Word: phenomena
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...troops entered Baghdad on April 5. There was euphoria in the Pentagon. The looting in the streets of Baghdad and the continuing attacks on coalition troops were considered temporary phenomena that would soon subside. On May 1, President George W. Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," on the deck of an aircraft carrier, near a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Shortly thereafter, Franks moved his headquarters from Qatar back to Florida. He was followed there in June by McKiernan, whose Baghdad operation included several hundred intelligence officers who had been keeping track of the situation...
...book Darwin's Black Box, a seminal work on intelligent design. Behe's main argument points to the fact that living organisms contain such ingenious structures as the eye and systems like the mechanism for clotting blood, which involves at least 20 interacting proteins. He calls such phenomena "irreducibly complex" because removing or altering any part invalidates the whole. Behe claims they could not have arisen through the gradual fits and starts of evolution, which, he says, "has been oversold to the public." Although his writing is couched in the language of science, Behe, a practicing Catholic who home schools...
...Such superheated political times produce strange phenomena. Last year, Fortunato Abat, a retired general who served as armed forces Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary under President Fidel Ramos, wrote a paper arguing that the country should be run by a junta composed of military men and civilians. When Abat distributed his paper to generals serving under Arroyo, the government said it was going to charge him with sedition. But when columnists wrote that Abat, 80, was just a harmless old man exercising his freedom of speech, the administration backed down. Abat didn't, however, and he's not restricting...
...these turbulent and momentous events and phenomena, however, only the ascension of Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership could eventually rival for long-range importance to the world the sweeping changes Deng is pushing through in China. But for all the panache he displayed on taking power and all the headlines and television time he and Reagan commanded at the summit, Gorbachev's impact on history by year's end was still far more potential than actual. The freshness and vigor of his personal style far outweighed the importance of any changes he had made in Soviet foreign or domestic policy...
...contained in Foucault's Pendulum. It's all old material that's been covered a thousand times before. Brown was very good at taking trash lying around and turning it into a page turner. But it makes me laugh that people take it seriously." Still, Eco treats lowbrow cultural phenomena with the same seriousness as higher-flown accomplishments. In one essay, for example, he analyzes the essence of Italian society by observing Mike Bongiorno, a TV game show host; another dissects the design of the 1,000-lire note. He has also described how comic-book hero Flash Gordon imparted...