Word: racketeer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...apartment building where she once lived. He speaks in a thick German accent and refuses to take anyone to see her. "She is very frail," he says. "She is not the kind of person who complains. But I worry for her." She has given his sons an old tennis racket and an old golf club (yes, Tiger Woods, she was a pioneering black pro golfer...
Each new case, and particularly the Tamraz tale, makes it harder for anyone in Washington to sustain the Big Lie on which the whole campaign-finance racket rests. The Big Lie works like this: over and over, despite each piece of evidence to the contrary, politicians insist there's no quid pro quo. People can give money to campaigns or parties, the pols say, but the donors get nothing from the government in return. Repeating this fiction obscures the obvious point: why would hardheaded businessmen give hundreds of millions of dollars--$262 million, the Federal Election Commission reported last week...
...range of reactions is interesting. There is the usual rolling of the eyes by the kind of Anti-Semite Lite who regards any mention of the Holocaust ("Not again!") as a bore and a kind of chronic blackmail, a moral collection racket. In an entirely different way, there are also Israelis who object to Holocaust remembering, because they think it a sign of weakness or at least of unproductive obsession. Some Jews who favor pressing the case against Swiss banks recall a bitter joke: in czarist Russia, two Jews are lined up against the wall to be shot; the captain...
...scientists could eavesdrop on the brain of a human embryo 10, maybe 12 weeks after conception, they would hear an astonishing racket. Inside the womb, long before light first strikes the retina of the eye or the earliest dreamy images flicker through the cortex, nerve cells in the developing brain crackle with purposeful activity. Like teenagers with telephones, cells in one neighborhood of the brain are calling friends in another, and these cells are calling their friends, and they keep calling one another over and over again, "almost," says neurobiologist Carla Shatz of the University of California, Berkeley...
...compare squash and racquetball, I would use the analogy of chess and checkers. Squash has a different ball, a different racket, different rules and a different court, but you're still in a big box, and that's like having the same checkered board," Barenbaum explains...