Word: besetting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...indistinct battle lines reflected the ethnic and cultural divisions that have beset Pakistan since its creation as a Moslem homeland when British India was partitioned in 1947. Two predominantly Moslem areas that used to be part of India became a new country, the two parts separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Thus, though 80,000 West Pakistani soldiers were on hand to keep order in East Pakistan last week, their supply bases were 1,000 miles away and most food and ammunition had to be carried 3,000 miles around the coast of India. The troops -mostly tall...
...left by the courts to the legal definition of obscenity, strict laws banning pornographic material from adults will not stand up in court unless the Supreme Court eventually changes its position. In its eyes, the dangers of inhibiting freedom of expression are far greater than those presented by pornography. Beset as we are so suddenly with mountains of pornographic trash and with well-meaning arguments for doing away with it all, it is easy to forget the crimes against political freedom, science and the arts that have been committed in the name of morality. Books by Aristophanes, Defoe, Rousseau...
...conservative, peasant-based society, regularly battled police and right-wing students. When 70,000 workers rioted last summer over an amendment to the labor code that would trim the power of radical union groups, order was restored only by the imposition of martial law. Turkey is also beset by poverty, with an average per capita GNP of only $346 a year, and inflation, which led to a 40% currency devaluation last August...
...drama there is comes from the constant onslaughts of nature. Beginning in the Wisconsin forests. Laura, her sisters and their parents trek west by wagon into Kansas (Little House on the Prairie), then up to Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek") and finally west again to South Dakota, beset along the way by grasshopper plagues, blizzards, rivers in spate and midsummer droughts that "cook the grains in the milk." Treated with a minimum of sentimentalizing (less and less in the later books, which are progressively directed toward slightly older readers), the Ingallses' frontier life comes through...
...work but reserved the best jobs for whites, that the casino collected millions but paid a mere $100,000 yearly in fees, and that the government had sold off choice beachfront property at fire-sale prices and did not even collect taxes on some of it. Meanwhile, Antiguans were beset by a 40% unemployment rate, inadequate sewers and waterlines, overcrowded classrooms, bad telephone service and a $30 million debt...