Word: pall
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...high cost of the victory by the violent and well-armed opposition was visible everywhere in the center of Tbilisi. A heavy pall of black smoke hung over the parliament building, where artillery shells had blown away huge chunks of the walls. On nearby Rustaveli Avenue only the scorched facades remained of graceful pastel houses. Gutted buses, twisted car wrecks and hundreds of scattered machine-gun cartridges bore silent witness to the ferocity of the fighting, which, officials said, left at least 90 people dead. Some estimates put the total closer...
...Keller fear that the shunning -- combined with hardships caused by the collapse of the socialist economy -- could encourage a popular tide of nostalgia for the good old, bad old days. Politically, of course, there is no going back. But the mood of disenchantment could leave an unpleasant pall over the ongoing struggle to build a unified Germany...
With the recession hanging on like a pall, many of the nation's big retail outlets are beginning to resemble mausoleums. Merchandise sales are dismally flat this year. Still, not every store is an echo chamber. A few novel retailing ideas have captured the attention of otherwise moribund buyers. The success of some may signal that shopping preferences and rituals are changing, while others may be nothing more than passing fads. As the great philosopher Confucius -- yes, Confucius! -- once said, "To open a shop is easy; to keep it open is an art." Here are three works of modern retailing...
...more pressing worry for the people of the gulf region is the unknown health effects of the pall of pollution. Not only have black smoke and ash darkened Kuwait's midday skies, but unburned and partially burned oil is also spewing from the wellheads. Someone standing near the al-Ahmadi oil field will find his shirt quickly covered with malignant black droplets that fall like an epoxy rain. The heat of the fires pushes much of the unburned oil high into the sky; it has rained down as far away as Qatar, 645 km (400 miles) to the south...
...pall causes gagging and choking, and there have been reports of respiratory problems from as far away as Bahrain. Eventually some of the toxic by-products will enter the food chain and work their way up, a phenomenon dubbed petroleum poisoning. "I think the whole region is in for a bath of carcinogenic, mutagenic and possibly teratogenic chemicals," says Peter Montague of Greenpeace, referring to compounds that cause cancer, mutations and congenital deformities...