Word: brutalize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Despite September 11, the Afghan campaign and the "axis of evil" speech, it's not hard to see why there's no rush to war with Iraq. While no significant constituency at home or abroad is comfortable accepting Saddam Hussein's continued brutal reign, there are few takers for launching a war in order to oust him. That's not only because victory may be neither cheap nor easy, but also because some of the stakeholders fear that victory itself may create a situation that's even less tolerable and stable than the present...
Jefferson had given Lewis an unambiguous mission: to find "the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent." Judged by that yardstick, the captains had utterly failed. What Jefferson hoped would be a "practicable" water route had turned out to be a brutal portage across parts of Montana and Idaho that included some of the most rugged wilderness in North America. If nothing else, later traders and settlers, appalled by the expedition's experience, learned where not to go and found a friendlier route along the Platte River across Nebraska and over South Pass in Wyoming...
...Western faith. They appear first in the Jewish Bible's books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The books were edited in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., and secular scholars find an intimate connection between their content and the horrors Jews faced at the time. In 586 B.C., after a brutal siege, the kingdom of Babylon conquered Israel and forced its elite into exile. The prophets defiantly proclaimed the opposite: the establishment over all nations of a Jewish kingdom under a divinely anointed Messiah, set at the end of days. It was so resonant to a nearly annihilated people that...
After Japan's bubble economy burst, youth crime surged, brutal schoolyard beatings became frequent and teenage prostitution evolved into a regular part of urban life. A "lost generation" started venting their malaise by randomly attacking salarymen, assaulting the homeless and even killing their parents. Japan is still a rich country that pampers its young, but the nation and its children seem increasingly aimless...
...sure, such a lavish tribute seems wholly inappropriate for a ruthless killer who made his living through hijacking, racketeering, extortion and drugs. Yet the virtual lionization of underworld figures is nothing new. During the 1920s, America’s mass media helped transform certain groups of brutal outlaws—namely, ethnic Irish and Italian hoods that operated within highly structured criminal syndicates—into pop culture icons. For many impoverished European immigrants, the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger-like tales of powerful mobsters such as Big Jim Colosimo and the infamous Al Capone seemed to epitomize the American...