Word: sacrosanct
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Environmentalists view the world's wilderness areas as sacrosanct places that must be left untouched. Their concern strikes Essayist and Microbiologist Rene Dubos as ironic. Dubos, who is perhaps known best for his work in using microbes to produce disease-fighting drugs, points out that many of the areas weekend backpackers and others consider so beautiful resulted from degradation of the environment. The sere hills of Greece were produced by deforestation and erosion; the Downs of England owe their lushness to the introduction of sheep grazing; the orchards and fields of New England are the creation of civilization. "Humanized...
Even so, the spending cuts apparently do not touch the fastest-growing portion of the budget, the major "entitlement" programs-Social Security, veterans' benefits, unemployment compensation -which are considered politically sacrosanct. Nor will the spending reductions by themselves balance the budget. If Congress and the Administration proceeded on the January plan, the $15.8 billion deficit originally estimated would swell to $25 billion or even $30 billion, according to estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. Main reason: inflation is raising the bills that the Government pays...
...Dominican Republic's embassy. "In El Salvador, I stood vigil outside the French, Venezuelan, Costa Rican, Panamanian and Spanish embassies. I reported on the burning of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. Once it was skyjacking. Now it's the seizure of a foreign embassy, that sacrosanct piece of land where a foreign flag casts a shadow and local political strife stops at the door -or used...
...displays on the campaign trail, Bush tried to look confident and exuberant, and he largely succeeded. Afraid of making a mistake that "might blow our momentum," he said as little as possible. Even so, he came close to one of those dread bloopers when he described Social Security, a sacrosanct subject if there ever was one, as "largely a welfare program." But then he hastily made clear that he was really talking only about supplementary benefits like Medicare-not Social Security pensions...
...Somalis claim that they are no longer supporting the W.S.L.F. insurrection, which is opposed by most African states because it violates a basic principle of diplomacy on the continent: namely, that national borders, even though drawn arbitrarily by European colonial powers, must remain sacrosanct. In fact, Somalia's protestations of noninvolvement are not quite accurate, as TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White discovered on a trip to the Ogaden area last week. His report...