Word: besetting
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...country where most politicians cut their teeth as student activists, the rise of groups like I.J.T. provides clues to Pakistan's political future. Although the country is officially aligned with the U.S. in fighting terrorism, it is beset by an internal struggle between moderate citizens and the fundamentalists who aim to turn the country into an Islamic state. As the hard-line demands intensify, President Pervez Musharraf has backed away from some policies sought by the Bush Administration, such as cracking down on radical religious schools, known as madrasahs, and curbing Pakistani support for the fundamentalist Taliban across the border...
Conventional wisdom holds that the Abramoff lobbying scandal that engulfed Washington a year ago has fizzled. Nothing like the 60 court cases some predicted have materialized. Democrats, beset by their own ethics scandals in West Virginia and Louisiana, have all but abandoned attempts to nationalize corruption as an issue. Even last week's revelation that Abramoff had 82 contacts with Bush adviser Karl Rove registered barely a blip on the capital's political seismograph...
...NASA officials say similar space junk has probably followed previous shuttles home, unnoticed and unscrutinized. But on a mission whose departure was beset by a fuel cell malfunction, a lightning strike on the launch pad and an approaching hurricane, the delay caused by the debris threatened to mar what has otherwise been a successful mission. After a four-year delay following the destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia, astronauts have finally resumed the construction of the International Space Station, installing 35,000 pounds of solar arrays and trusses. Fourteen more missions are needed to finish the job by 2010, when...
Alice McDermott is one of those writers who take seriously the injunction to write about what you know. The intricately beset realm of Irish Americans in New York City and on Long Island is the world she grew up in. It's that same world she has offered us, newly lighted, examined and even transfigured, in five earlier novels, including Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner...
...Sept. 11, her husband tempted by a schmancy new job, New Yorker Amy Wilentz pulled up stakes and moved across the country to Los Angeles. What she knew of California was largely derived from Beach Boys lyrics. What she found "felt a lot like the Third World": a state beset by fires, floods, earthquakes, energy shortages, debt and political crisis. "I had arrived in L.A. hoping to avoid catastrophe," Wilentz writes in her new book, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen (Simon & Schuster; 322 pages), "only to find that I was living in its capital...