Word: habit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...increased. Among eighth graders, for example, the percentage of those who have smoked in the past 30 days increased 30% between 1991 and 1994. Findings such as these, combined with popular politics--polls show that even most adult smokers do not want their kids to pick up the habit--led President Clinton last week to instruct the Food and Drug Administration to draft a series of aggressive regulations to keep tobacco away from teenagers. His plan includes banning cigarette vending machines, outlawing tobacco billboards within 1,000 feet of playgrounds and schoolyards, restricting magazine advertising, requiring the tobacco industry...
...same way he did as leader of the P.L.O., and the bottleneck of decision making at the top has helped create pervasive disorganization within his government. "There is an unbelievable amount of inefficiency," says a department head. "The norm is against working well." Arafat has also retained his habit of appointing at least two people for every task, so that no one rises too high and he retains power as the arbiter of conflicts. The results are incoherent policy and internal bickering. The chairman is notorious for playing his Planning Minister, Nabil Shaath, and his Economics Minister, Ahmed Qrei...
...moments of stress, Alicia Silverstone has the adorable and quite marketable habit of squinting -- as if trying to read a TelePrompTer or possibly hatch a thought. This makes the 18-year-old actress the ideal vessel for Clueless, an enjoyable movie that says a lot about the needs of Americans, and not just teens, in the mid-'90s. The tale has Cher (Silverstone), a popular high-schooler in Beverly Hills, toiling as a matchmaker, as her father's confidant, as a makeover adviser to a clumsy friend (Brittany Murphy) and as her stepbrother's nemesis. All this echoes the plot...
British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. It is a habit that saves his latest novel (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) from becoming an all-too-familiar tale of midlife crisis. Lawrence "Tubby" Passmore is 58 and securely married with a job he loves. But he quickly finds all is not as secure as he believed. Tubby's attempts to recover make for neither enterprising nor funny reading, says TIME's Martha Duffy. But a meeting with a teenage love redeems both Passmore and the book. "By subtle shifts in tone," says...
...rapes, our first reaction was, "What about that?" The [Bosnian Serb] leadership explained, "It is absolutely not the truth, absolutely not." That was what was explained to us, and we then had a very deep confidence in what they were explaining. And I believed that just because of habit. One detail reported in the press: a Muslim girl who was pregnant by rape got shelter in a hospital in Switzerland. An abortion was not possible, and when the child was born, it happened to be Negro. No Serb was a Negro...