Word: benign
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...They had been trained for a conventional struggle in which success is measured by gaining territory. In Vietnam, by contrast, there were no front lines to advance; the war was pervasive. An apparently benign peasant could be a guerrilla, a pretty prostitute a clandestine agent, the kid who delivered the laundry a secret informer. Flooded rice fields concealed spikes, booby traps permeated jungles, and barracks were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. No wonder the grunts were paranoid and their commanders frustrated. So strategy was reduced to a basic formula: kill as many of the enemy as possible in hopes of breaking...
...retained. But as of March 31, the Office of National AIDS Policy still consisted only of a locked room with a phone that no one answered. That’s when the Washington Post picked up the story, which turned what had been a case of not-so-benign neglect into a public embarrassment for the Bush administration...
...system that is in place is not benign-it is vicious," Orfield said. "It has got a momentum of replicating itself and is going to cause huge problems. The race problem hasn't gone away...
...Dame Judi Dench walks among the crowd with a relaxed, regal air, like a benign dowager duchess bestowing air kisses and greetings to old friends. She'd appeared in skits the previous year, and so was enjoying her night...
...Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed presence is palpable in Manets like the Bunch of Asparagus, 1880, with its almost miraculous rendering of the blue tips of the asparagus spears. (It sold, fresh off the easel, to a collector named Charles Ephrussi. Manet felt he had been paid too generously, and with his usual...