burn notice
n.— «Despite these qualms at lower levels, no written warning—or “burn notice,” in CIA parlance—about Curveball ever was issued, and administration officials repeatedly used his bogus claim that Iraq had mobile biological-weapons facilities in making their case for preemptive war against Iraq.» —“Old woes dog U.S. intelligence gathering” by Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott Philadelphia Inquirer (Pa.) Mar. 30, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A Louisiana listener shares a favorite passage from Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie (Bookshop|Amazon), about his boyhood in post-World-War II England. An extract is here and contains the passage:“For the first time in my life I was out of the...