Word: selectiveness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although Leland had managed to persuade the House to create the Select Committee on Hunger and make him its chairman in 1984, famine lost its luster once the strains of We Are the World faded and the television lights went off. There is little money or prestige in hunger. Leland earned $22,650 in special- interest speech-giving fees in 1988; Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, earns nearly ten times as much as that. Laying guilt trips on colleagues until they provided $800 million for starving Africans during the sub-Saharan famine...
...zoos fight back, they are pulling along the public with some shrewd tactics. Conservationists often select an irresistible, oversize crowd pleaser -- pandas are perfect, but snow leopards and black rhinos work fine -- and lead a campaign to preserve the creature's habitat. "There is a utility in the concern for the giant panda," says the National Zoo's director Michael Robinson. "Pandas are relatively stupid and uninteresting animals. But they happen to be photogenic and appealing, and they help focus people's attention." Big animals need big swatches of habitat, and so in the process a lot of less sexy...
Journalism at best only approximates reality, because writers must inevitably select and compress. If they cannot cram in the whole truth, however, they can be expected to deliver the truth and nothing but -- especially between quotation marks. The very use of that punctuation signals a special claim to credibility: this is not judgment but unfiltered fact...
...Nobody is telling us to target only the top 10% of white students," explains Claire Gaudiani, the school's president. Public school teachers select the students and accompany them to the campus for two weeks of classes and counseling. In order to maintain the students' interest in college, professors and minority alumni will correspond with them throughout high school and hold twice-yearly "reunions...
Unlike many of us, who would merely file such a memory away under the heading "Tragedies Witnessed," Leland decided to do something about it. Despite the apathy of his fellow representatives, despite the chronically poor relations between the United States and Ethiopia, he formed the Select Committee on Hunger in the House and managed to appropriate $800 million for famine relief in that African nation. How many lives that $800 million has saved is unknown, possibly tens of thousands, but that was still not enough for Leland, who continued looking for solutions to the global problem of hunger...