Word: blights
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...When the blight struck in 1845. the eponymous Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister, the heir of nearly 700 years of British domination, which had left more than 8,000,000 Irish living like pigs-and sometimes with them under the same sod roof. A visiting Frenchman found in Ireland "the extreme of human misery, worse than the Negro in his chains." Why this savage squalor in a fertile land? "All this wretchedness and misery.'' says Woodham-Smith. can be "traced to a single source-the system under which land had come to be occupied and owned...
...world's most spectacular slums smudge the green mountainsides above Rio's crescent beaches, mosaic sidewalks and balconied hotels. Cariocas call them favelas, and there are 251 such slums in Rio with a population of 900,000. All year long the favelas are the city's blight; cops venture through some of them in cautious pairs by day, clear out altogether at night. But one night a year-the second night of pre-Lenten Carnival-the poverty-ridden, hungry world of shacks brings Rio a matchless show of gaudy costumes, music, dancing and gaiety unrestrained...
...during pregnancy. And there is much retardation among these mothers' abnormally high proportion of premature babies. Children's minds also seem to wither under conditions of severe neglect, said the President, in an atmosphere of hopelessness, where there is no impetus to learning. "This self-perpetuating intellectual blight should not be allowed to continue...
With the doldrums of examinations once again upon us, it is a joy to find the Brattle Theatre reverting to its old policy of reviving interesting movies to erase the blight of Cambridge entertainment. The Humphrey Bogart festival, so missed last January, is back (though in truncated form) and a series of good Guinness reruns provide an admirable complement to Big Sleep and Maltese Falcon...
Many a modern city is suffering from an epidemic known as the Downtown Disease, or Business Center Blight. There are three courses of treatment: 1) rerouting through traffic away from the business district; 2) cutting off vehicular traffic altogether, as Copenhagen did last month on its principal shopping street, the ⅔-mile-long Stroget; 3) performing major surgery known as "making a mall...