Word: sham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hatched the scheme and heads the project, and Texas billionaire Edward Bass, who is financing the venture, have been described as onetime members of a cultlike commune. Biosphere participants have admitted that the degrees some of them received from the Institute of Ecotechnics in London are something of a sham; the institute was set up by Bass to confer legitimacy on the project...
...stock as an essential part of many fraudulent deals. B.C.C.I., said Price Waterhouse, covertly acquired the stock of First American, code-named WXYZ in the report, through "prominent Middle Eastern individuals" who thus were merely nominal -- or "nominee" -- owners. B.C.C.I. then used First American shares as collateral for sham loans that produced phony income. Clifford, meanwhile, regularly briefed Abedi and Kamal Adham, a major B.C.C.I. shareholder from Saudi Arabia, on First American's operations. Clifford said the meetings were needed to keep B.C.C.I., as adviser to the Arab owners of First American, informed about the U.S. firm...
Arms control was always something between a sham and a sideshow. The end of the cold war has proved it. The U.S.S.R. today has thousands more nuclear warheads than it did 10 years ago. Yet we feel far more secure today. Why? Because security never depended on numbers. It depended on intentions. Soviet intentions have changed, and the change had nothing at all to do with arms control...
High art, we are taught, resides in the lower depths. Misery breeds profundity, the argument goes, and it has a corollary: anything cheery is a gilded lie. Drizzle is real, sunlight a sham. To focus on the sunny side, and to find resonance there, is to engage in a kind of aesthetic Reaganism. Every smile is a commercial for a product destined to be recalled: Life Lite...
...perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number -- had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, "Educational Funding Services" of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology's headquarters...