Word: leveling
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...diamond-encrusted skull he unveiled last year called For the Love of God. As a trope for human folly and cupidity, a glittering death's head is as tired as it gets. Hirst's twist, such as it was, was to have the thing manufactured at a stratospheric level of crass luxury - a platinum skull layered with 8,601 diamonds - then to offer the poisoned apple to the world's billionaires for $100 million. At that price level it would not only be the most expensive work by a living artist, but a punch line to Hirst's conceptualist joke...
...betrayed during Katrina by badly designed and constructed Corps flood walls as well as by a misguided Corps navigation canal called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which intensified storm surges. The Corps has pledged that by 2011, the city will be safe from a 100-year storm--the level of protection that was required but never provided before Katrina. It has already repaired or improved 220 miles (350 km) of flood walls and levees and installed floodgates that during Gustav helped keep surges from Lake Pontchartrain out of the city's drainage canals. "The New Orleans area...
...says Garret Graves, who oversees coastal protection and restoration for Governor Bobby Jindal. And even 100-year protection may be insufficient for a low-lying city in a bowl, especially if seas keep rising and wetlands keep collapsing into the Gulf. "New Orleans still faces a higher level of risk from flooding than would be acceptable for other engineered life-protection systems," the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded in a report commissioned by the Corps. "Another Katrina-like hurricane is inevitable...
...neither friendship nor enmity.' MUAMMAR GADDAFI, Libyan leader, describing relations with the U.S. before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's arrival. It is the highest-level U.S. visit in 50 years...
Court documents allege Maionica confided he was "brought into the conspiracy by a high-level official of DISIP." They say Kauffman and Duran - who own ritzy Florida homes, enjoy racing Ferraris and are part of what Venezuelans call the revolution's "Boli-bourgeoisie" - issued thinly veiled threats. They warned that "foreign government authorities would pursue Antonini" if he talked, and that it was in his children's best interest that he have "no problems" with Venezuela. At one cloak-and-dagger gathering, Canchica, using the name "Christian," allegedly told Antonini that PDVSA (the Venezuelan oil corporation) and the Chavez government...