Word: plights
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...debate in its wider dimensions was not so clear-cut. Other key issues gripping the West and Japan included Soviet compliance with arms reductions, the security of Eastern Europe's newborn democracies, and the plight of the Baltic republics. Overarching those quandaries was the question of who in the U.S.S.R. was now the worthier negotiating partner: a diminished Gorbachev or leaders of the newly muscular, more reform-driven republics -- especially the Russian president and hero of the hour, Boris Yeltsin...
...this year. June brought what was soon called the "constitutional-coup attempt." Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov asked the Supreme Soviet for the authority to issue decrees without Mikhail Gorbachev's knowledge, but was rebuffed. In late July hard- liners published an announcement appealing for "those who recognize the terrible plight into which our country has fallen" to support dramatic action to end disorder. They might as well have put up billboards shouting COUP...
...answer is almost certainly no. This is not, putting it mildly, a subject of wide or particularly pressing current interest. Barton Fink's capacity for spiritual uplift is nil, and though the plight of the eponymous scrivener is often bleakly funny, we are not talking Hot Shots! here. In fact, with its long passages in which, literally, we are invited to watch nothing more stirring than paper peeling off the walls (or not moving through Barton's typewriter), the movie may challenge the faith of even the most loyal Coenheads...
...also the age of the all-purpose victim: the individual or group whose plight, condition or even momentary setback is not a matter that needs be solved by individual effort but constitutes a social problem in itself. "We're not to blame, we're victims" is the increasingly assertive rallying cry of groups who see the American dream not as striving fulfilled but as unachieved entitlement. Crybabyhood is all blame, no pain, for gain. And all too often it works...
...Mulie Jarju, 33, a migrant worker from Gambia, starred last year in a prizewinning film, Letters from Alou, about the plight of Africans employed illegally in Spain under conditions close to those of slave labor. Today Jarju cannot find work in Spain as either actor or laborer and faces deportation...