Sharif calls on Obama

Fourteen years after his last Oval Office visit, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is poised to meet this Wednesday with U.S. President Barack Obama. In between, Sharif was deposed in a 1999 coup and then endured nearly a decade in the political wilderness. His arrival this week in Washington marks another moment of triumph for one of South Asia’s political heavyweights.   

word	meaning	usage
poised	completely ready for sth	The British team is poised to win the title.
endure	experience hardship; bear	The pain was almost too great to endure.
heavyweight	a very important person	a political heavyweight.   a heavyweight journal

(Time 22 October 2013)

Karzai Is Planning To Be There For A Successor

With less than a year left in his final term, President Hamid Karzai insists that he is eager to leave the presidential palace and lead a quieter life. It turns out, though, he may just be moving next door, to a lavish new home yards from the complex that has been the seat of his power for more than a decade.

According to Afghan officials, Mr. Karzai’s new home will be an old, European-style mansion that, once renovations are done, will be roughly 13,000 square feet.

words	meanings	usage
lavish	luxurious; large in quantity and expensive	They lived a very lavish lifestyle.
complex	a group of buildings of a similar type	a sports complex
mansion	a large impressive house	an 18th century country mansion
renovation	repair; reconstruction	buildings in need of renovation

(The New York Times 5 October 2013)

Alarming picture: Capital flight

The governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Yasin Anwar, is perhaps the first senior official to concede that capital is being moved out of the country in very large sums, and also to quantify it. In his testimony before senators on Tuesday, Mr Anwar said $25m were being ‘smuggled’ out of the country in briefcases every day from four major airports — Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Quetta. He did not say how the bank had worked out the size of the illegal capital outflows and since when this practice had been going on — and these gaps in information have left some economists puzzled. However, even if half this staggering amount is going out of the country each day, it would confirm how porous our custom checkpoints have become, not least because of corruption and weak controls.

words	meanings	usage
concede	admit; acknowledge antonym: deny	He was not prepared to concede that he had acted illegally. I had to concede that I’d overreacted.
quantify	determine the number of; tell antonym: guess	The risks to health are impossible to quantify. It's difficult to quantify how many people will be affected by the change.
work out	calculate; find out by calculation	to work out an answer. to work out a sum
outflow	flowing out antonym: inflow	Capital outflow took place on a very large scale. The central bank has announced controls on capital outflows.
porous	having many small holes; penetrable antonym: impenetrable	porous brick walls. porous material/rocks

(Dawn 03 October 2013)