Word: melle
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...worked as a dishwasher to pay for college. After graduating from Pepperdine University's law school, he eventually found work as a prosecutor in Cook County, which includes Chicago, frequently handling domestic-abuse cases. He married well; his wife Patti, the daughter of influential Chicago alderman Richard Mell, used her father's political smarts to help Blagojevich win elections - first to Illinois' General Assembly in 1992 then, four years later, to the U. S. House, as the Representative from the Fifth District of Illinois, which includes parts of Chicago's North Side...
Blagojevich also alienated his powerful father-in-law. Mell had been given a lot of the credit for helping Blagojevich win the governor's office, so much so that a local publication called Mell the "governor-in-law." But petty arguments mushroomed into a major falling out, including Blagojevich's shutting down a landfill owned by a Mell relative who allegedly boasted he had clout with the governor. Blagojevich then publicly belittled his father-in-law, saying "This is the kind of thing that I think, frankly, separates the men from the boys in leadership. Do you have the testicular...
According to news reports, Blagojevich said of Mell, "There's a method of operation by people like him, and they've been doing politics for years, and they like to leverage and probe and threaten and bluster and bully until they get their way." Political observers say there was a brief attempt at reconciliation between the two men after the death of Mell's wife. But the feud resumed. As the scandal broke this week, Mell barely mentioned his son-in-law as he publicly comforted and defended his daughter...
...recent years, China has barely been able to keep a lid on the social dislocation caused by the country's pell-mell economic growth, which has brought miraculous progress but also misery to millions of people working in inhumane conditions or victimized by widespread corruption and collusion between businessmen and local Party bosses. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but government officials have acknowledged that scores of so-called "mass incidents" - protests - occur every day. These often violent eruptions of frustration were bottled up by the authorities as the Olympics loomed. Some are now worried they are primed...
...exaggerate just how important the answers to those fundamental questions will be for China. Chinese society has reached a point where maintaining the status quo is simply not an option. Beijing is barely able to keep a lid on the tremendous social dislocation caused by the country's pell-mell economic growth over the past 30 years, and the consequent misery suffered by untold millions - the unemployed, the landless, tens of millions of migrant workers laboring under inhuman conditions, the countless victims of widespread corruption. Government officials have acknowledged that up to hundreds of so-called mass incidents occur every...