Word: scant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...economy is crippled, and many citizens blame the government's mismanagement and corruption. Unemployment is estimated at 30% of the work force. Housing and consumer goods are in scant supply. The drop in world oil prices has drained petro-revenues by two-thirds, and most of the remaining earnings go to service the $25 billion foreign debt. "When I see the poverty in the streets, I feel ill," says Zena Haraigue, who won Algeria's highest medal as a freedom fighter. "The government filled its pockets and its stomachs, and now they ask what's wrong with their young people...
...easier access to other journalists' stories. Financial pressures impel sheer productivity. Reporters see career advancement coming through literary stylishness or Watergate-type exposes instead of nuts-and-bolts checking. And editors at even the most prominent places increasingly call themselves "packagers" rather than seekers of news. Thus it is scant surprise that even experienced reporters make bad judgments...
...superslim slivers and oversize wedges. A manufacturer wishing to boost the nutrient value of a cereal, for example, simply bases the label on an oversize portion. If low calories are the object, the portion becomes minuscule. Take, for example, Entenmann's fat-free Chocolate Loaf Cake, which boasts a scant 70 calories per 1-oz. serving. No one with a sweet tooth would ever cut the cake this small, argues Dr. Brian Levy, who treats diabetics at New York University Medical Center. "It is physically almost impossible and emotionally unsatisfying to eat just 1 oz.," he says. Haagen-Dazs markets...
...what used to be the German Democratic Republic, the Communist Party is an anorectic shade of its former self. With a peak membership of 2.3 million, it once embodied East Germany's political, intellectual, military and bureaucratic elite. Now reborn as the Party of Democratic Socialism, it has a scant 250,000 adherents, the majority of them former communist functionaries who, says one observer, "cannot believe they can hang up the socialist dream like a soiled coat." They remain loyal even though thousands have lost their jobs because of what Germans call Ausgrenzung, or discrimination against those linked...
Aloof and sometimes quirky, Tsongas is a man who wastes scant time on political heartiness. "He gives little feedback," says one of his top aides. Escaping political orthodoxy appeals to him. The higher a person's standing, staff members say, the more likely Tsongas is to ignore him. He is incapable of rudeness, but there are glints of social defiance in his nature. In nine years in Washington, Tsongas says, he never held a dinner party. The Senator needs few people aside from his wife, Niki, and three daughters, Ashley, 17, Katina, 13, and Molly, 9. He is fanatically devoted...