Word: refraining
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...created on Destroyer records. But somehow he makes abstraction and mystification attractive. Any song named “A Venue Called Rubella” shouldn’t be fun, but the out-of-tune saloon piano makes the ditty a rollicking, midtempo good time and the eponymous refrain catchy...
...that familiar refrain is not the whole story. Some of the parallels being drawn between now and the days of Soviet rule are rhetorical and overblown. Those who are ill at ease in today's Russia for whatever reason can choose to live and work abroad (indeed, many of Putin's critics have decamped to London); an earlier generation could only dream of such freedom. Still, Kondaurov's feeling of claustrophobia - what Victoria Webb of Amnesty International describes as "the shrinking space for individual voices in Russia" - now appears to be widely shared. This year, Stanislav Dmitrievsky was prosecuted...
...Following France's school laws and the calls by Britain's Prime Minister to refrain from wearing the niqab in public, the Dutch center-right government has pledged that if it is returned to power in Wednesday's election, it will pass a law prohibiting the wearing of niqab and full-body burqa in public. Holland's 1 million Muslims have lived under an air of suspicion from the wider society since the 2004 murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh by a Islamist radical. That killing and the subsequent arrests of extremists plotting terror attacks have understandably raised...
...drastic measures may be required to clean up Beijing's air in time for the Olympics in August 2008. During that summit, which featured 42 heads of state, the authorities ordered half a million official cars off the roads and said another 400,000 drivers had "volunteered" to refrain from using their vehicles. The Air Pollution Index responded grudgingly, slowly falling until finally, on the last day of the meeting, it had dipped into a range considered normal anywhere else in the world. By the next day, though traffic was back to its usual chaotic state and the index...
...Beethoven’s Ninth, and the Nazis were known to listen to Wagner with rapture after a good day’s genocide. Harvard English professors themselves—who have spent a lifetime immersed in literary scholarship—are hardly moral paragons, although I will refrain from scrounging up the sordid details of their personal lives...