Word: shakedown
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...America: I window-peeped four years of our history. It was one long mobile stakeout and kick-the-door-in shakedown. I had a license to steal and a ticket to ride… I am going to tell you everything.” At the beginning of James Ellroy’s latest novel, “Blood’s a Rover,” the third installment of his “Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy,” one of the book’s three narrators proposes to retell the history of America between June...
...renewed shakedown has led many Iranians to be subversive in more discreet ways. Instead of joining street protests, they try to short the electrical grids by turning on all household appliances en masse; they boycott products advertised on state TV; and they increasingly turn to Twitter, blogs, Facebook, e-mail-distribution lists and underground newspapers to bring attention to the regime's brutal tactics. (Read "Which State Security Branch Rules Tehran's Streets...
...This spike in consignment popularity comes in the midst of a brutal shakedown of the retail industry. The Associated Press reported last week that the retail industry cut 45,100 jobs in January following 14 consecutive months of job losses...
...bull about how the ship would be flown. NASA scientists had stuffed the flight plan with experiments and astronomical observations, but Schirra didn't want any part of them. This was an engineering mission, as the test pilots liked to call it, meaning that it was a shakedown flight for the ship itself, not a working trip for the men in lab coats...
...explained. Since the North is in many respects a state-run criminal enterprise (reportedly replete with drug-running operations, and scams to counterfeit everything from U.S. dollars to Marlboro cigarettes to Viagra), this may be seen as pure goodfella fury at being stung by the very victims its own shakedown racket was supposed to be bilking. Or it may be that since the Macau seizures are practically the only penalties Pyongyang has suffered (thus far the U.N. sanctions enacted after last fall's test are mere pinpricks), it wanted to make sure it had an absolutely risk-free economic playing...