Word: mooning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...touch. Ethiopia is discovering, as the U.S. has in Iraq, that invasion and occupation are two different things. It is stuck fast in its own East African quagmire, reluctant to stay yet unable to withdraw. This month, in response to a Security Council request, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said sending in a U.N. peacekeeping force was "neither realistic, nor viable" and - appropriating the White House's language - suggested the formation a multinational "coalition of the willing." Ban knows full well that no one is willing. The African Union, which promised 8,000 peacekeepers, has supplied just...
...heading to and from the Suez Canal, and attacks have rocketed this year. The conflict in Somalia - which pits Ethiopian and T.F.G. troops against Somali rebels, backed by Eritrea - also has the potential to ignite a larger regional war that engulfs the Horn of Africa. Last week, Ban Ki-Moon expressed serious concern about the military buildup along the Eritrea-Ethiopia border, while State Department spokesman Sean McCormack urged Eritrea and Ethiopia to pull back troops from key border areas and use "maximum restraint" to avert...
Take that title literally: This is No Country for Old Men. It may be no country for any life form more evolved than a Gila Monster. We're talking West Texas here, not far from the U.S.-Mexican border. The landscape is as bleak as the moon's dark side and its relatively few inhabitants lead lives that are scrubbed down to the basics. That is to say, it is pretty much kill or be killed in the Coen brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's spare and unsparing novel...
...1780s. The stunning variety, wrote a contemporary, "bursts upon our view at the first glance like a new creation." When Macleay agreed to go out to New South Wales as colonial secretary in 1826, his sole consolation for being sent to that era's equivalent of the moon was that he'd find it easier there to feed the addiction that threatened to ruin him: collecting insects from the antipodes. In an exquisite introductory essay, Ashley Hay tells how Alexander's son William and nephew William John succumbed to the same mania, piling up butterflies and beetles, bats, gnats...
...agree when the cycle should begin. The ancient Egyptians celebrated the new year as the Nile rose at the end of August. The Incans picked the year's shortest day (June 21 in the southern hemisphere), while Chinese New Year usually falls on the day of the second new moon after the winter solstice. It was Pope Gregory in 1582 who finally settled on Jan. 1 for Europeans. But wherever it lands, it serves its purpose: the past falling away, its demons chased out by bells and whistles and drums, a new year born with no mistakes...