Word: subsistance
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...fish live nowhere else in the world. Among them: giant tortoises, Galapagos penguins, waved albatrosses, flightless cormorants, Galapagos fur seals, seagoing iguanas, three types of rice rat, Galapagos bats--and 13 species of Darwin's finch, whose variously shaped beaks, perfectly adapted for the foods they subsist on, were used by the scientist to illustrate his theory of evolution...
...dictator's military commanders (and sons-in-law) suggest that Saddam's army is a threat mainly to other Iraqis. Amatzia Baram, chairman of the department of Middle Eastern history at Haifa University, calculates that up to 30% of Saddam's fighting troops, unable to subsist on meager army rations, have deserted, and many now roam the country as armed bandits. The rest are hardly in top shape. According to diplomatic and academic sources in Britain, when Saddam massed troops near the Kuwaiti border last summer, the maneuvers flopped. Trucks broke down, and when the Iraqis retreated, valuable equipment...
...would expect to find diamonds on the souls of evangelical American missionaries in Zaire? Situated in the bull's-eye of Africa, Zaire has 43 million citizens scratching out a living on roughly $500 a year apiece. Zaire's cruel, old-style dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, however, does not subsist on $500 a year--he has many millions stashed away, and right now he makes a decent income off his country's roughly $300 million-a-year diamond trade. Now, with Mobutu's permission, Zaire's diamond business has a new entrant--Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and ex-presidential...
Meanwhile, jobs are scarce, low paying and seasonal. For most of the year, | hundreds of families subsist on welfare: a single mother with one child gets $123 a month, a family of five, $370. For many the only available work is backbreaking minimum-wage jobs in the nearby cotton fields. Some older men, like John Henry Jackson, don't seem to do much but stand around drinking and swapping stories about the old days, when they worked on the farm and "followed some funky-ass mules all day long, smelled just like 'em and didn't get no money...
...Little Saigon" in Southern California's Orange County, 140,000 Vietnamese refugees are crammed into 5 sq. mi. often under deeply impoverished circumstances. Without the resources and planning that other Asian families have used in resettling, many of them work at dead-end jobs or, as a last resort, subsist on government handouts, which profoundly shames them. Says Nghia Tran, 30, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County: "As refugees, this population represents a special set of needs, and sometimes they are not met. This is where we get our delinquency problems, with Vietnamese youths getting involved...