Word: usual
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...appropriate that the just-concluded season of Samuel Beckett plays produced by the Gate Theatre of Dublin for the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City took place not in the Center's usual theater space but at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (familiars call it the John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge). For the oeuvre of the Nobel Prize-winning Irishman contains testimony from, and about, people guilty of a long list of particulars, most particularly being born. They solemnly declare all crimes of commission and omission, which Beckett sets down in crystalline phrases that might...
...latest collapse in global trade talks. Negotiators, meeting in Geneva, had seemed optimistic a few days earlier, hopeful of a breakthrough in the seven-year-old Doha round. But as so often, hope was no match for the strength of entrenched positions. After the breakdown, there were the usual murmurings that trade ministers might get together again to salvage something from the wreckage. But most observers found it hard to escape the conclusion that, this time, Doha really was dead...
Following the failure in Geneva, there was the usual rush to gloom, the usual voices warning darkly of the risk of a beggar-my-neighbor protectionism, redolent of the 1930s. That is always possible. But it is important to remember just what we are fretting about. A trade dispute - a trade war, even - is a far cry from a real one, the sort of war fought with bullets and bombs. Not so long ago, doomsayers predicted a rising China or India would lead to certain conflict with established powers. Instead, both countries are active players in a system that, creaking...
...Where will the candidates cut spending to prevent the deficit from exploding? On this point, both candidates are relying, as usual, on sound bites rather than actual policies. Obama says he wants all sorts of cuts to waste and abuse, including procurement reforms and a reduction in earmarks, but he doesn't estimate the exact savings of these measures. He does, however, acknowledge that he wouldn't end deficit spending in his first term...
...when the injured from other blasts were being brought in. (Later, in Surat, a center for the world's diamond industry, a bomb was defused near a hospital, and two cars packed with explosives were found in the city's outskirts.) Investigators pointed fingers at the usual Islamist suspects: Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihadi Islami (HUJI) and the indigenous Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). But even as the police searched for clues, the Ahmedabad attacks were owned up by a group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen...