Word: portent
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President Bush's decision to send General Anthony Zinni back to the Middle East is good news for Yasser Arafat, bad news (with a silver lining) for Ariel Sharon and a portent of doom for Saddam Hussein. The move came at the end of the bloodiest week of a 17-month intifada that has so far claimed more than 1,000 Palestinian lives and some 300 Israelis. More than 100 people died just this week as each side sought to ratchet up military pressure to force the other to submit...
...means - and "if the recent, more favorable developments continue and gain momentum, uncertainties will diminish" and good times will soon follow. It might take another interest-rate cut at the next Fed get-together ending Jan. 30, and then again it might not; media consensus on the speech's portent was that Big Al "left the door open" to another...
...Still, despite Sharon's dramatic tone and escalation of attacks on Palestinian Authority (PA) targets in the West Bank and Gaza, the portent of his latest message is not yet clear. Pronouncing Arafat "irrelevant" simply repeats, hyperbolically, what many close observers of Palestinian politics have warned of for months - that the aging leader's political authority has waned over the course of the current intifada to the point that he is no longer able to impose his will on the Palestinian street. Or, he is unable to find the political will to reassert his authority against the tide of Palestinian...
Javanese rulers have long gazed upon an eruption of Mount Merapi as an omen of troubled times ahead. So when the central Java volcano began sputtering and oozing lava early last week, many Indonesians recognized a portent of ill tidings for President Abdurrahman Wahid, the nearly blind 60-year-old Muslim cleric who has fitfully governed the country for the past 15 months...
...your standard inspirational-rock-star-travelogue-and-Alas ka-guide-with-baby-snaps. "I wrote at least 1,000 pages for the book," says Jewel, though the final text comes in at a tight 176. "I enjoy writing about really small moments that are very fleeting but filled with portent...and whatever else they're filled with." In addition to the portent, the book has photos, including a young Jewel with a belly that would make Charles Durning proud and an in-the-gloaming cover shot of Jewel riding bareback. "When you grow up on a ranch, you tend...