Word: penchant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...addition to his penchant for making disparaging remarks about immigrants and southern Italians, Bossi, 66, has targeted national symbols. In 1997 he declared that the Italian tricolore flag was best used as toilet paper. The Northern League repeatedly aims its ire at the government bureaucracy in Rome and at the underdeveloped regions in Italy's south, which it says are siphoning off tax dollars with public subsidies. While Bossi was ranting on Sunday against southern teachers being sent to work in northern schools, he cited the national anthem, whose words were written in 1847 by Goffredo Mameli to encourage...
...calls alerting them to overnight cables and demanding to know what should be done. ''It's always a little off-putting to get slammed up against the wall at 7:30 in the morning,'' says an admiring Richard Murphy, who worked with Oakley during the Reagan Administration. Oakley's penchant for stating, in his soft Louisiana drawl, exactly what he thinks can get him into trouble. As Ambassador to Zaire, he was nearly kicked out of the country when his unvarnished reports angered President Mobutu Sese Seko. ''He doesn't say thank you. He doesn't say please...
...between Syria and Iran on the one hand, and American and Israel on the other, that would settle the cold war for the Middle East. This means that the United States would have to give up once and for all its project for a "new" Middle East, and its penchant for regime change. That might happen on its own in November if Barack Obama becomes President. But a package deal would also have to solve the Iranian nuclear issue, map out the future of post-American Iraq, solve the Syrian-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli...
...Brady also warned against Sarkozy's following his presidential predecessors' tradition of nakedly pushing French national interests in Europe's name. "The E.U. presidency is about achieving consensus. It's about being an honest broker, not a bulldozer," Brady said. He warned that Sarkozy's penchant for glitz and spontaneous policy announcements could be jarring in the more cautious E.U. settings. "Sarkozy has admirable energy, but he does not have diplomatic skill," he said. "At a time of fraught nerves, Europe needs someone to reassure, and I'm not sure Sarkozy is that...
...holiday, which Obama has outspokenly opposed. And while Obama says he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and other such pacts, he usually makes a point of defending free trade and globalization in the same breath. This can probably be chalked up to a natural penchant for truth-telling--which McCain has at times seemed to possess as well. But however much it appeals to magazine columnists, straight talk on the economy has never been much of a vote getter, so Obama has been keeping that penchant reined in (as has McCain...