Word: dirt-poor
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...soft-spoken, gently smiling and ingratiating performance, he is altogether more charming than most of his predecessors; it comes as a real shock when he must off a competitor or a betrayer. And we enjoy seeing him enjoy his success - the gigantic mansion in which he installs his formerly dirt-poor family, his trophy wife, the celebrity that comes to him. There has never been much point in deploring a gangster's rise; it's his demise that we fear - the notion that the American go-getter must inevitably be gotten. "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico...
...Either way, Jefferson's fate has become something bigger than the man himself. He rose from a dirt-poor rural childhood to attend Harvard law school and became, in 1990, the first African-American elected to Congress from Louisiana since Reconstruction; his equally spectacular fall, if it comes, would be a bitter disappointment to many constituents. Some of them have already organized in his defense; a group calling itself the Justice for Jefferson Committee issued a statement less than a week after the indictment accusing the federal government of using "vast financial resources to manipulate the media" and calling...
...Four years ago, a friend showed Liang Daxing a photograph of a traditional cloth pillow fashioned into a toy tiger. The image stirred Liang's memories of his time in China's barren, dirt-poor Northeast, where he was packed off for re-education during the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution. A master tailor, Liang, 59, was due to retire until he saw the photograph. It inspired him to hold onto his needle and thread, and delve into the old craft of making toys from spare cuts of fabric. Today, he sells the fruits of his labors from...
...that spells more Hummers and luxury condominiums in Beijing and Shanghai for Shanxi's coal barons. The cash to buy their cars and toys will come from the sweat--and perhaps blood--of men like Xie Daibing. Xie, originally from the remote and dirt-poor province of Gansu, on the border with Tibet, works in a mine less than a mile from the shaft in Zuoyun County where the 57 miners drowned. "No, I'm not scared," he says, although he looks it, a frown creasing his forehead and his fingers restlessly juggling his cigarette pack and lighter. Xie says...
...then there's the patient known as S.R.D. Discovered by researchers four years ago in Ahmedabad, India, she was a 32-year-old, dirt-poor maid who had been born with severe cataracts. They were removed surgically when she was 12--and within a year, despite what neuroscientific dogma would have predicted, S.R.D. learned to see. Her case, described in the December issue of Psychological Science, is forcing scientists to rethink their long-held beliefs about vision. "There is a critical period for perfect acuity," says Pawan Sinha, associate professor of neuroscience at M.I.T. and a co-author...