Word: descente
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...Congo. Long before Sierra Leone, Belgium's colonial army encouraged the amputation of body parts as proof that native soldiers had actually killed their enemies. Former Financial Times correspondent Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" details Joseph Desire Mobutu's rise to power and his descent into paranoia, isolation and self destruction. Mobutu's Congo, Wrong writes, was a modern-day kleptocracy - a nation state that institutionalized theft...
...They did so with a vengeance two weekends ago in Oldham, a former textile town near Manchester. A skirmish outside a shop between two British-born teenagers, one of Asian descent and one white, triggered fighting between whites and non-whites. The Asian youths then turned on the police. The violence left dozens injured, cars torched and properties smashed. Though Oldham has quieted down, race relations are likely to remain contentious issues even after the election. Says Chris Myant, of the publicly funded Commision for Racial Equality (C.R.E.), "While you have a picture of significant success in some areas...
Sadly, the season's final game also marked the end of the collegiate careers of great teammates and friends Gunderson and Magnuson. The two, both of Scandinavian descent, have been called the Bobbsey Twins for their closeness in and out of the water...
Taiwan, at this moment, is an island on the brink of embroilment in superpower conflict, of descent into economic distress and of an unprecedented national awakening and cultural flowering. It is on the brink of, dare anyone say it, nationhood--not in constitutional terms but, perhaps more important, in cultural terms. The 22.2 million Taiwanese and the rest of Asia as well have posited a Taiwan that is so much more than a cold war bulwark and superpower pawn. The island that used to be thought of as the un-China, the anti-Mao or, later, the chip fabricator...
This stands, however, only as a subjective (and shortly, sentimental) judgment. The smooth columns of Widener and the short descent to the Tercentenary Theater need not universally recall the tongue-and-grooved columns at the Acropolis' entrance, a good 10 minutes' walk from level ground. Roofed Pusey's no Parthenon, and Harvard Square--for all its memorabilia--hardly Plaka; and the comparative praises of higher learning have already been sung. So I will risk the addition of hyperbole to say that the Athens of Greece and America are responsible for my working notion of history...