Word: drabs
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Finally, as fine flakes of snow powdered the gray morning sky on Thursday, Reagan and Gorbachev broke their public silence and converged on the drab concrete bunker in Geneva that serves as an international conference center to tell the world what their private fireside summit had produced. Their report was modest. As Gorbachev put it in a brief, formal statement, the talks had failed at "solving of the most important problems concerning the arms race." He cautioned, "If we really want to succeed in something, then both sides are going to have to do an awful lot of work." Nonetheless...
...sometimes tedious British drawing-room dramas that arrive regularly on these shores. There is, for one thing, scarcely a drawing room to be found. The beautifully detailed production moves with ease from the grand country estate of Lord and Lady Dedlock (Robin Bailey and Diana Rigg) to the drab chambers of Chancery and into the sad, grimy streets of London slums. South African Director Ross Devenish shot much of the drama in moody semidarkness, with scenes lit only by the soft glow of a lantern or the flickering of candlelight...
...less than two miles away, where the broad Paseo sweeps into Mexico City's dingy eastern suburbs, the vista was not as comforting. In small parks along the thoroughfare, about 200 drab green tents were pitched together against the early winter chill. The dwellings sheltered only a fraction of those left homeless by the quake, a total of 50,000 by government estimates, or as many as 150,000 by unofficial counts. There are no sanitary facilities in the encampment; periodically, municipal trucks distribute small plastic bags of potable water. Along with a few donated blankets, that...
...drab this seems compared to the heady days of the early 70s, when "There was something exciting about pornography," as Norman Mailer says in the new documentary Inside Deep Throat. "It lived in some mid-world between crime and art. And it was adventurous." Porn films preoccupied critics, cops and the courts. Often financed by Mafia families, they attracted the crusading instincts of local, state and federal prosecutors, who shut down the films and secured the conviction of one actor. They were directed by men who could fancy themselves as artists, and starred off-Broadway actors as well...
...blood on his hands. In 1992, in his West Bank home village near Nablus, the Hamas activist executed a man he suspected of collaborating with the Israelis. An Israeli court sentenced Mardawi to life in Block 8, the high-security wing of Shikma Prison, on the outskirts of the drab seaside town of Ashkelon on Israel's central plain. These days, Mardawi, a trim 40-year-old with a close-cropped gray beard, says he rejects violence. "We can't crush the Israelis and they can't crush us," he admits, sitting on a rough brown blanket on his metal...