Word: plight
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...after growing slightly for seven years, the North Korean economy contracted by 1.1% in 2006, according to South Korea's central bank, and a bad harvest has worsened chronic food shortages, say North Korea watchers. Lee has pledged to maintain humanitarian aid to the North. But if Pyongyang's plight continues to worsen, Lee's tourniquet on other potentially vital economic arteries could force the Kim regime to heel...
...mystery of Mugabe's mind. "Like the seemingly respectable married man who makes his living as a drug lord, Mugabe holds parallel positions," she writes. "The two are not coordinated in his divided self. While he was indeed the enlightened leader who wanted to develop the country, improve the plight of the poor and secure freedom by resisting colonial power, the once-admirable leader is also the person doing the terrible things that can't be mentioned? He can insist that he never sacrifices his principles because the way he sees it, he did not set out to murder...
...same time keeping an iron grip on power (sanctioning vote-rigging, beating up Tsvangirai and others, as they did last year, and, in Matabeleland in the 1980s, committing mass murder). Hence its appeal to Zimbabwean patriots to vote for Mugabe and against Western imperialism, while all but ignoring the plight of a people enduring an economic collapse that is only hinted at by the numbers: more than 100,000% inflation and 80% unemployment. The most recent example of this duality came at the weekend, when the regime announced it would contest the results in 16 parliamentary seats...
...welcome both the Games and the world on August 8, activists from across the globe are stepping up calls for countries to boycott the Games. Yet such calls are both unrealistic and futile in effecting positive change—not only does a boycott fail to improve the plight of those affected by China’s actions, but such a step does, in fact, concretely harm the athletes themselves and the symbolism of brotherhood and harmony advanced by the Olympic Games. When Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the decision was certainly controversial, but many...
...leading member of the French National Consultative Committee on Ethics, Axel Kahn, acknowledges there are "several incoherent aspects" to Sébire's attitude towards treatment and demands for an administered death. Still, Kahn isn't sure full disclosure of her case would have changed opinion of her plight. "Public response to her condition and plea for euthanasia was compassionate and emotional," Kahn says. "Hard ethical analysis of whether her own peculiar decisions dealing with her disease undermined her request for death involves rational conclusion. Rarely in our world will the rational win out over the emotional...