Word: tweaking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...billion in new loans this year. M.I.T. Economist Lester Thurow warns that the austerity measures that Mexico has endured to pay interest on its debt could make it politically popular for the country's leadership to repudiate the loans. Said Thurow: "What better way for the Mexicans to tweak the Yank's nose than to default on all of the debts." That could set off a financial crisis in the U.S., where many large banks still have multibillion-dollar loans to Mexico on their books. De Vries said, however, that financiers were likely to work out yet another package...
...days discuss the issues with the evenhandedness of a sociologist and the fervor of an accountant. They aim to inform and perhaps to persuade but not to dictate. The only outrageously opinionated fellow left is the cartoonist, no longer confined to illustrating the boss's prejudices and free to tweak Reagan or ridicule Tip O'Neill. In the past presidential election several newspapers declined to endorse a candidate. It wasn't so much a case of disliking both nominees as a decision that the paper shouldn't be in the business of proclaiming a preference...
Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Castigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures-of fiction-which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collection closely resembles the herd obtained on the Castigator's last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from upcreek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city...
These are twelve-meter yachts, called simply twelves, a reference not to their length of 65 ft. or so but to the quotient of a complicated formula involving water line, sail area and displacement. Auto racers tune their engines no more fastidiously than boat architects tweak their designs. Discretion is usually the rule. The captain of the British syndicate-like the love life of a horse, an America's Cup boat is never the property of an individual, always a syndicate-is a multimillionaire financier by the name of Peter de Savary. In the corridors of the N.Y.Y.C...
...sweep the Pacific's warm equatorial waters westward. As a result, some of the water flows south toward the South American coast, rising over and blocking the cold Humboldt waters from the Antarctic. This is how El Niño is born. But the oscillation also appears to tweak the Northern Hemisphere's weather as well. This year the increased west-to-east jet stream, which usually diminishes during winter, has raised sea levels 8 in. above normal and brought huge amounts of precipitation to California. While these byproducts are plain enough, the oscillation's original cause...