Word: decrepit
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...Daily News to the decade's iconic headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." An army of the emotionally disturbed, evicted en masse from state mental hospitals, made cardboard-box homes on the streets. Graffiti festooned many tenement buildings and scarred the exteriors and interiors of the city's decrepit transit system. Sitting inside a subway car, with its garish scrawls, was like being trapped in someone's deranged mind, screaming out madness from within its metal walls. (See photos of the inner workings of the world's megacities...
Because of a prisoner-transfer agreement signed last month between Britain and Laos, Orobator may be able to serve her sentence back home instead of in one of Laos' notoriously decrepit prisons. Previous foreign inmates in Laos have complained of torture, inadequate food and routine overcrowding of cells...
...next three to six years, and train hundreds of thousands of fresh, paid soldiers in modern warfare. But today's high school graduates were born when Russia's birth rate hit an all-time low in the early 1990s, and were raised during the disastrous Chechen war. Near the decrepit train station of Vladimir, a military town near Moscow, an army-recruiting center promises a life of adventure for those who sign up. THE ARMY OF RUSSIA - AN ARMY OF PROFESSIONALS, says a billboard, showing a young man in a leather military helmet peering out of a tank scope...
...this case, I mean the high-minded part literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age - say, 80 - all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our driver's licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would be?) We'll let you proceed with your lives - much of which will be spent paying for our retirement, in any case - without having to hear us complain about our every ache and reflux. We'll be too busy exploring altered states...
Amid all the anxiety out there, if there's a theme to the special Ideas issue this year, it's renewal. This is not false hope or irrational optimism but the power of ideas and innovation to transform the world and us. A decrepit transport system becomes the nerves of a new, greener network. A 16th century sect inspires a new generation of believers. The power of ideas is to make old, broken things work in fresh new ways. In fact, transformation is at the heart of what is going on in America and around the world...