Word: hapless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iranians seized the embassy in retaliation, none answered. And when the thing actually happened, no one on any side was sure of exactly what to do. The triumphant but clueless students would hang on to the 52 frightened, angry Americans for 444 days, all the while making hapless attempts to prove that the embassy had been a cockpit of intrigue and espionage. Although for the most part the hostages were not subjected to torture, their detention and humiliation were in themselves an outrage and came complete with occasional beatings and sham executions. Spectacularly uncooperative types like Michael Metrinko, a political...
...going to have to look for this movie in the fine print of the art-house listings, but it is well worth the effort - mostly for what the movie does not do. Chief among its reluctances is killing Germans. Exactly one of them, a hapless guard at the Paris Gestapo headquarters, is murdered by Philippe (the great Lino Ventura) as he makes his escape from his would-be torturers. For the rest of the picture he runs a little band of underground fighters who are mainly preoccupied with their own security. You never see them blowing up a train...
...kids gonna be out here all night?” The HUPD officer who asked should’ve known better. The two Arctic weather-proof tents pitched in the middle of the Malkin Athletic Center quad were a dead give away, but it was too late: the hapless member of Harvard’s finest had just become an unwitting straight man. “Well, sir,” said Corey M. Rennell ’07, a Crimson photo editor, drawing out his words for added effect, to the delight of the eleven other students gathered around...
...Yanukovych's impressive showing may have been a surprise to Westerners who thought his time and eastward-looking agenda had come and gone, but it wasn't to him. Over the past year and a half, he has remade himself, hiring Western spin doctors rather than wasting funds on hapless Russian advisers. He became available to the media, and toned down his allegiance to Moscow, while still emphasizing the need to move to Europe "together with Russia." He also promised to ease the burden of high gas prices by re-entering the United Economic Space with Russia...
...Instead, he looks hapless before the specter of a nuclear-armed militant clerical regime that looms beneath the veil of a peaceful nuclear energy project. Putin's massive supplies of conventional weapons to Iran, including air defense missiles and armor, have strengthened that specter - much to Russia's own peril...