Word: rare
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is a rare, fancy metaphor that can be backed up by hard numbers. The Pentagon has indeed been on a long binge: in the eight years of the Reagan Administration, Congress will have handed it $2.2 trillion -- trillion! A good deal of that has been dribbled away in heedless, indiscriminate spending. Now the bills are coming due -- literally, in the case of a number of supersophisticated weapons systems nearing production. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been forced by the overall federal budget squeeze to embrace a decidedly unfamiliar, and in its eyes hideous, new bride: austerity...
...with a serious mien and a gift for apricot trees. He is serving a life sentence for murder in Muskegon, Mich. "Prison has a tendency to make you angry. It's like quicksand. Your rights can be jerked at any time." But the garden provides him with a rare escape. He now teaches other inmates, though carefully, hesitantly. They will learn more through their mistakes, he finds, than from anything he tells them. "I order the seeds, and they can take what they want. It gives them a sense of freedom...
...better at math than the top 5% of Americans taking college-prep courses. It blasts U.S. math instruction as "dominated by paper-and-pencil drills on basic computation" and by rote explanations from teachers too dependent on set- piece texts. Innovative teaching, lab work and special projects "remain disappointingly rare...
Maybe it is the change of season, or something in the social climate, but suddenly everyone seems to be a gardener. Whether it is an elegant floral sanctuary or a swatch of tomatoes or a circle of herbs, our garden provides us with essential staples: good health, creative challenge, rare humility and peace of mind. -- A gardener' s reflections on roses and apple trees. See LIVING...
...bizarre and frightening deed, one that elicits an almost primal horror: an apparently normal mother suddenly snaps and kills her newborn child. Sadly, it is not all that rare. In April, according to police, Lucrezia Gentile, a Brooklyn housewife, reported that her two-month-old son had been abducted, then confessed that she had drowned him in his bath. Reason: she could not stand his incessant crying. A year earlier, Michele Remington, a factory worker in Bennington, Vt., fatally shot her infant son with a .22-cal. handgun before unsuccessfully trying to kill herself. Kathleen Householder, of Rippon...