Word: primed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...veil: visible signs of Islam's presence and thus sites for tension between Muslims and non-Muslim traditionalists. A recent report from the London-based Institute of Race Relations chronicles scores of campaigns against plans to build mosques across Europe. In 2007, a petition posted on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's website calling for the government to scrap plans to build a mega-mosque on an 18-acre (7 ha) plot near the site of London's 2012 Olympics drew over 275,000 signatures. That same year, members of Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League party "blessed," as they...
...lives. Supporters say the measure will stop 2 million kids from lighting up and spur about 1 million adults to quit, but the sharp hike has some smokers fuming. Cigarette taxes, detractors argue, are a way for governments to line their coffers by legislating personal choice--and a prime example of a regressive "sin tax," the term often used for fees tacked on to popular vices like drinking, gambling and smoking...
...President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown—fresh off his humiliating trip to Latin America—tussled with Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the priorities of immediate stimulus versus regulation, Paramount Leader Hu Jintao quietly positioned China as the champion of the entire, unrepresented developing world. Meanwhile, President Lula da Silva of Brazil—the planet’s most popular politician, with an 80% approval rating—explicitly blamed the irrationality of white, blue-eyed beasts of prey for the financial crisis...
Most importantly, fashionably dressed Italian Prime Mogul Silvio Berlusconi, true to form, arrived at the G-20 completely “G’d up from the feet up.” Smooth teamwork is not the style of diplomacy the world is used to seeing at these meetings. After all, we’ve come to expect deadlock on the most important issues. The last G-20 summit ended with nothing but an agreement to meet again, and the Doha round of international trade talks was a joke...
...nukes to Iran and North Korea. The talks are to be followed by another meeting between the two leaders in July. "We have considerably more positions that bring us together than those that force us apart," he noted, marking a new sense of possibility between the two countries. Still, Prime Minister Putin's influence over Medvedev remains solid, as exhibited by the military force Medvedev used against separatists in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia last August...