Word: basic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hotel lobby. The cousin is a mess--hooked up with a trashed rocker, nursing and occasionally flashing her envious grievances at her star relative. They would like to pretend that nothing has changed since childhood. Both know better. You will cringe. You will laugh uncomfortably. You will get the basic idea of Jarmusch's movie, which is that all his anecdotal encounters are about the betrayal of the coffee-and-cigarettes ideal. They're not about the genial bonding we anticipate. They're about misunderstanding, edging over into suppressed hostility...
...Americans at Abu Ghraib violated this understanding. The soldiers exposed the men publicly and added humiliation to injury. They fostered inhuman feelings, both sexual and violent, that broke the bonds of basic human society. They wrapped the bodies of the dead in plastic and ice and left them exposed and photographed. They applied pain in excess of what was permitted or necessary for their duties. They acted in the manner of ancient tyrants...
...basic security flaw in Sharon's plan is unlikely to be eliminated, even if Israel picks a brief lull in fighting as an opportunity to withdraw. That's because Sharon's plan requires the Israeli military to maintain control of a strip between Gaza and Egypt it calls the "Philadelphi Road." That would mean that like the Hezbollah gunners that target Israeli outposts in the disputed Shebaa Farms on the border, Palestinian gunners will continue have an immediate and accessible Israeli target in their sights even when the last settlers are gone...
...story begins not in Oregon but in Canada, where last July the top court in British Columbia--just an afternoon's drive from Multnomah County--legalized same-sex marriage. Hundreds of gay Oregonians began traveling north to wed. When they returned, flush with emotion, scores called Basic Rights Oregon (B.R.O.), the state's biggest gay group, demanding to know what it was doing to win marriage rights at home...
...these days. Fourtou is practically the anti-Messier. A sturdily built rugby fan from southwestern France, he is as low-key as Messier was flashy. Unlike Messier, whose acquisition spree was propelled by a subsequently discredited vision of the future, Fourtou has taken an approach to Vivendi that is basic. Rather than embracing a grandiose strategy, he started by selling what was easiest to sell while asking shareholders to be patient. After some strategic twisting and turning, he decided to spin off Universal to NBC, with Vivendi retaining a 20% stake in the venture. "He's not a screamer," says...