Word: present
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal...
...Oracle Temple of Siwa Oasis. The walls of this 4th century B.C. temple, where Alexander the Great was supposedly crowned King of Egypt, have developed cracks and are in danger of falling. Egyptian officials hope to save the monument by moving it piece by piece from its present site on shifting sand in the Western Desert to firmer ground. The big question is where...
...experiments had gone wrong. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had caused the nuclei of deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, to fuse together to form helium, thus releasing radiation and heat energy. But, the physicists suggested, the radiation detected might have come from radon that was already present in the laboratory's air. The helium reported could also have seeped into the apparatus from...
...rush, the commercial hopelessness of a Wales Tourist Center seemingly intent on keeping you out of Wales -- dripped with nostalgia for a lost civilization: pre-Thatcher Britain. Life isn't much like that anymore. Ten years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, an episode far more characteristic of the present moment, and also true, is seeing a waiter from a fancy restaurant chasing up the street after a pinstripe suit, waving a small object, shouting "Sir! Sir! You left your telephone on the table...
...backslapper and insists on calling his aides by their formal names. A man of meticulous appearance who has been known to cast a flirtatious glance or two at the ladies, Shevardnadze is not a stickler for protocol; on entering a negotiating room, he unfailingly makes the rounds of all present, shaking hands and engaging in small talk. "You don't feel that he is full of his own importance," says a West German diplomat. "He's a really pleasant fellow to do business with...