Word: optioning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Senate floor) aren't really a serious national problem. Roughly 15% of mastectomies are done on an outpatient basis today, up from 2% in 1991. Naturally there are some abuses. But as with everything from cataracts to cartilage, technical leaps often make outpatient surgery the safer, cheaper option. Johns Hopkins University, for example, one of the nation's top breast-surgery centers, does mostly outpatient work and reports fewer infections and happier patients. As it turns out, women are as likely to have drive-by mastectomies in fee-for-service plans as in HMOs. Moreover, HMOs tend to give women...
Before I left, I meant to practice pitching. What I focused on instead was what to wear. I examined old photos of Presidents' throwing out first pitches, most of whom went with suits. This seemed the smartest option until I found out I couldn't expense a suit. Then I came up with the idea of buying a Kernels uniform. This, I figured, would not only go over well with the crowd but was also completely expensable...
Coaches are recruiting talented children as young as eight, whose after-school hours, weekends and summer vacations are occupied by clinics, practices, tournaments and fight-to-the-death competition. The old childhood ideal of goofing off--what the grimmer parenting books term "nonstructured play"--isn't an option. As the kids get older, the more talented rise to ever more selective teams, perhaps representing an entire county, while their less gifted (or less committed) teammates drop away. Family holidays, including Christmas and Thanksgiving, dissolve into long treks to tournaments...
...Nowadays, if a kid waits till she's 10 to decide she wants to compete at an advanced level, the travel team will have already left the station. Her peers will be making deft one-touch passes while she's still learning to dribble. That leaves as her only option the easygoing recreation league, where the coaching is desultory and players often go AWOL. While many parents of kids on "rec" teams equate "keeping it fun" with holding down the level of instruction and competition, the kids often see things differently. Young, of the professional coaches' association, observes...
Assad has long wanted to reclaim the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, the loss of which he regards as a personal and national indignity. Outpowered militarily, Assad knows negotiations are his best option. The Syrian leader, 68, suffers multiple ailments, which are thought to include diabetes and heart disease. He is eager to prepare the succession of his son Bashar, 34, a mild-mannered, British-trained ophthalmologist who emerged as heir apparent only after his elder brother Basil died in a 1994 car crash. "Assad has more a sense...