Word: shrunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problem for outsiders is to square what sometimes appears to be a Persian lamb with a notably lion-like personality. The superficial prosperity of Tehran is illusory. Because of war and runaway population growth -- estimated at 3.6% a year, though that may be declining -- per capita economic output has shrunk about 40% since 1979. Many factories are running at only 40% to 50% of capacity...
RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY, U.S. LABOR LEADERS ARE convinced that unrelenting hostility from a Republican White House is a major reason why union membership has shrunk to a five-decade low -- 16% of the work force. Ronald Reagan set the tone in 1981 by not only firing illegally striking air-traffic controllers but also decreeing a lifetime ban on rehiring them. Now Bill Clinton has let it be known that he is considering taking back those controllers (maybe 3,000 of an original 11,400 strikers) who still want their old jobs. As further proof that he wants an entirely different...
...Tikal and Angkor are among the fabled places that disappeared into the sands or jungles of time. Surviving cities have undergone wild swings of fortune. Alexandria, Egypt, may have housed several hundred thousand people at its peak in Roman times, but when Napoleon entered it in 1798, it had shrunk to 4,000 souls. Since then, it has again boomed to nearly 3 million and faces grave ecological threats. The gleaming city that Arab poet Ibn Dukmak compared to "a golden crown, set with pearls, perfumed with musk and camphor, and shining from East to the West," is slowly sinking...
...rents are driving the working class to the suburbs -- and long commutes discourage after-work aperitifs. As a result, many cafes have beefed up their menus and make up the lost zinc trade from office workers who no longer go home for lunch. In the country, mechanized farming has shrunk village populations, leading to the closing of the cafes that served them. Still, most towns have a place where tradition survives. In Houlgate, a small town on the Normandy coast, six men and a woman chatted around the Formica counter on a recent Saturday. "We come for the conviviality...
...concrete landscape in a bleak terrain. Behind communism's illusions there always lurked a chilling soullessness. From an unlimited expanse of possibility, the horizon of Russia's future has shrunk to a prefabricated emptiness devoid of assurance that things may one day change for the better...