Word: mean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...costs might seem painful during an economic slump, cities will be keen to press longer-term benefits. "The London 2012 Games will provide economic gold at a time of economic need," Tessa Jowell, Britain's Olympics Minister, wrote in the latest annual report on progress toward 2012. That will mean 100,000 contract jobs to stage the Games - of those currently working on the Olympic site, one-tenth were previously unemployed - with half as many long-term positions created in the park and surrounding area. "The Games remind us," Rogge said on a recent visit to London, "that the transient...
...Obama name is golden right now in book land. The President is leading the hit parade: Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope are on both the New York Times' hardcover and paperback best-seller lists, no mean authorial feat. (Dreams is No. 1 on the paperback list after a staggering 133 weeks.) Books by more than a dozen other authors on the Times lists retell the tale of the Obama campaign, evaluate the man or set out his life story. There's no mystery as to why new Obama books keep popping up in the nation...
There are some clear differences between today's conditions and those in the 1930s, which fomented key reforms, including the introduction of welfare and social security. Today people are more willing to acknowledge and are better prepared to address mental illness, though many states' current budget woes will undoubtedly mean some cuts in social services and counseling. And at the Depression's nadir, 34 million Americans had no income at all, which is not likely to happen today. Still, if poverty levels approached anywhere near those levels, the psychological toll could be greater because of the intervening erosion in family...
Lopez was the last of the remaining high-profile political prisoners to be liberated, and the FARC by most accounts has sworn off taking any others. That doesn't necessarily mean the rebels will stop nabbing military and police prisoners, as well as non-political civilian hostages, of which they still have hundreds in their clutches. But war-weary Colombians are cautiously hoping that their long national kidnapping nightmare is in its final throes. "In the best case," the Colombian newsmagazine Semana wrote this week, "the liberations could be the first step toward negotiations to bring...
...Kenyan government says that's rubbish. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, GOSS stands for "General Ordinance and Security Supplies," a division of the Kenyan Defense Ministry. "This is the thing with these sort of acronyms - they could mean anything. It's perfectly plausible, and it's up to everybody else to prove otherwise," says Paul Holtom, a researcher with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Project. "My point is that that manifest doesn't support definitively one or the other except to say that the consignee is the Ministry of Defense in Kenya...