Word: habit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...agree that casual gambling, in which participants wager small sums, is not necessarily bad. Compulsive betting, however, almost always involves destructive behavior. Last fall police in Pennsauken, N.J., arrested a teenage boy on suspicion of burglary. The youth said he stole items worth $10,000 to support his gambling habit. Bryan, a 17-year-old from Cumberland, N.J., recently sought help after he was unable to pay back the $4,000 he owed a sports bookmaker. Greg from Philadelphia says he began placing weekly $200 bets with bookies during his sophomore year in college. "Pretty soon...
Saddam can seek shelter in a palace bunker some 40 miles out of Baghdad, but allied forces are unlikely to find him there. During wartime, the Iraqi leader makes a habit of hiding in civilian areas. A Shi'ite opposition leader recalls that his cousin's family was rousted by soldiers at dawn several years ago. The group was sent to Baghdad's Al Rasheed Hotel for the next 24 hours before being permitted to return home. Only then did government officials tell the family that Saddam had spent the previous evening in its quarters. In thanks for the coerced...
Many Arabs despise Saddam, condemn his invasion of Kuwait and welcome the coalition's war against him. They know that in his blood-drenched career, Saddam has acted truly, not metaphorically, satanic. It is reported, credibly, that in the evening, before bed, he has been in the habit of watching a video of an execution that he ordered, preferably one carried out that day. He is apparently conscienceless, a murderer of Caligulan whimsy. In August 1979, during a purge of his Baath Party, Saddam arranged this scene, reported by a former Iraqi Cabinet member: "The party officials were handed machine...
...keystone species," says zoologist David Garton of Ohio State University. "It has the power to restructure the entire ecological community." The zebra mussel can strip water of algae and other microscopic plants and thus endanger animal life. Native clams are beginning to die off, victims of the zebra mussels' habit of attaching to clamshells in such numbers that they cannot open...
...conviction that fat is the villain. Critics of this theory point out that statistical correlations are not the same as proving cause and effect. Many researchers argue that there are probably several life-style factors rather than a single culprit. "The high rates are not due to one bad habit, but to our whole way of life," says Mary-Claire King, a cancer geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley...