Word: leafed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...passion. Among them were company presidents, politicians, entertainment celebrities and Marine Corps generals. The champagne, lobster ravioli, rare filet mignon and ripe cheeses they savored were but pleasant distractions from the evening's true purpose. Sealed from the hotel lobby and society's opprobrium beyond, these "lovers of the leaf" were happily turning the air blue with the smoke from their premium cigars...
...cigar's lineage goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus, whose sailors took a liking to West Indian tobacco, rolled into palm or maize leaf, which they then took back home. Spanish nobles picked up the habit, and merchants spread it to the rest of Europe. By some accounts, Spain took more wealth out of the New World in tobacco than in gold and silver. In the American colonies, the cigar became a symbol of winner-take-all capitalism and flinty frontier grit...
Sadly, Cuban cigars fell victim over the years to socialist mismanagement. The island's wrapping handicraft declined, and its tobacco fields produced inferior leaf because they were no longer properly fertilized or allowed sufficient time to lay fallow. So uneven is the yield that two years ago, Switzerland's Davidoff company, which profited handsomely for decades from Fidel Castro's crop, pulled up its Cuban stakes...
Instead, Gates says "we've got to borrow a leaf from the right, which is exemplarily aware of the role of education in the reproduction of values." Gates just wants to reproduce the "correct" values. And why not? The alternative is the teaching of the present "aesthetic and political order," composed of the subjective experiences of white men, reconstituted in the texts of the canon...
...India's Medha Patkar is a passionate critic of big dam projects, especially the one scheduled for the Narmada Valley, which will submerge 245 villages and uproot 100,000 people. Taking a leaf from Mahatma Gandhi's book, she has organized hunger strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, roadblocks and rallies. A measure of her success: the World Bank has ordered an independent review of the environmental impact of the Narmada dam and plans for resettling villagers, prompting foreign investors to delay releasing fresh funds...