Word: powerlessness
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That failure was starkly evident to guerrilla leaders who met last week in Damascus. Israel, by expert policing and harsh retaliation, has virtually sealed its borders against them and forced its neighbors to bring the guerrillas under control. The fedayeen are powerless in Jordan, kept on a tight rein in Syria, and restricted in Lebanon. The result is that they have been reduced to occasional random terrorism that is ruthless but scarcely effective in either overthrowing Arab leaders opposed to them or restoring Palestine to Arab control. Some Al Fatah leaders are even talking about investing in nightclubs and laundries...
...city of Cambridge are powerless to keep Harvard from expending. It's on the books they say. Well, if the laws are on the book, let's change the laws...They built the overpass at the foot of Kirkland St. to protect the lives of poor students. But then they took Kirkland St. and added it to Memorial Hall. They said, 'The pilgrim fathers gave it to us 200 years ago and we've been lending it to Cambridge--now we're going to take it back...
...administrators spend considerable time worrying about the Geneva problem, not the least because Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General, has made a point of giving it special attention. But the U.N. has become almost powerless to impose itself upon the budgets, staffs or even programs of the various agencies. One answer, in some minds, is to begin to centralize a good many U.N. functions, perhaps even working toward a common budget, but that would mean taking back what has already been handed out-a political feat anywhere. Should Geneva become too cumbersome, however, U.N. officials are now working on another possible...
Quick Change. The flu bug is a quick-change artist. It undergoes what scientists call antigenic alterations, or periodic transformations in biochemical makeup. As a result, vaccines developed to defend against one virus generation-usually too late to do much good-generally prove altogether powerless against the next. In addition, natural immunities acquired through exposure to one year's microbes may offer no protection against later models...
With his chilling vision of man as a helpless pawn caught within a brutalizing bureaucracy, Franz Kafka would have been intrigued by the sad happenings in his native Prague last week. He would probably have seen both captor and captives as almost equally powerless. The captor, in this instance, was Party Leader Gustav Husák, who has repeatedly vowed since taking power in 1969 that supporters of ousted Reformer Alexander Dubček would not be put on trial for their roles in Prague's short-lived "springtime of freedom," which was crushed by the Soviet-led invasion...