Word: spent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before reality TV involved writers, immunity challenges and Paris Hilton, there was the Loud family. A public-television crew spent hundreds of hours in 1971 with a "typical" California family that proved to be anything but. Midway through the 12-hour cinema-verité series, paterfamilias and executive Bill Loud and wife Pat decided to split up. Their son Lance was casually introduced into the gay social scene of Greenwich Village in what would remain one of the most matter-of-fact treatments of a homosexual TV "character" for decades. The series raised what seem like--in the Big Brother...
...Having spent significantly more time at work than the 109th Congress (1,967 hr. vs. 1,433), this Congress has also managed to pass more legislation. Some of those bills count as real accomplishments. Between the House and the Senate, Democrats have passed 122 substantive bills (compared with 77 by their GOP predecessors), including lobbying and ethics reform and an expansion of children's health insurance. But they've also done a lot of speechifying. The number of purely symbolic measures passed by Congress has nearly doubled...
Geoffrey Tabin, an accomplished American ophthalmologist, sent me an e-mail recently reporting on the week he spent in a poor village in Ghana, in West Africa. "We examined 4,600 people and documented their visual status, refractive errors and any pathology or disease," he wrote. "We gave spectacles to all who needed glasses and gave away 500 pairs of reading glasses. My retinal partner and I performed 159 cataract surgeries. All of the patients were seen one week postoperatively. There were no infections or serious complications...
...while it looked as if the event would turn out to be the usual dog-and-pony show the Defense Department puts on for VIPs. The captain spoke as if he had spent a lot of time memorizing what he was going to say. Holding a long metal pointer up to a wall map, he told Bush what his unit had seen in its area of operations. Bush followed along, nodding. But then Hemming began to talk about his unit's new rotation schedule, and its extended tours in Iraq, and the room became perceptibly tenser. Speaking more quickly...
...fresh troops around most of Baghdad and crimped the flow of explosives into the city, making life there markedly better. The surge took place in a belt of outposts around the capital, where troops barricaded roads into the city, worked with local residents to flush out insurgents and spent millions creating safe zones where markets and normal life could return. Average Iraqis tell Time that Baghdad feels safer; sectarian violence in the capital has been reduced, Pentagon officials say, and many Baghdad residents want the surge to continue. That's in part what the operation's architects had in mind...