Word: precursor
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...certainly looks like something out of a 1960s precursor to Transformers, its round, white head ready to make a mechanical turn, sprout legs and stand up, streaming seawater and begin terrorizing the good people of Honolulu. But the 280-foot high, $900 million gizmo will soon be scanning the horizon for enemy threats, joining the growing suite of land-, sea- and space-based technologies that the MDA claims is the nation's first functional national missile defense system. Since President Ronald Reagan initiated his Star Wars program, about $100 billion has been spent on U.S. missile defense...
...seize or hold on to power. The apartment bombings of 1999 helped make Putin president. A seizure of a school by terrorists in the city of Beslan in September 2004 let him broaden his hold authoritarian grip on the state. Last night's train bombing may prove a precursor to a similar grab, as Russia elites gear up for the coming political season...
...Human Rights. The Chinese government wants to keep political activists from spoiling its Olympic party. But if recent days are any precursor of what will come next year, Beijing won't have its way. An aide to Steven Spielberg told ABC News last month that the producer would reconsider his role as an artistic adviser to the Games' opening ceremony if China didn't take a tougher stand on the government of Sudan over the Darfur crisis. Days later Beijing went along with a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to the war-plagued region. While a connection between Spielberg...
...what does that have to do with the eponymous Francisco de Goya (Stellan Skarsgard), that greatest of Spanish painters and precursor of modernism? Very little, as it turns out. He painted Ines, and her wealthy father was one of his patrons. But in Goya's Ghosts he is pretty much what he was in life - the politically temporizing foreground observer of Ines' anguish, which is symbolic, in its way, of Spain's anguish as the 18th Century turned into the 19th, its royal family deposed by the bloodily invading French, who were, in turn, defeated by the British. Mostly...
Traveling widely and feted by the wealthy and well-connected, Garibaldi was a favorite in Victorian England of what historian Rohan McWilliams calls a precursor to the "radical chic" crowd. His mix of egalitarianism, insurgent tactics and rugged sex appeal made him a forerunner of Argentine Marxist Che Guevara. Though T-shirts may be rare, after his death Garibaldi's name would adorn monuments, towns and mountain ranges from Rome to New York City, from Russia to Brazil...