Word: sap
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...total employment as the primary forms of welfare, while workers were supposed to plug any gaps in the social safety net themselves with prodigious savings. Strategic industries were propped up to protect jobs. This system worked fine when earnings were plentiful during the postwar boom. But today the policies sap the strength of small- and medium-sized businesses, a major source of new jobs. At the same time, younger Japanese are crowded out of the workforce by graying incumbents in cradle-to-grave employment. (Read "Japan, After The Bubble...
...president's deadline is more vague. "By the end of this year," Obama said after Reid's announcement, adding, "I want it done by this fall." But in Washington there is considerable worry that a month-long recess in the company of constituents worried about trillion-dollar deficits could sap whatever momentum remains for sweeping reform. Obama warned legislators not to lose their steel. "Sometimes delays in Washington occur when people just don't want to do anything that they think might be controversial. You know what? That's not how America has made progress in the past...
...course, there is political calculation to Khamenei's investigation. It neutralizes the main demand around which the opposition is rallying on the streets and imposes a de facto 10-day cooling-off period that could sap, even demoralize, the anti-Ahamdinejad demonstrations. The huge rally in support of Mir-Hossein Mousavi in Tehran on Monday is enough to make any ruler, autocrat or not, tremble. All of this opens the Supreme Leader's window of vulnerability to one very powerful enemy. (See pictures from Iran's tumultuous election...
...south. Many of the thugs being picked up by the military are from the Barrio Azteca gang, which is based in El Paso but whose members are recruited to work for La Línea in Juárez. That makes it all the more urgent for U.S. law enforcement to sap Barrio Azteca's strength on the U.S. side. Six Azteca bosses were recently convicted in El Paso on federal racketeering charges. Sheriff Wiles, a Democrat, believes that this attention to localized border strategies is deepening under the Obama Administration and Napolitano, who was governor of Arizona, a border state...
...have foregone labor-intensive buckets, in favor of tubing systems. The holes bored in sugar maples in early spring are usually made with a cordless drill. Sugar makers insert small plastic spouts into the holes and connect the spouts to huge webs of plastic tubing that route the precious sap into large tanks. Many of these sugar bushes even have vacuum systems that suck the sap out of the trees to increase yield, along with oil-fueled furnaces and reverse osmosis filters that remove some water prior to boiling. The technology has changed dramatically, but in essence the process...