Word: shrewd
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...those seven years, Gigante's lawyers and family have insisted he is a feeble, addled man going back a quarter of a century, incompetent to put on a pair of pants, let alone mastermind a secret society of schemers, thieves and assassins. But prosecutor George Stamboulidis called it a "shrewd and shameless camouflage," and a detective testified that the slow-footed Gigante developed Olympian quickness when a car bore down on him as he crossed Sixth Avenue one day. The government, however, has offered little hard evidence against Gigante, whom associates referred to with a silent tap on the chin...
...brand-name promotions, and by stigmatizing it with a broad antismoking ad campaign paid for by the industry, the settlement materially strengthens the Clinton Administration initiative to discourage teen smoking. It is, in effect, a vigorous exercise in preventive medicine that is both sound public policy and shrewd politics. Remember, though, that kids smoke in part because it's dangerous, not in spite of it, and forbidden fruit, no matter how badly spotted, rarely loses its allure...
...moral of this funny and acerbic family novel is, Don't give your clever eight-year-old anything to write about. Do not twit, tease, appall, amuse, behave weirdly in the presence of, or otherwise give fertile novelistic material to, the sort of shrewd moppet who may someday find a publisher...
Virgil, seen here, is decent, ordinary and a bit slow. Not a good match, the reader feels, for the shrewd Virgil of the next section, who reluctantly accepts the stony verdict of his family and acquaintances, including the local sheriff, that he must kill the man who murdered his wild brother Boyd. The author does his impressive best to make this believable, writing a drunk scene in which Virgil sprawls on his back in the night woods and stares at the Milky Way. Virgil sobers up and, as efficiently as a spy-story villain, creates an elaborate false identity...
DIED. ELBRIDGE DURBROW, 93, shrewd diplomat who for all his acumen could not maneuver the U.S. out of intemperate relations; in Walnut Creek, Calif. From the Moscow embassy, Durbrow witnessed the beginning of the cold war in the late 1940s. War seemed to shadow him; in 1957 he became ambassador to South Vietnam just in time to watch that region move toward conflagration...