Word: squalidity
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...media sometimes learn from criticism, but not very quickly. Thirty-five years ago the press made a public figure of the demagogic Joe McCarthy, quoting his every reckless accusation of treason. The nation had to undergo a prolonged and squalid crisis until journalists learned to check out irresponsible charges and give the accused a chance to reply. Spiro Agnew was a nonentity as Vice President until the beleaguered Richard Nixon decided to deploy Agnew to wage a smear campaign against network news bias. Fearful of Government intervention, television gave him more attention than he deserved. Agnew's hour...
...violence began two weeks ago in Gaza, the squalid swath of poverty along the Mediterranean that is home to 600,000 Palestinian Arabs. Rumors spread that an Israeli truck had deliberately rammed two cars carrying Arab workers, killing four of them, in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli merchant. By the next morning much of Gaza was covered with smoke from burning tire barricades. Thousands marched through the dirt streets carrying photocopied pictures of local youths who had died in the unrest. In the following days, troops attempting to disperse the demonstrators were greeted with showers of stones, iron...
...Gaza's Palestinians: some 5,440 people occupy each square mile, a density that approaches Hong Kong's. The Jews inhabit a beach-front enclave that is fast growing into an Israeli Riviera. But more than 60% of Gaza's Arabs are refugees, most of whom live in squalid United Nations camps built 40 years ago. In the camp of Nuseirat, Sabha, a 50-year- old woman, finds only despair. "There is no way of getting out of this muddy life unless a miracle occurs," she said. "But the time of miracles has gone...
...breach was potentially devastating and perfectly legal. Consarc even managed to persuade the British Trade Ministry to insure the project for $11 million. Growled Stephen Bryen, who heads the Pentagon's export-control program: "This was an instance of really bad licensing by the British. It was an absolutely squalid case...
...consensus and compromise become hopelessly unsettled in the face of single-minded zeal. The tendency is then to mistake it for irrationality. Ronald Reagan once famously referred to a group of regimes that defy the rules of international conduct as the "strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich." Less than two years later it was discovered that Reagan not only had dealt with these Looney Tunes but, in the words of his former chief of staff, had been snookered by them...