Word: beset
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...capital punishment appears not to have had much effect. Kenya is so beset by crime that it can be unsafe to walk in Nairobi at night, and carjackings and violent robbery are common. "In Kenya, [the death penalty] has not stopped murder - indeed, the rate has been going up by leaps and bounds - nor has it discouraged violent robbery," The Daily Nation said in an editorial after the decision was announced. There are no current figures for the crime rate in Kenya, but the U.S. State Department says there is a "high rate of crime in all regions of Kenya...
...government ledgers and its state bonds are trading at near junk status. It's been a long, slow tumble from the Golden State's glamorous peak in the 1960s--when Governor Pat Brown built an efficient network of freeways and thriving, affordable public universities--to today's insolvent government beset by an unwieldy constitution and decades of mistakes...
...political comedy series The Thick of It, the movie is directed by series creator Armando Iannucci and written by Thick veterans Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin. Its central character is a Candidean foreign minister in the British cabinet, Simon Foster (tiny, beset Tom Hollander). A sweet-souled doofus of the second tier, Simon is invited to attend to top-secret conferences, but not to give opinions, only as an extra body - "room meat." And he's so fearful of scandal that, if left alone at night in a hotel room on a trip to Washington...
...Africa, however, that the battle for the hearts, minds and lungs of new smokers is being waged most aggressively - and Nigeria offers a telling look at how the fight is unfolding. For all the woes that beset the continent, Africa still enjoys the lowest smoking rates in the world, largely because most people just can't afford it. In Ghana, the male smoking rate (which in most places in the world is higher than the female rate) is only 8%; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it's 14%; in Nigeria, it's 12%. Compare that with 31% in India...
...five countries that signed the agreement - Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria - have been working on the ambitious $11 billion Nabucco project for seven years. The development of the pipeline, which will run initially from the Turkish capital to Baumgarten in Austria, has been beset by political bickering. But if completed as planned by 2015, the line could bring up to 31 billion cu m of gas a year from the Caspian Sea and the Middle East across Turkey and into Europe. (See pictures of Obama in Europe...