Word: group
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...lites - those who could pay $549 for a ticket - gathered in suffocating self-righteousness at the Opryland Hotel on the first weekend of February. It was classic Palin, a brilliant line, brilliantly delivered: she does folksy far better than George W. Bush or any of the other Republican focus-group populists ever did. It was the signature line of her speech, which rocked the joint - and then, slowly, began to rock the national political community. The speech was inspired drivel, a series of distortions and oversimplifications, totally bereft of nourishing policy proposals - the sort of thing calculated, carefully calculated...
...national issues," but she probably shouldn't have: current events is American for "policy." It is the high school term of art for the hour each week when students are forced to study the state of the world. Palin's great strength is that the vernacular, rather than focus-group language, is her default position. At the end of the interview, Wallace asked what role she wanted to play in the country's future. "Well, first and foremost, I want to be a good mom," she replied. And then, in closing, Wallace asked, "Can I get a 'You betcha...
...disappearance, which was presumably at the hands of state security officers. "This series of repression against dissent and activism ... I don't know if it's coincidence or reflective of a deeper meaning," says Joshua Rosenzweig, a Hong Kong-based researcher for the Dui Hua Foundation, a human-rights group. "Certainly looking at it from the outside, at case after case of heavy sentences being handed down for things that should be constitutionally protected rights, it's hard to come away from this and not see a hardening line." (See pictures of the making of modern China...
...alleged ringleader of the group, who has been identified as Roland K, a 74-year-old former developer, testified in a Bavarian court this week that they didn't intend to kidnap the victim, identified as James A. He said he and his friend and fellow investor, 60-year-old Wilhelm D, met with the investment specialist in the town of Speyer in June 2009 for a "final chat" about getting their money back. But when they realized that their savings were gone for good, he said they became enraged. (See the top 10 crime stories...
...Roland didn't deny being angry at James, calling him a "liar and a crook" in court. He said that the retirees met James while on vacation years ago in Florida and that he persuaded them to invest their money in the U.S. housing market, promising the group a profit margin of 18%. Following the subprime-market collapse in the U.S., Roland now claims that James "tricked us and took us for a ride...