Word: aswarm
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...huge square found it virtually blocked off by hundreds of police standing at rigid attention. "What's happening?" asked one perplexed out-of-towner. "Any foreign dignitaries arriving?" That was hardly the cause for the show of force. Within hours, despite the police, the historic site was aswarm with protesting students, singing and chanting slogans. It was the largest illegal demonstration in the Chinese capital since the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79 -- and a stinging reminder that the student unrest born in early December had far from run its course...
...toward passage. Last week, as a cutoff approached for voting bills out of committee and onto the floor, the most frantic spot in town was Room 4202 in the capitol building, the hearing room of the assembly's critical ways and means committee. Day after day, the chamber was aswarm with legislators, their aides and California's highly visible corps of lobbyists...
There once was a family of Hungarian frogs that went on a hopping holiday to the mountains of Transylvania. The mountain forests were aswarm with wolves and wildcats, so the mother frog warned her children to keep quiet. Her youngest son defiantly boasted, "I am proud to be a frog, and it is in the nature of a frog to croak." He hopped off one day to the bank of a pond and croaked so loudly and so long that a mountain goat spotted him and killed him. "I told him not to croak," the mother frog mourned...
Parts of the underground economy are highly visible. Most big cities are aswarm with street hawkers, who sell from boxes and truck tailgates an astonishing variety of jewelry, clothes, toiletries, fruits vegetables and assorted schlock. Some of the stuff is "hot"; last year about $2 billion in merchandise and food was hijacked from trucks or stolen from warehouses. The rest is distress merchandise that has not moved on the store shelves and is dumped at large discounts to middlemen, who field it out to street hawkers. City governments are trying to collect sales taxes from the vendors, but the vast...
...Somerset County calls it "an aggravation." Some of Somerset's oft-bitten residents would describe it in considerably stronger terms. Because of heavy rainfall, muggy weather and high tides that keep water overly long in the salt marshes of the state's Eastern Shore, the area is aswarm with mosquitoes. To determine how bad the infestation really is, the state's department of agriculture sent human volunteers into a mosquito-infested marsh and had them stand still for 60 seconds. As many as 100 mosquitoes per minute landed on the volunteers' exposed skin and clothing. That...