Word: placide
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...arap Moi, 57. It came as a particular shock to Kenyans, who are proud of their country's reputation as a model of African capitalism and stable black self-rule in the midst of a region of turbulence. Suddenly, Kenya was revealed as a country racked, beneath its placid surface, by savage and dangerous political and economic tensions. Says Peter Frank, manager of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nairobi: "The magic that was Kenya disappeared on a Sunday morning...
...million-member Seventh-day Adventist Church is normally the most doctrinally placid and prosperous of faiths. Lately, however, it has fallen into unaccustomed uproar. For starters, church members are suing Adventist officials in an Oregon court for fraud and breach of fiduciary trust, stemming from the 1981 bankruptcy of fellow Adventist Donald Davenport, a Los Angeles developer. The suit charges that without adequately checking Davenport out, Adventist clergy blithely invested church trust funds with him and urged church members to make their own investments. As his empire collapsed, Davenport supposedly used newly raised moneys to cover payments due to previous...
...swimming and comes to believe that a giant frog, an "undertoad," menaces him. It becomes a symbol for all the hidden dangers of modern life. The film never locates its undertoad and thus never confronts the true subject of the book. It is all just body surfing on a placid pond. -By Richard Schickel
...lurking beneath the placid facade were gathering tensions that threatened to bring the Israeli siege to an imminent and bloody climax. After weeks of intense haggling, negotiations to transfer some 6,000 Palestinian guerrillas encircled inside West Beirut to another Arab country came to a virtual standstill when Syria refused again to offer them sanctuary. Moreover, the Israelis charged that Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat had no intention of leaving Beirut and that he was deliberately dragging his feet in order to avoid a direct Israeli attack on his stronghold. In East Beirut, the director-general of Israel...
...would seem to borrow most from the middle of Harvard-the placid, academic, somewhat boring postwar years. But our complacency is not the same, stemming from a bleak and not a sunny view of what lies ahead. Not many in the Class of '82 plan to burn around next year, not many are joining the Peace Corps. A job is a job, and not to be sneered at. Less stock is put on accomplishment, and more on getting ahead and getting by. Exuberance, energy, enthusiasm-those words described the Harvard of 1952 or 1962 much better than the Harvard...