Word: nadir
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Ever since it gained independence from Britain in 1962, Uganda has been racked by bouts of tribal war, political ineptitude and state-approved brutality that badly eroded the once lustrous prospects of a country that Explorer Henry Stanley called "the pearl of Africa." Uganda probably reached its nadir under the infamous Idi Amin Dada, who seized power in 1971 from the country's first leader, Apollo Milton Obote. During Amin's eight-year reign of terror, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people were killed, and thousands more were forced into exile. After the dictator expelled the country...
Several recent films, most notably The Outsiders, have played on this adolescence violence theme in an apparent attempt to link youthful energy, usually directed against others, with some kind of statement about what it means to be young in America. But Tuff Turf reaches a new nadir of gratuitous violence masquerading as moral message. What makes this especially curious is the true lack (in the first part of the movie, at least) of overt sex. The film really does try to convey a feeling of "nice guys finish first" while attempting to retain a real-world grounding...
...generally acknowledged to have been the L.I.R.R.'s nadir, a period of such egregious discomfort that at least a small part of the growth of the Sunbelt can be traced to the conditions on the commuter line. The railroad was 150 last year, and there are definite signs of improvement. Last year 88.5% of the trains arrived within five minutes of the schedule--up 6% since 1979. It may be better than it was in the '70s, but it is not yet as good as it was in 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt's summer White House lay in Oyster...
...study had warned about the danger posed by the Administration's huge budget deficits. The White House last week went a giant step further, revealing that it may want to discard not only the council's embarrassing statements but the panel itself. The disclosure marks a historic nadir in the influence of the CEA, which was established by Congress in 1946 to be the President's closest source of economic advice. The Administration points out that eliminating the CEA and its 33-member staff would save the Government $2.6 million a year. But most observers think...
...Donnell returned to teaching the subject seven years ago, after raising six children. Her re-entry came at the nadir for Latin in the U.S. In 1976 just over 150,000 American public high school students took the language, down a disastrous 79% from the 1962 peak of 702,000. "Latin went into a slump with the Sputnik era, with its concentration on science and technology," she recalls. And she says, "Then came the permissive age," the 1960s and early 1970s, when demands for so-called relevancy in course content pushed many schools to reduce or abandon classical studies...