Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Indonesia, corruption is so family-oriented that in the early 1970s, President Suharto's wife Tien was known as "Mrs. Ten Percent." These days scandal surrounds one Haji Achmad Thahir, a drab Indonesian government employee who never made more than $9,000 per year in salary in his life. But relatives fighting over his estate discovered him to have a bank account of nearly $35 million. The Indonesian state oil company, Pertamina, has charged in court that two German companies, Siemens and Klockner Industrie, paid Thahir the money in connection with the construction of a $500 million steel mill...
...Deputies in Spain's 350-seat lower house were halfway through their vote on a new government when the heavy rococo doors of the Cortes, the country's parliament in the center of Madrid, burst open. In rushed a dozen armed attackers, most of them wearing olive drab parkas and blue jeans. In the marble corridors outside the chamber, some 200 uniformed men nervously fingered their weapons as they sealed off the exits. The invaders fired their submachine guns at the ceiling to drown out the Deputies' protests, causing plaster to rain over the assembly. Most...
...These drab monthly rituals have been going on for 16 years at centers like the schoolhouse on West Byers Place, ever since the Department of Agriculture expanded its food stamp program as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Currently, 12.5% of Denver's residents use the program (the nationwide figure is 10%), which provides an average of $ 138 a month to 24,000 households. Denver is a boom town. Yet because it is an urban area with lots of poverty as well as wealth, as many as 60,000 people there now depend on the stamps...
Says one Western diplomat who has closely watched the military situation: "There's no mixing at all. I doubt if the first-year recruits ever get off the compound." The Soviets, he notes, tend to travel in their own olive-drab military trucks. Officers, at times accompanied by their wives and children, will occasionally enter local shops or offices, but they rarely, if ever, use public transportation or patronize local restaurants. The soldiers and their families generally shop at their...
Corporate headquarters is a complex of drab brick buildings near an Atlanta airport taxiway. Some of the executive offices have linoleum tile, not a Bigelow, on the floor. The company even boasts of "zero paper-clip attrition" because it strips the clips from incoming mail rather than buying new ones...