Word: tiers
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...even if this is second-tier Pynchon, it's still entertainment of a high order. It was only a matter of time before he would write a private-eye novel. Each of his books has been built around a character - or two or 12 - on a quest into the heart of a mystery that is never quite solved. The difference here is that Pynchon finally makes one of those characters a licensed gumshoe, albeit one with an incongruous hippie backstory. "Doc" Sportello is an ambling longhair with links to the surfer world and an appetite for controlled substances that would...
...state.) "Once they found themselves in trouble they started this sort of SOS signal, calling on Putin's door, 'Give us the money,' " he says. Lebedev says he is not receiving any government cash, and that the crisis and the bailouts are only widening the chasm between the "first tier" of people who own (and run) Russia and everyone else. "The first tier, this is where the crisis happened. As far as the second tier of the country is concerned, there could be no crisis because the crisis was there permanently, for 500 years...
...movie is directed by series creator Armando Iannucci and written by Thick veterans Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin. Its central character is a Candidean foreign minister in the British cabinet, Simon Foster (tiny, beset Tom Hollander). A sweet-souled doofus of the second tier, Simon is invited to attend to top-secret conferences, but not to give opinions, only as an extra body - "room meat." And he's so fearful of scandal that, if left alone at night in a hotel room on a trip to Washington, he'd be "trying to spank...
...purchase of more F-22s (beyond the 187 already acquired) was opposed by Obama, Gates, the Air Force leadership and the Senate's top military experts. That forced the F-22's backers to rely on less influential supporters - and reasons - to buy more planes: arguments from second-tier officers, imaginary threats and the most potent argument of all these days: 25,000 well-paying jobs. "This is a critically important program to maintain superiority - not parity, but superiority - which has always been our goal in protecting our national-security interests," argued Democratic Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, whose state...
...could take 15 years for China to make the yuan a fully convertible currency. Laurence Brahm, a China expert and author of the new book The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club, seconds this view. Though Brahm believes that China has a long-term goal of making the yuan a top-tier global currency, he says that the major reforms needed may have to wait until new leaders come to power. "During the administration of [President] Hu Jintao, a conservative leadership, I don't think they want to do anything that is too reformist," Brahm says...