Word: trapdoors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fighting that threaten his rule, he retreats to his emergency war room, a small building with dark glass windows and aerials on the roof. Inside is a small bedroom. "You see this?" he asks, pointing to a closet with a mirror on the front. "Inside, there is a secret trapdoor into the basement. When you are a soldier, you have to know the ways of escape." He regrets he cannot go to restaurants; he fears assassination too much. Last year an attempt was made on his life in a northern town, using remote-controlled rockets...
...audience no longer naive about presidential double-talk. Thus when Clinton sat down with Jim Lehrer on Wednesday afternoon and repeated, in heavily lawyered cadences, that "I didn't ask anybody not to tell the truth," reporters pounced on the use of the double negative as another linguistic trapdoor. Try as it would, the White House could not seem to manage a believable denial...
...Gulf averages only around 3 million fish. Indeed, so many snappers are being scooped up as by-catch that the productivity of the fishery has been compromised. Fortunately, there is a solution. Shrimp nets can be outfitted with devices that afford larger animals like snappers and sea turtles a trapdoor escape hatch...
...services that last twice as long as a typical white service. Roosevelt Clossum, minister of the African-American congregation at Mount Olive, says that when he went to give a guest sermon before the whites at Kingshighway, he was warned that if he preached more than an hour, a trapdoor would open under...
...news had industry watchers wondering whether Allen was building a trapdoor beneath his feet. After the huge write-offs earlier this year, better results were expected, and soon. Explaining the disappointing prospects, AT&T reminded analysts that its core business, long-distance phone service, remains under intense pressure from new and old rivals. Even so, says Simon Flannery, an analyst with J.P. Morgan, many investors hoped the second-quarter trouble "was a one-quarter phenomenon and that things would improve. People who bought stock on that hope were probably disappointed and sold it." Which is not to say that...