Word: prescient
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...Three years ago, the commander's sentiment seemed overly bleak. For soldiers hunkered down on an isolated base that regularly took fire, giving candy to children seemed like a pretty innocent way to lift spirits. These days, however, his warning seems prescient. Just last week, soldiers inspecting a project outside of Jalalabad stopped to toss candies to kids who were swarming around their humvees. Minutes later, an explosion tore through the crowd, killing five Afghans, including two boys, and wounding nine U.S. soldiers. The crowd quickly turned on the Americans, blaming them for the deaths. (See pictures...
...deal was even less popular when Abbey's new CEO António Horta-Osório slammed the brakes on new mortgage lending in 2006, right in the middle of a housing boom. But Horta-Osório looked prescient when U.K. banks such as Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley kept on lending and then found themselves in crisis when the market crashed. Santander bought them both - in B&B's case, it was only the deposits and branches - for about one-fifth of what it had paid for Abbey. (Read: "U.K. Acts to Stem Bank Panic...
...whose story is eloquently told in Lawrence Wright's masterly book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Time and time again O'Neill warned his superiors that al-Qaeda was readying a big strike, only to be marginalized, causing him to leave the bureau. Another prescient voice was that of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order suggested that culture and religion would be the sources of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington didn't limit this to war between the West and Islam, though...
...theme of this year's World Breastfeeding Week in August - "Breastfeeding - a vital emergency response" - has proved eerily prescient in the case of the Philippines. For mothers and young children caught up in the devastation of the sort wrought by Typhoon Ondoy on Sept. 26, breastfeeding advocates say the practice can provide the key to averting a whole new set of disasters. "The availability of water, cooking utensils, and fuel is very unreliable," said Nona Andaya-Castillo, co-organizer of the synchronized breastfeeding event, in Manila, three days after the nation experienced its worst flooding in nearly 50 years...
...which charts the ways in which modern Americans have become disillusioned with their government, culture and society. It's easy to dismiss Meyer as a malcontent lamenting a lost time. But in the wake of an economic downturn caused by greed and selfishness, Meyer's 2008 writing looks positively prescient. TIME talked with the author about how his book, due to be re-released in paperback on Sept. 22, might have changed in light of two enormous events - the historic election and the worst recession in decades. (See how Americans are spending...