Word: rip
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...currencies, privatizing state-owned industries, eliminating subsidies and cutting health, education and welfare spending. These "structural-adjustment programs"--a chilly bureaucratic euphemism if ever there was one--attract foreign investment and stimulate the business climate (and the local elites). But the programs also drive up the cost of living, rip holes in already tattered safety nets and help kill small farms and businesses. After Haiti lifted its trade barriers under IMF pressure in 1986, for instance, an imported mountain of cheap American rice--subsidized by the U.S. government--buried the island's rice industry...
...This rip in space-time, better known as a wormhole, could in theory serve as a shortcut to a distant part of the universe (characters on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine use wormholes the way New Yorkers use subways). But according to an idea proposed in the 1980s by Stephen Hawking, it could also lead out of our cosmos altogether, creating a "baby universe" that would then expand and grow, forming its own self-contained branch of space-time...
Think of all they would have to talk about, if Al Gore and George W. Bush could go out for a burger to savor their victories this week and resist the temptation to rip each other's throat out. Who would have thought last summer that Bush would have the near death experience, or that Gore, in the course of flattening Bill Bradley, would manage to climb to a dead heat with Bush after lagging 17 points behind in January--and have even more money left over? After their long distraction, the two presumptive nominees finally get to concentrate...
...Saving art from censors used to mean fighting for Ulysses, or at least the Smothers Brothers. Once, thought-provoking series like All in the Family and M*A*S*H stirred turmoil. But recent TV history, from upn's The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer to Fox's Simpsons rip-off Family Guy, is instead littered with idiotic series under idiotic attacks from would-be censors. Thus the job of pushing society's buttons and fomenting public discussion--once a hallmark of "quality TV"--has largely been taken over by TV's most mediocre shows...
...been knocking on doors since the summer, while Gore floated through the state in 20-car motorcades, aloof and distant, connecting with no one. Whouley asked former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Joe Keefe, a key Gore supporter, to send a memo assessing the problem. Keefe let it rip: Bradley was "on fire" in New Hampshire, he wrote. Where Gore had the endorsements, Bradley had the people who mattered--the activists who had delivered the state to Gary Hart in 1984. Coelho was ready to blame the New Hampshire organization, but Whouley set him straight. "The problem...