Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...austere thriller with one lingering mystery: Why was it shelved? Did the old husband -- brutal, impotent, self-deluding -- offer the Chinese rulers a disturbing mirror image of themselves? Did Ju Dou's child -- twisted, ruthless, utterly inhuman -- remind the authorities uncomfortably of the '60s Red Guard? Maybe the film was deemed too sexy for Chinese viewers. Though not much flesh is exposed, Ju Dou is a powerful essay on sexual longing, grounded in time-honored dramatic elements: fire, water, pain and lust...
...Gentlemen of Verona lacks both complexity and freshness. The play contains the early prototypes of what will become Shakespeare's stock characters: the blunt fool Launce (Christopher Scully), who uses crass language to express his words of wisdom; the love-sick Valentine (Andrew Sean Kuan); and the ruthless backstabbing Proteus (Alice Kim). In addition, the play is full of enough concealed identities, overheard conversations and overworked puns to make a sitcom writer groan...
...movie stars Wesley Snipes as a flashy and ruthless crack dealer. Rap artist Ice-T, Judd Nelson and director Mario Van Peebles play police officers out to destroy his drug empire. The drug dealer is eventually brought to justice, but is not punished. Instead, a citizen takes the law into his own hands...
Despite deepening American involvement with Iraq, the CIA had trouble predicting what Saddam was up to. Part of the problem was the nature of Iraq's political structure. Saddam ran a ruthless, highly centralized regime. Says Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Reagan Administration: "The intelligence was limited, always has been, and still is today. The access to Iraqi officialdom and private citizens was extraordinarily limited." The U.S. had few intelligence assets within Iraq; as one American official says, analysts were reduced to "dealing with a welter of contradictory, fragmentary...
...Middle East was too vital to American strategic and economic interests to allow a ruthless dictator to run roughshod through the region. The U.S. had to stop Saddam. We had to prevent him from gaining a stranglehold on the region's oil supplies. We had to eliminate his power to trigger devastating chemical or even nuclear wars. Most important, we had to send a clear message to Saddam and to future Saddams that wanton aggression in the Middle East would be met forcefully...