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Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Dec. 27, 2012

Ripped from the headlines! See full stories here: Senators to Return With 5 Days Left and No Clear Fiscal Path, Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China, and Syrian General Whose Task Was Halting Defections Flees.
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Full list of words from this list:

  1. fiscal
    involving financial matters
    With just five days left to make a deal, President Obama and members of the Senate were set to return to Washington on Thursday with no clear path out of their fiscal morass even as the Treasury Department warned that the government will soon be unable to pay its bills unless Congress acts.
  2. filibuster
    a legislator who gives long speeches to obstruct legislation
    If passed without a filibuster, that legislation could force the House speaker’s hand and quiet his raucous Republican conference.
  3. surmise
    infer from incomplete evidence
    The managers of this 164,000-employee factory, she surmised, believed that comfort encouraged sloth.
  4. curtail
    terminate or abbreviate before its intended or proper end
    Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.
  5. abide
    put up with something or somebody unpleasant
    No other major manufacturer has pledged to abide by China’s work-hour laws in such a public manner.
  6. juggernaut
    a massive inexorable force
    The company has helped make China into a manufacturing juggernaut through strict discipline that is visible everywhere, even in the salutes managers give visiting executives.
  7. defection
    the state of having rejected a cause
    Syria’s government suffered an embarrassing new setback as the top general responsible for preventing defections within the military became a defector himself, making what insurgents described on Wednesday as a daring back-roads escape by motorcycle across the border into Turkey.
  8. regime
    the governing authority of a political unit
    “The regime army has lost control over most of the country,” the general said in an interview on the Saudi-owned channel, which has heavily criticized the Syrian government.
  9. dissident
    disagreeing, especially with a majority
    He also presided over a force that guarded prisons where civilian dissidents were held.
  10. abound
    exist in large quantities
    In the past few weeks, unconfirmed reports have also abounded about the possible defection of Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, who had numerous foreign contacts and who disappeared from public view in early December.
Created on Thu Dec 27 10:02:03 EST 2012 (updated Thu Dec 27 10:15:39 EST 2012)

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