Word: rundowns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...twilight, about 300 illegal immigrants had massed on "the soccer field," a patch of rock-strewn brown earth halfway up Otay Mesa and just across the U.S. border from a rundown section of Tijuana, Mexico. Some bought tacos from a vendor who wheeled a white cart through the crowd; others burned old tires to cook makeshift meals before pushing off into the rattlesnake-infested canyons leading toward San Ysidro, Calif., and points north. Two dozen agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), deployed in Dodge Ram trucks on surrounding hillsides, squinted through binoculars to count the aliens...
...eventually designed a successful desktop machine. Their company, Scopus, grew so rapidly that by 1983 it had sales of $26 million. But this is not just another California start-up-to-success story. Housed in a modest concrete building, the eight-year-old firm operates out of a rundown industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city...
...Soviet Union. But when his brand of "revolutionary socialism" failed to alleviate Guinea's poverty, he turned to the West for assistance. The country's new rulers have indicated that they would, if anything, accelerate that trend. Military broadcasts said that the government would "restore the rundown economy through the encouragement of private enterprise and foreign investment...
Economically, Guinea fared little better under Toure. Despite its vast resources of bauxite (used to make aluminum), diamonds and iron, Guinea remains a desperately poor nation. Annual per capita income is $290, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and the infant mortality rate is tragically high. In the rundown capital of Conakry, there has been little new construction in 25 years. Businesses must provide their own services, even such basic ones as electricity and water. Malnourished children play listlessly in the streets...
Public education in Arkansas has long been the Dogpatch of the nation's school systems. Many poorly financed districts in the state have tiny, rundown schoolhouses staffed by some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country. Consider, for example, the Thornton school district (total enrollment: 300), located in the timber country of southern Arkansas. The last time its tenth-graders took the basic skills test they placed in the bottom 12% of national scores. The average teacher's salary is only $11,663, and not one teacher is certified to teach physics, foreign languages or art. Says...