Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today the fastest-rising practitioners of the sneak attack--what the Pentagon likes to call using "asymmetric warfare" to slip past America's vast military superiority--are fanatics pursuing hate. "The normal restraints on the use of violence don't apply to them," says Steven Simon, assistant director at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. These kinds of terrorists, he says, "want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead." More important, he adds, "they want God watching. That's why they don't care about claims of responsibility...
Last week that deluge came--and it wrought what may have been Latin America's deadliest natural disaster of the 1900s, a grim closing note to the continent's century. Fewer than 2,000 bodies had been recovered as of late last week, and a reliable death toll was impossible to calculate as soldiers and rescue workers continued digging near the northern coastal town of La Guaira, just across Mount Avila from Caracas. Still, officials said the toll would certainly surpass 5,000 and could even reach 30,000. "There are bodies in the sea, under mud, everywhere," said President...
...resorts lie, are now uninhabitable. The devastation was doubly crushing because Venezuela is suffering one of its worst recessions ever. Decades of foul politics played just as large a role in this catastrophe as the week of foul weather. Venezuela has the hemisphere's largest oil reserves and is America's No. 1 foreign source of crude. But because a corrupt elite, los cogollos (slang for big shots), has pillaged the country's oil wealth for generations, 80% of Venezuela's people live in poverty--and each year, searching for jobs, they scratch their way onto Caracas' perilous mountainside real...
...King and church, where the arts were easily accused of frivolity and sensuality, this was a colossal claim. Very rarely, an artist gets to transform the conditions of his culture--not just add to them or jog their evolution, but alter them decisively. This is what Picasso did for America and Europe in the 20th century. Perhaps less obviously, Velazquez did the same for Spain in the 17th century. He showed that the nation's painting need not be provincial, that it could be open to Europe and, especially, to such Venetian masters as Titian. Titian had made masterpieces...
...which are legal in some 30 states, can be more than you bargain for and carry an interest charge that amounts to 500% on an annualized basis. "This is no different than taking a cash advance on your credit card," says Jean A. Fox of the Consumer Federation of America. "It's just more expensive." Anyone in a cash crunch would do better to seek a credit counselor, take out a long-term loan or make arrangements with a creditor to stretch out payments...