Word: officialdom
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Reporting from a paranoia-mad communist country has never been easy, and these days Cuba is a more difficult assignment than ever. Most journalists do the prescribed, unenlightening rounds of officialdom in Havana, sneak off to see a few dissidents, then interview cab drivers or disgruntled locals in food lines. Honesty is like bread -- a commodity on rations. Oppenheimer, a Pulitzer-prizewinning correspondent for the Miami Herald, found a way around this difficulty: he carried letters from Cubans in Miami to relatives on the island, thus gaining their trust. As a result, he captures a truer, if sadder, portrait...
...University officialdom was concerned, I felt little lost and neglected as I began my first year. Forget coddling her young: Mother Harvard didn't know that my classmates and I existed...
...Christian Science is further beset -- by doctrinal tumult. Last month many members of the faith were shocked when sedate reading rooms around the world began displaying a book that had been deemed unsound by church officialdom more than four decades ago. The Destiny of the Mother Church, by Bliss Knapp, claims that the faith's 19th century originator, Mary Baker Eddy, was virtually a second Christ. This flies in the face of Eddy's own claims to be no more than the inspired founder and leader of the movement. Official publication of the volume has led to a rare outburst...
...atop the Acropolis. Still, with as many as 6,000 visitors a day clambering up the Acropolis, some parts of its rock have become so slippery and dangerous that officials have had to cover them with concrete. Marble treasures in the museum have been blackened by tourists' greasy hands. Officialdom can also be difficult: although buses have not been allowed on the Acropolis since the mid-1970s, it took until this year to persuade the mayor that it was just as bad to let them park at the foot of the hill, since many drivers leave their motors running...
...problem was the nature of Iraq's political structure. Saddam ran a ruthless, highly centralized regime. Says Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Reagan Administration: "The intelligence was limited, always has been, and still is today. The access to Iraqi officialdom and private citizens was extraordinarily limited." The U.S. had few intelligence assets within Iraq; as one American official says, analysts were reduced to "dealing with a welter of contradictory, fragmentary and incomplete information, and then trying to make sense out of that mess...