Word: linings
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...International expansion is continuing despite the financial crisis, which has ravaged Benetton's bottom line. Profit in the first half of this year plunged 60% to $42 million from $115 million in the comparable period of 2008; sales in the same period were down 11% to just under $1.3 billion. The company has responded by putting in place a restructuring plan that mainly targets operating efficiency in its supply chain. Many financial analysts are lukewarm about the company's prospects because of the weak consumer-spending climate and the tough competition. "Benetton remains under pressure from multiple angles...
...countries negotiated a Line of Control dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir in 1971, but that unofficial border has been a source of constant conflict and tension. In 1989, a homegrown movement of Kashmiri separatists rose up against India; Islamabad supported some of them, as well as groups of cross-border militants. To put down this multiheaded insurgency, New Delhi sent in what amounts now to a presence of 700,000 troops (among a civilian population of just 5 million). The military's hard-line tactics have sparked considerable anger among the local populace. The presence of those troops - despite...
...conservative candidate in the presidential election. Chirac won, named Villepin, his former campaign director, as his Elysée chief of staff and banished Sarkozy to a humiliating political exile. Sarkozy's punishment finally ended in 2002 when Chirac, eager to exploit the younger man's well-known hard-line attitude on law and order, tapped him as Interior Minister. Sarkozy's efforts there and in later Cabinet posts boosted his popularity just as he was consolidating his control of the conservative Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) ahead of the 2007 presidential race. Chirac, however, remained furious over Sarkozy...
...trouble with Family Guy is that it seems to want to say everything. It's The Simpsons on Red Bull, with a dysfunctional family - the Griffins of Quahog, R.I. - but twice the outrageousness and thrice the pace. Its signature move is to cut away from a story line for a non sequitur gag (a pop-culture parody, a celebrity spoof, a Star Wars reference). The Simpsons is a satire, but it's rooted in its family. Family Guy is less a half-hour narrative about characters than a delivery system for unconnected jokes the writers can't bear to part...
...them invest in labs or radiology clinics so they generate revenue not just from the procedures they do themselves but also from the ones they farm out. Others buy state-of-the-art diagnostic hardware and charge state-of-the-art fees to use it. "Focus on your bottom line," urges a brochure for in-office CT-scan machines from one manufacturer. And as long as insurers pay the bills, patients don't ask what things cost. "A colonoscopy used to take 45 minutes to perform," says Ted Epperly, board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians...