Word: mading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...single most powerful figure--not merely in these two millenniums but in all human history--has been Jesus of Nazareth. Not only is the prevalent system of denoting the years based on an erroneous 6th century calculation of the date of his birth, but a serious argument can be made that no one else's life has proved remotely as powerful and enduring as that of Jesus. It's an astonishing conclusion in light of the fact that Jesus was a man who lived a short life in a rural backwater of the Roman Empire, who died in agony...
...daubed with mud, and each house full of the mouths he could hear saying "Bastard, Miriam's bastard boy, God's big baby!" His mother's story had leaked out somehow, likely through Yosef, who claimed that he had dreamed it but nonetheless married her, took in Yeshu and made other sons and daughters on her body. All of them grudged the favors their mother gave Yeshu as her eldest child; he was only half their brother...
Matthew and Luke give detailed descriptions of the tempting offers that Satan made to Jesus in the desert. Since Mark mentions 40 days in the desert but gives no specifics, I've imagined that it was then that Jesus began to believe--from the content of his vision at baptism--that God was a gentler kind of father than he proved...
...bureaucracy is maddening; the military, headed by Castro's brother Raul, plays an inordinate role in business affairs; and some 85% of the wages that foreign companies pay impoverished Cuban workers (who make an average $15 a month) ends up in government coffers. Cuba's post-Soviet economy has made a comeback since it crashed in 1993, but the country has garnered less than $3 billion in foreign investment in the '90s--largely because Castro remains ideologically opposed to opening more widely to private capital. "So far, he's invited us in only to assure his survival, not his country...
...easy to stop the trade. UNITA has already amassed a fortune from illicit diamond sales, enough to continue its hostilities virtually indefinitely. Diamond analysts calculate that UNITA made more than $2.5 billion from diamond sales between 1992 and 1997, and last year collected at least $225 million. U.N. researchers and human-rights lobbying groups put the figure far higher. By any estimation, Savimbi's 40,000-strong UNITA must be the richest rebel movement in the world...