Word: pitilessness
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...search of food, tottering, often falling into the dust to die, sometimes within sight of their goal. This time it is not only emaciated mothers with their hollow-cheeked children but skeletal men as well, not just in the war-ravaged south but also in the north. Across the pitiless expanse of Sudan, starvation threatens 2.6 million people, of whom 350,000 may be facing death...
...still undersize and boyish, but he was just 13 when rebel Renamo soldiers crept into the hamlet of Taninga before dawn in 1988 to steal food and took him too. They threatened to execute him, armed him with an AK-47 assault rifle and turned him into a pitiless killing machine aimed at his family, friends and neighbors on the government side of Mozambique's civil war. "They told me I must fight in order to eat," he stutters, loath to recall those years. "I killed people. I saw their faces when I hurt them." He cannot look a questioner...
...heart of the play is the sparring between Wilde (Michael Emerson) and his courtroom antagonists. The flip, willfully perverse Wildean wit suffered the rude shock of having to defend itself under pitiless legal questioning. Asked if something he has written is true, Wilde replies, "I rarely think anything I write is true." He was a victim, of course, of Victorian prudery but also of the perennial clash between the aesthetic and the moral, the realm of art and the realm of life. Wilde realizes too late that it's an unfair fight. "One says things flippantly," he apologizes wanly...
...million that a cargo-ship owner can expect to pocket for making his vessel available to Uncle Sam in wartime--even though the Pentagon no longer wants it. Was it only a year ago that the full-throated budget warriors of the Republican revolution were unleashing a pitiless campaign to cut off the tens of billions of dollars expended each year on subsidies and tax breaks for big business...
Last Thursday night, exactly one year since his triumphant ascent to the Speaker's chair, Gingrich stood before his troops at a private session in the Cannon caucus room. He had told them then that there would come a dark hour, when the fight would grow hard, the polls pitiless, the prospects bleak. And he had promised he would be right at their side, that once they had won the war, all the pain would be forgotten...