Word: blackest
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...sing. To play the canary. To be a stool pigeon. The blackest humor jeers behind the slang for acting as informer -naming names. To say the word "informer" is to evoke the history of betrayal, to hear the ring of 30 pieces of silver. Yet for a brief period in the late '40s and '50s the community's moral leper was promoted to something of a cultural hero. That elevation was not so odd as it first appeared. Soviet espionage, after all, was no fiction: wartime thieves of atomic secrets had been tried and convicted in federal...
Suddenly, everything was different. For the victors, it was a day to match their brightest expectations. For the losers, it was worse than their blackest fears. Trooping to their caucuses in record numbers last week, the voters of Iowa produced stunning surprises that upset the carefully drawn plans for the 1980 presidential race in both parties. Left reeling in defeat were two of the nation's foremost political figures, Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was trounced 2 to 1 by Jimmy Carter, and immediately found himself so strapped for funds that he had to stop paying his campaign...
...President was shaking up his White House staff, perhaps firing top aides; the President was having a mental breakdown; the President was preparing to resign. As Washington waited, the dollar plunged on international financial markets. The New York Post summed up the spreading bewilderment by demanding, in its blackest front-page type: WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU UP TO, MR. PRESIDENT...
...year's first quarter, its earnings fell 44%, the probably temporary result of lower prices for North Sea crude and of marketing losses in Continental Europe. BP, which has total operating freedom from the politicians in Whitehall, has long emphasized crude production over marketing. The company produces the "blackest" barrel of oil in Europe-that with the largest proportion of low-profit heavy fuel-and early this year closed its biggest refinery, in Rotterdam, for two months because of poor sales. On the other hand, it has done the best job of any Sister in exploiting new oil finds...
...killed by tuberculosis in 1924, he entreated his friend Max Brod to burn his books-to destroy the unpublished masterpieces (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika) that posthumously raised his estate from weird minor talent working in the ruins of Austria-Hungary to premonitory genius of the century's blackest impulses. Brod of course refused; it remained for both the Nazis and the Soviets to suppress Kafka's works-a neat case of reality confirming the artist's point...