Word: distressingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During a three-hour videotaped statement, Wuornos admitted killing Mallory and six other men who had picked her up on interstate highways. According to police, she posed as a motorist in distress to get her middle-aged victims to stop, persuaded them to go to a secluded spot with the promise of sex, then robbed and killed them. Her lawyers argued during the trial that Wuornos had struck back in self-defense after her clients became abusive. But both her adopted brother and lesbian lover took the stand to dispute her account. Wuornos must now stand trial on four other...
...Minoru Arakawa, president of Nintendo of America, made an offer last week to buy the Seattle Mariners baseball team. Cars and baseball are items located near the center of the American psyche and folklore. To see them symbolically under threat from the Japanese caused unusual resentment and distress to some Americans, especially after they have watched the Japanese buy heavily into Hollywood and Rockefeller Center. The distress was illogical sometimes: Arakawa has lived in the Seattle area for 15 years and has promised to keep the team there, while the competing bidder, a group of Americans, plans to move...
Time and time again, the effort to assert these differences, particularly in institutions that precisely insist upon certain assumptions of universality, has been met by strong backlash and not a little anxiety. From Professor Thernstrom's railings to William Cole's reactionary tirades, the signs of conservative distress are apparent. That those who call for "reopening" debate so often seem to have controlled the debate all along is an irony not without consequence. It reminds us that the slogan "politically correct" has come to identify the correcting discipline of the politically powerful...
East and West, economic distress is also spurring the rightist revival. In the East, the breakdown of command economies has led to chaos and suffering that the painful birth of free markets has not yet relieved. Western Europe, though far more prosperous, nonetheless has been experiencing some of its highest unemployment rates since World War II. It has been easy for demagogues to blame immigrants who snatch away the jobs of the native-born -- though that happens far more often in right-wing mythology than in reality. The movement toward west European integration has also provoked a nationalist backlash...
...afford to direct toward their captors. In one instance, a group of hostages coaxed their guards into getting a birthday refreshment for Sutherland. When the guards returned with cupcakes, Sutherland protested, "How come Father Jenco got a big cake, and I only get cupcakes?" Jenco insists Sutherland's distress was real. On rare occasions, tensions erupted in hostility, such as the well-known episode in September 1985, when captors invited a group of hostages to select among themselves who should go free. Anderson and Jacobsen nearly came to blows over the sweepstakes, which Weir won -- by the captors' choice...