Word: powerlessness
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Since early this summer, the finance ministers of the seven leading industrial countries have seemed almost powerless to tame the surging U.S. dollar. They agreed the currency was too high and, in the long run, threatened to aggravate the U.S. trade deficit. But their desultory attempts to push down the greenback prompted suspicion that the G-7 group had lost its clout. Last week the finance ministers made a concerted effort to bring the dollar down by intervening in the currency markets. The U.S. currency fell nearly 5% against the yen and about 4% against the deutsche mark by week...
...vowing noninterference in the domestic affairs of Eastern Europe. In a report to the Kremlin that leaked in West Germany last week, Valentin Falin, head of the international department of the Soviet party's Central Committee, said the East German leadership had "sharply rebuffed" advice from Moscow but was "powerless" to deal with the crisis. He predicted that "hard-to-control mass demonstrations" would break out in East Germany by early next year...
Syria, in fact, appears just as powerless as other would-be peacekeepers in Lebanon, which has been reduced by 14 years of civil war to a lawless slum where kidnaping and murder are the norm. The fate of the hostages is tied as much to the bitter backyard struggle for power in Beirut as to international diplomacy, and that struggle has grown worse. Over the past five months, artillery duels between the Lebanese Christian General Michel Aoun and the Syrians have killed at least 600 people and wounded nearly...
...snorting civil rights leader? Some say the promise never existed, that all along he was an opportunist obsessed with power. Others shrug and wonder if he simply traded in his civil rights merit badges for the good life. Perhaps the passion for power simply overwhelmed his compassion for the powerless. Yet he bristles at talk of promises lost. "I reject all of that because the things I was fighting for when I came into Washington were justice, equality, fairness, for blacks to get into certain positions of responsibility, to make decisions about people's lives. What's the power here...
...knows to deal with another kind of madness: popular anger. At the time of the massacre, many citizens were so incensed that the P.L.A. was being used against the people that they ambushed stray groups of soldiers with fire bombs, bricks, clubs, even bare hands. Later, outgunned and powerless, the resistance turned to words. In the shadow of the Beijing Hotel, a young man spotted a military helicopter hovering over Tiananmen and wrathfully wished destruction on it. "Fall down!" he cried. "Fall down!" Across the square, a worker stared angrily at a group of soldiers and muttered, "So many died...