Word: topness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Russians seem intent on winning--for now--at any cost. In Moscow, top army commanders announced at week's end that Russian troops had entered the third and final phase of the offensive, the destruction of guerrillas in their mountain bases. On Thursday Grozny was hammered with the heaviest rocket and artillery fire of the current war. Thousands of rockets and shells rained down on the city, according to the Russian media. The few journalists in the city say hospitals are overflowing. The breakaway government claims more than 4,000 have died, though this cannot be independently confirmed. But Chechen...
...woman has been waiting under the baobab tree for maybe two days. The sun burns through the branches of the tree that the locals say God grew upside down because it looks as if its roots are on top. She has two children with her, and they play in the dust, chasing chickens around the base of the huge tree, eating roasted corncobs from the campfire. A 4x4 truck with Zambian registration draws up, and a black man in a khaki safari suit gets out. The woman reaches inside her bra and draws out a twist of dirty cloth. Inside...
...Every year millions of gems, ranging in size from small specks to major stones, are sorted into 14,000 categories before they are cut and polished, making it nearly impossible to mark each one in a way that could be retained from mine to showroom. Says Willy Nagel, a top De Beers broker in London: "The certification of diamonds is not foolproof. Smuggling is so widespread and so difficult to combat that one way or another, the UNITA diamonds are going to get on the market...
...character called Laura Cruise was sketched out but got the boot because "she sounded too American." When Lara Croft arrived, "we went over the top making her British." The fictional Lara is a graduate of Prince Charles' alma mater, despite the small obstacle that--as Smith points out--the school doesn't admit women...
Which brings us to the decline and fall of the American empire. Yes, the mightiest nation on earth still slugs it out with the Saddams and the Milosevics. But willpower is melting away like foamed milk on top of a double-shot decaf. The numbers speak for themselves. At the beginning of this decade, there were but 500 "gourmet coffeehouses" in the U.S., says the National Coffee Association; now there are 7,000, including 2,000 Starbucks...