Word: opted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...simple enough: the armed services are not interested in spending money on programs that do not produce weapons. Promotions go to those officers who command warships and fly warplanes. Says a Navy captain: "You don't make admiral driving freighters." Left to their own devices, Pentagon planners invariably opt for the furthest reaches of technology, seeking machines with almost magical properties. What they usually get are production delays, cost overruns and hardware that never lives up to its advance billing. They are again talking up their pet projects. "The Pentagon sees this crisis as 100% justification for every system...
...Gorbachev will still face a major problem: the rot that has infected the 4.5 million- strong Soviet armed forces. It has spread beyond nationalist resentment into the very nature and role of the army itself. Estonia and Lithuania have passed legislation allowing draft-age boys to opt out of military service, and Georgia and Russia may soon follow suit. In this year's spring call-up, the number of outright draft dodgers has grown to an estimated 20,000. In Armenia a mere 7% of draftable boys bothered to answer their induction notices...
There are plenty of kids in Belfast who reject either option. Some of them opt for "joyriding," a relatively new plague, a widespread, nonpartisan and deadly display of juvenile delinquency that equally confounds parents, the paramilitaries and the police...
Robert Scalapino, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, suspects that a deep-seated need for stability on the part of most Chinese will induce the next generation of leaders to opt for a system of political authoritarianism but social and economic pluralism. Says he: "Even the intellectuals remember the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the warlord period, and they don't want to go back...
...numbers are far higher. For children older than two, 10% of the adoptions are dissolved. For ages twelve to 17, the rate shoots up to around 24%. This poses a special problem, since healthy adoptable babies are increasingly scarce owing to the fact that more single women now opt to have abortions or to keep their infants. More families are therefore adopting older or handicapped children. This seems to be a main cause of the growing return-to-sender phenomenon...