Word: beset
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Berlin election did not produce a clear-cut victor. The Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.) garnered 47.9% of the vote, its best showing ever, but the party still fell short of a majority. The biggest winner in this disillusioned city of 2 million, beset by youth protest and a wave of squatters taking over vacant buildings, was the Alternative List: a motley array of leftists, environmentalists, pacifists and others who reject all aspects of West German society. Using the symbol of a green hedgehog, this irreverent protest group polled 7.2%, and for the first time gained representation in the city parliament...
There was ample cause for Israelis to be concerned. The country was beset by internal troubles and a burning foreign crisis. Concern about a possible new war with Syria was on everyone's mind. Prime Minister Menachem Begin's transitional government, charged with guiding the country until the June 30 elections, found itself embroiled in a growing campaign controversy over Israel's actions in Lebanon. On Independence Day Begin declared in a broadcast that it would take a "miracle" to induce Syria by diplomacy alone to remove the SA-6 antiaircraft missiles it has placed in Lebanon...
Howard Hughes died batty and beset by phantoms, and all of us learned valuable lessons from his downfall: do not let your fingernails grow to excess, do not inherit too much money, do not fly too high. The man's decay was so pathetic and so gaudy that it is difficult now even for those with a good grip on middle age to remember that once he was a hero. A strange hero, certainly, but a real one; a test pilot of impressive courage and a gifted, self-taught aircraft designer at a time when aviation was the century...
...tried to shoot President Ford, thought of herself as a Halo shampoo girl. The movie Taxi Driver wove together many themes found in the lives of American assassins. A taxi driver (played by Robert De Niro), obsessed with shooting a presidential candidate and protecting a young prostitute (Jodie Foster), beset by aggressive urges as well as sexual ones (coded in the film as a pure-hearted defense of a prostitute), finds an acceptable resolution: he spares the candidate and instead shoots the girl's pimp and one of her Johns, thus symbolically killing his lust and emerging...
...priests and wonder rabbis, black, Oriental and Indian investigators whose ethnicity is more important than their cases. If Arkady has any equivalent it is George Smiley, the resolutely unglamorous star of John le Carré's spyworks. Like Smiley, Arkady has an inconstant wife; like him he is beset with interdepartmental intrigue and divided loyalties...