Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...premier indie label, Aksara Records, in 2005 and quickly became its top-selling act, shifting 15,000 copies of the White Shoes album. "These guys had a lot of fans before they signed with us," says Hanin Sidharta, Aksara's co-founder. "And they have used their art-school background to create a look and sound that is unique...
...When I first saw that picture, I was amazed by the beauty," says Qiu, now 54 years old and possessed of the pleasantly bookish air of a college professor. "It was kind of natural to conclude the people in it were from a bourgeois family background, so they must have suffered during the Cultural Revolution. I thought, What could have happened to them...
...should Obama's multicultural background and his early years living abroad be dismissed so easily? To what degree should those experiences be considered in judging whether he's prepared to deal with the complexities of the world today...
Obama's multicultural background has, of course, been used against him in other ways, notably with a barrage of e-mail attacks that charged (inaccurately) that as a child living in Indonesia Obama was a practicing Muslim. Two Clinton volunteers have been fired for their role in forwarding the e-mails. But Obama has tried to turn the issue around to his advantage. "I've lived in Muslim countries, even while I'm Christian, so I know how they're thinking about issues," Obama says in his typical stump speech. Electing a President that has lived in a Muslim country...
...numbers of people living on less than $1 a day rose from 1.89 million in 1996 to 4.2 million in 2005. The fact that poverty has grown along with the economy on Mbeki's watch works in the favor of Zuma, whose popular appeal is rooted in his peasant background with no formal education. In popular perception, the aloof and bookish Mbeki's exclusion of Zuma from the government was an echo of the exclusion of South Africa's poor from the fruits of South Africa's boom. Business Day editorialized that "the growing social distance between the ANC leaders...