Word: beset
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...popularity, and she and the Congress Party won overwhelmingly in Uttar Pradesh. Though she is still respected there, the state government has been shoddy and corrupt and as feudalistic as the ancient Moslem regimes that were displaced by the British. Indeed, in the past year the state has been beset by a provincial-police mutiny, widespread rioting and looting prompted by food shortages, soaring inflation, power failures, unemployment, vicious black markets and bureaucratic incompetence. As a result, Mrs. Gandhi was reluctantly forced to fire her hand-picked state government and dissolve the leg islature last June. To ensure victory...
Barter supposedly is a primitive form of commercial exchange that became outmoded centuries ago with the appearance of money. But in the U.S., barter is suddenly coming back strong. Beset by shortages of many basic raw materials and finished goods, purchasing agents for the most modern corporations are turning into sultans of swap: they obtain scarce products that their companies need by offering goods that are in equally short supply...
NOTHING IS guaranteed to make an audience feel more awkward than a joke which doesn't work. The captive spectator, forced to watch a fellow human being struggling for laughs where few are to be had, is constantly beset by nagging questions and self-doubt. Why am I here? How can it be that I have paid to see this? How far away is the exit...
Aging Leaders. Much of Israel's uneasiness seems to be the result of a basic lack of confidence in the country's tired, aging leadership. Beset by painful bouts of shingles (a virus infection of the nervous system) and an inflammation of the eyelids, Prime Minister Meir, now 75, has been largely out of sight for weeks at perhaps the most critical time in her political career. Though her new government is stable enough in the short run, new elections will probably have to be called before the term of the current parliament expires in 1977. Many Israelis...
That faith is nowhere more evident than in the U.S.S.R., which has been beset in recent years with controversial sensitives. One, Ninel Kulagina, was appraised as capable of causing objects to float in midair. As Martin Gardner notes, "She is a pretty, plump, dark-eyed little charlatan who took the stage name of Ninel because it is Lenin spelled backward. She is no more a sensitive than Kreskin, and like that amiable American television humbug, she is basically show biz." Indeed, Ninel has been caught cheating more than once by Soviet Establishment scientists...