nothing wrong with being ambitious." (See the Top 10 news...
...Quiet Giant So what will she do now? Given Germany's modern history, it is hardly surprising that the nation - and whoever leads it - rarely seeks to thrust itself into acrimonious global issues. German political debate overwhelmingly concerns itself with sustaining and extending the widely shared prosperity and personal security that was a hallmark of the old West Germany. When the Great Recession began at the end of 2008, Merkel initially drew fire for her handling of the crisis, and in 2009, the German economy contracted 5% overall. Critics said she was doing too little, too slowly and that...
Eventually, the disk of gas dissipates, and the proto-planets are fixed in their permanent orbits. Exactly where those orbits lie depends on all sorts of factors peculiar to a given planetary system - how much material there is in the original proto-planetary disk, how much of that is dust and how much is gas, how big the dust grains are, how hot the star is and more. That's one reason we should expect each solar system to look a little bit different. Which, as it turns out, they...
...energy that Weiss observed on the mat in Saturday’s contest against the Pride will prove crucial for the Crimson as the dual season unfolds, given the number of sidelined grapplers. Harvard bounced back from its loss to Rutgers by winning four of the eight bouts contested at the Mack Sports Complex, but with heavyweight Spencer DeSena out due to a skin infection, the Crimson forfeited the final matchup and settled...
Last week's suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan, underscores just how difficult a mission the agency - and the U.S. as a whole - faces in the country. Given the size of the CIA, the loss it suffered when a Jordanian assumed to have been an asset penetrating al-Qaeda instead detonated an explosives belt at a gathering of agency personnel, was the equivalent of the Army losing a battalion. It was a major setback for the CIA after eight years at war, not to mention the fact that it coincided with a moment when the Agency...