Word: bit
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...what Wellington's ambassador to China Tony Browne calls "a very detailed, very complicated, very elaborate negotiation," New Zealand is on track to become, on April 7, the first developed nation to sign a free-trade pact with the market the whole world is courting. "It's a bit like getting the first date with the best-looking girl on the block," says Stuart Ferguson, chairman of the New Zealand-China Trade Association: in this case, ahead of suitors Australia, Norway and India. Details are a closely held secret, but the deal is expected to give Kiwis gradual relief...
...decided I was not willing to pay $180 for a bit of oil, no matter how good it is. Of course, I am not willing to pay $40,000 for a car either. But I now understand how a beer can be worth $100 and that a butter junkie isn't a reprobate for dropping $50 on a fix. And if you're somehow rich enough, there may be times when kicking back and enjoying an insanely expensive vinegar makes sense...
...Trastevere. When Andrea Riccardi founded the Community of Sant'Egidio with a circle of high school friends in Rome in 1968, he did not have big plans. The group would pray together and aid the poor and in that way help improve the human condition at least a tiny bit. "The periphery of Rome was like a Third World city," Riccardi recalls...
...should big-time directors make "small" docs? Because the discipline has aerobic artistic benefits--it's a workout for different muscles. To simplify a bit: directors of fiction films make things happen; directors of documentaries find things happening and shape them into a story. In a fiction film, the essential tool is the camera; in documentaries, it's the editing table. That is where the snippets of real life, even if staged as a concert, are analyzed and alchemized into a movie that, if the stars are aligned, entertains the audience as much as any Harry Potter blockbuster...
There are times when Benedict's love affair with American religious pluralism seems a bit naive, especially when it clashes with his nonnegotiable doctrinal stands. Without Roots had wonderful things to say about Protestantism as the genius of American religiosity and burnished the alliance between Catholic conservatives and American Evangelicals against abortion. But in 2000 and more acidly in 2007 (after he became Pope), the Vatican released documents describing Protestant churches as suffering from ecclesiastical "defects," adding that "it is difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to them." Some of Benedict's new allies...