Word: brushed
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...exactly a secret that President Bush’s administration hasn’t been particularly friendly to America’s public lands. Despite his campaign pledge to “restore and renew” our public land and his image as a brush-clearing Texas outdoorsman, our national parks suffer from overcrowding and insufficient funding, our national forests are being thinned by irresponsible logging, and our wilderness areas are threatened by drilling and development. The very agencies that are supposed to protect the environment are themselves in danger of atrophy. Morale among long-time staff in government...
...mile further down the potholed and shell-scarred border road is Aitta Shaab, a bastion of Hizballah support, now deserted, which has witnessed some of the fiercest fighting between Israeli forces and Hizballah fighters. It was in the rolling brush-covered terrain south of the village that Hizballah fighters punched through the border fence to snatch two Israeli soldiers nearly a month ago, triggering Israel's onslaught against Lebanon...
...understatement, perhaps. The sound of warfare is inescapable. The sharp crack of outgoing artillery rounds from Israeli positions just across the border is accompanied by the door-slamming sound of exploding shells nearby. Dirty clouds of smoke and dust blossom on the rocky hillsides. The flames and smoke of brush fires sparked by shelling add to the noonday haze and turn vast expanses of countryside into sterile charred deserts. Jets swoop overhead, dropping massive bombs that leave huge towering columns of smoke, the blast carried for miles on the hot breeze...
...from Baghdad, there were two such events: the killing of terrorist Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and the appointment, after weeks of political haggling, of new ministers of Defense and the Interior. The ministers, a Sunni and Shi'ite, respectively, had been touted as independent and nonsectarian--new brooms to brush away the rampant corruption in the two crucial security ministries. Interior, in particular, would be cleansed of the Shi'ite militias that had infiltrated all levels of the police and other security forces and turned them into instruments of Shi'ite vengeance against their former Sunni oppressors...
...terrorist group and widen those chasms to cause it to explode, to isolate the hard-liners and strengthen the moderates," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and the author of the new book Inside Terrorism. "The risk of painting all terrorists with one brush is that you miss those signs, and so you miss those opportunities...