Word: skirmishes
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Vietnam veterans won another skirmish last week in the battle over Agent Orange, but the government continues to hold its ground. For 14 years now, veterans' groups have charged that the herbicide used to defoliate the jungle canopy was toxic to soldiers. More than 35,000 have filed claims for diseases like cancer and birth defects in their children. Last week the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that a limited number of vets who contracted peripheral neuropathy, a nervous disease that causes numbness and tingling, within 10 years of their service will be allowed disability payments...
...Post's plight was the latest skirmish in the prolonged battle for survival in New York City's fiercely competitive newspaper market, increasingly an oddity in the era of one-paper monopolies and bland corporate chains. Four papers -- the broadsheet New York Times (circ. 1.1 million) and three tabloids, the Post (504,000), the New York Daily News (1.2 million) and New York Newsday (230,000) -- managed to make it through the booming 1980s. But now the city's economy is in a tailspin, and the tabloids are being dragged down with it. "I don't think there's room...
...right-wing criticism of the National Endowment for the Arts, an actor from North Carolina steps out of character to vow that this year his state will unseat the NEA's foremost critic, Senator Jesse Helms. Despite that bravado, many cultural leaders fear that what started out as a skirmish against would- be censors is turning into an unwinnable war. After years of debate about whether public funding for the arts was growing fast enough, cultural institutions now worry whether the NEA will survive at all, at least on terms consistent with intellectual freedom. Says Yale Drama School professor David...
...garbled dialogue between conflicting cultures, mutual trust is essential -- and it has been sorely lacking in the seven-week impasse between Mohawk Indians and Canadian authorities. Late last week, just as a possible resolution of the standoff appeared to be in sight, another factional skirmish broke out behind the barricades of the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, near Oka, 18 miles west of Montreal. The incident was relatively minor: two Mohawk men were severely beaten with baseball bats by a group of members of the militant Mohawk Warriors Society. But it was enough to break the impasse. In response, Canadian troops...
During the Reagan years, it seemed as if the American and Soviet First Ladies had decided to continue the superpower rivalry by other means. Raisa Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan's every tea, luncheon and photo op was another skirmish in their mutual assured destruction pact, a frost-filled sideshow of haute-to- haute combat. Reagan complained that Gorbachev lectured her mercilessly on Marx and missiles, compared the White House to a museum, and was given to an imperious snapping of her fingers to summon the KGB to fetch a chair for her. After one White House dinner where Raisa used...