Word: moderners
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...Forcing victims of Burma's worst natural disaster in modern history to participate in a referendum of questionable validity underscores the callousness of the Burmese regime. But the determination to hold the plebiscite also points to an even darker irony. A week after the cyclone devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, precious little aid is reaching the storm's victims. On Friday, in village after village, residents told me no aid at all had arrived. Blackened, bloated corpses still bobbed in rivers. Many storm survivors had no idea when they would be eating their next meal. NGOs began reporting outbreaks of diarrheal...
...year-old had long been considered a prospective Taoiseach (pronounced tee-shuck), but was suddenly catapulted into office by the surprise resignation of Bertie Ahern, his colleague in the centrist Fianna Fail party. Ahern, the longest serving Irish premier of modern times, announced his resignation last month to concentrate on defending himself before a tribunal investigating payments to politicians...
...prepared than the isolated, desperately poor nation of 53 million that is Burma. Ruled by a clique of reclusive generals since 1962, Burma, also known as Myanmar, has degenerated from a resource-rich country, which upon independence from the British 60 years ago was hailed as a model for modern Asia, into an economic disaster zone. Burma now boasts one of the world's worst health systems, a worrisome situation as diseases fester in the wake of the storm. Medical experts warn that filthy water, poor sanitation and lack of shelter could prove almost as deadly as the cyclone itself...
...almost from the beginning, movies saw machines as humankind's enslavers, not liberators. The definitive image of man's domination by the contraptions he'd created came in 1936's Modern Times, with Charlie Chaplin being threaded, like a strip of film, through the wheels and cogs of a giant machine. In later films, the gadgets we created were less likely to help us than to turn on us, like the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or to hunt us down, like the Schwarzenegger cyborg in the original The Terminator...
...racing writers, explained the death of the Kentucky Derby runner-up by noting that thoroughbreds are, in fact, overbred. They are no longer created with robust careers in mind; their life goal is a couple of quick wins in Triple Crown races, followed by retirement to a stud farm. "Modern commercial breeders produce horses in order to sell them, and if those horses are unsound, they become somebody else's problem," Beyer wrote for the Washington Post. "Because buyers want horses with speed, breeders have filled the thoroughbred species with the genes of fast but unsound horses...