Word: long
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mantra long invoked to justify American military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq - we're fighting extremists there so we don't have to fight them here - has taken a beating of late. In September came the arrest of Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado man accused of plotting perhaps the gravest U.S. terrorist attack since 9/11. November saw Major Nidal Malik Hasan gun down 13 people - including 12 of his fellow U.S. soldiers - at Ford Hood, Texas, in the deadliest assault on a military base in U.S. history. The latest blow came Dec. 7, when the U.S. Justice Department filed new charges...
...This new Obama, long past his Panglossian dreams of new Beltway comity, used fighting words because, quite frankly, he is trapped in a political tight spot, wedged between sky-high unemployment and lingering public worries over government spending. Almost 10 months after signing the $787 billion stimulus, the largest such federal program in U.S. history, he announced on Tuesday that the Federal Government needed to spend even more, a prospect that polls poorly, as concern about spending and the budget deficit continue to fester...
...loan program that would be mostly paid back to the Treasury, where its proceeds would be used to pay down the deficit. "The $700 billion program we have proposed is not a spending program," former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson explained before Congress in September 2008. It didn't take long for Republicans to take that position. "The stimulus money clearly was a spending bill. TARP was a loan - a loan to be paid back. And we know that a number of the banks are, in fact, paying it back," said McConnell...
...over the next few weeks and months as Congress attempts to pass a series of large spending bills, which could include a number of the programs that Obama announced. "One of the central goals of this Administration is restoring fiscal responsibility," he said in his speech. But as long as the economy continues in its fragile state, that goal will remain secondary to the more immediate task at hand. Which means that Obama's calls for government spending will keep being met by Republican cries of hypocrisy...
...insurgency's effect on education has been devastating. The Naxalite movement has been agitating for revolution in India's long-neglected rural interior since 1967, and sees any government building as an emblem of the state it seeks to overthrow. Naxal attacks usually occur at night, when improvised explosive devices, known as "can bombs," are set off inside the schools. Human Rights Watch researchers visited a school in Dwarika, a village in Jharkhand where no classes have been taught since a can bomb explosion severely damaged the building in November 2008. The wooden doors were shattered, and the walls cracked...