Word: took
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...coalition troops are set to invade Marja, a Taliban stronghold in the country's southern Helmand province. The offensive will target Taliban fighters who for years have holed up with the area's narcotics traffickers, planning and carrying out suicide and roadside bomb attacks. U.S. officials took the unusual step of announcing the mission ahead of time, saying the element of surprise was not as important as reassuring citizens that the Afghan government will be there for them once the militants are gone...
...took his time getting there. Hill, 37, spent more than a decade trying his hand at a variety of genres (a thriller in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, a children's tale, a 900-page fantasy novel) with no bites from publishers. "I began to think I might not be able to cut it as a novelist," he says. So he scaled back, and in 2005 a small British press released a collection of his short stories, the touching, terrifying 20th Century Ghosts. It was followed two years later by the best-selling Heart-Shaped Box, a novel about...
...first new version of the Big Mac the company has introduced since the iconic burger was launched in the 1960s. The Big Mac remains on the menu - the company isn't stupid - but executives were so fearful of spinning off a variant that internal negotiations and testing took a year. "Don't touch" was the attitude toward the Big Mac when he arrived, says Coudreaut. The fact that the top brass allowed him to remix it is both an expression of the company's faith in him and a signal that McDonald's once again feels strong enough to take...
...failures, a breakfast Snack Wrap made with a crepe that held vanilla cream cheese and fruit. ("Why it didn't work is because we served it cold," Coudreaut says. "We serve hot food. Even our salads, we serve warm chicken on top.") The testing process is painstaking: it took two years for the Angus Third Pounders, the company's first new burger in eight years, to get on the menu...
...past three years, I have been researching the story of one unit's deployment to Iraq - a story that turns on the lack of accountability for the failure to properly handle a murderous, dysfunctional soldier. In late 2005, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division took control of a stretch of land just south of Baghdad that had come to be known as the Triangle of Death. Experiencing some form of combat nearly every day, suffering from a high casualty rate and enduring chronic breakdowns in leadership, one of the battalion's platoons - 1st Platoon, Bravo Company - fell into...