Word: fire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remote, but in Russia things change fast. There is the specter of Chechnya, where a single disaster--if it can break through the military's news blockade --could turn public opinion against both the war and the Prime Minister. The other is the truculence of Yeltsin, who tends to fire overly successful Prime Ministers. Putin's aides say this will not happen. But should Yeltsin decide to dump Putin, the Kremlin's electoral technicians may return to last week's results and put a new spin on them: with enough money and media, you can get absolutely anyone elected...
...Governor of New York and 12 years as President--the mere act of standing up with his heavy metal braces locked in place would be an ordeal. Yet the paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. After what his wife Eleanor called his trial by fire, he seemed less arrogant, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. "There had been a plowing up of his nature," Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed. "The man emerged completely warmhearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts." He had always taken great pleasure...
...progressed. The people of the vast Old World invented farming before the people of the smaller (and, at first, thinly populated) New World. And the Aborigines of yet smaller Australia never farmed. As for tiny Tasmania, modern explorers, on contacting the Tasmanians, found them lacking such Australian essentials as fire, bone needles and boomerangs...
...impact, good or evil, the heroes or the villains, Roosevelt and Churchill or Hitler and Stalin? To what extent do they depend on each other, when threats produce resolve, when terror engenders courage, when an ultimate challenge to principle has the effect of making principles stronger, forging them by fire? Thoughtful people who argue for Hitler as the Person of the Century do not want to honor him; they want to autopsy him, understand what made him strong and what finally killed him, and search, perhaps, for a vaccine for the virus that reappears still in ethnic enclaves, on websites...
...Notre Dame de Chartres (112 ft.). Again and again, over the course of 200 years, fire destroyed the cathedral as commoners, clergy and nobility struggled to raise it. But with its towers, sculpture and luminous stained glass, it became the crown of the High Gothic age as it celebrated the piety, pride and prosperity of Crusader France...