Word: polished
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reiterate his pledge to create a modern free-market economy, even as Ukrainians saw their gas prices soar. "If this country is governed by honest people and the government can survive, people will feel the effects of the economic development plan within a year," he told Polish TV. Ukrainians hope Yushchenko is right; his survival as President may depend...
...lost count of how many times my grandmother expresses herself in Polish or Yiddish expecting me to understand. When I don’t, though, and I usually don’t, she is visibly disappointed. And so am I. But my disappointment is laced with frustration towards her, and hers seems laced with indignance that I, her own granddaughter, cannot understand her. When I told her, last year, about the Yiddish class I was taking, she scoffed and asked what good it would do. I would be better off, she told me, if I were to take a class...
...fairly bloodless novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit. Neither one made it seem that fiction was her natural milieu. But she went on to publish some fine and original short stories and eventually returned to the novel with new juices flowing. In America, her story of a 19th century Polish actress who sets up a utopian commune in California, won the National Book Award in 2000. But it was as a tireless, all-purpose cultural critic that she made her lasting mark. "Sometimes," she once said, "I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending ... is the idea...
MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA ... Lowering the Red Flag President Vladimir Putin signed a new law scrapping October Revolution Day, the once-sacred holiday marking the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik uprising. A new People's Unity Day to replace it will celebrate the departure of Polish troops from Moscow in 1612, which led to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. Supporters said the change was needed because Russians are divided over the revolution; presumably, they agree on the Romanovs...
DIED. JAY VAN ANDEL, 80, billionaire co-founder of direct-sales behemoth Amway; in Ada, Mich. With his childhood friend Richard DeVos, Van Andel founded the company in the pair's basements in 1959 and built it into a worldwide network of individual distributors who sold cosmetics and furniture polish and earned a cut for recruiting others. In the 1970s the government investigated Amway, suspecting it was a pyramid scheme, but the charges were never proved. In 2000, it became part of a larger sales and business-services company, Alticor Inc., formed by Van Andel's and DeVos' families...