Word: venal
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...great threats to civilization in the second half of this century: nuclear war and communist dictatorship. In the dark, bitter depths of the cold war, Sakharov's voice rang out. "A miracle occurred," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "when Andrei Sakharov emerged in the Soviet state, among the swarms of corrupt, venal, unprincipled intelligentsia." By the time of his death in 1989, this humble physicist had influenced the spread of democratic ideals throughout the communist world. His moral challenge to tyranny, his faith in the individual and the power of reason, his courage in the face of denunciation and, finally, house arrest...
...country with no government and no plan for recovery. The massive dislocations in country after country lay in the mismanagement or malfeasance of top political and business figures, and the difficulty the world is having in repairing the damage owes much to a set of leaders who are weak, venal or tarnished...
...checked with friends at HotWired, CNET, CNN Interactive and other Websites, and everyone was optimistic. ("Cha-ching!" was how a pal at HotWired put it.) The more traffic to your site, you see, the more you can charge advertisers, theoretically. That may sound venal, but it's been lean out here. A lot of Websites have died for lack of revenue. Thanks to IE 4, traffic is way up, in some cases more than 25%. Within two weeks, visits at TIME Daily doubled, to 500,000 page views a week. We still have to convince advertisers that people...
...looks bloated, and his face wears defeat as its due. The sheriff of a Jersey suburb overrun by venal New York City cops, he is seen as a genial buffoon. Even the metallic voice of a video game tells him, "You have no authority." He seems almost at ease with his fate--one of those rare men who don't dare to dream or think of themselves as hero material. Imagine an older Rocky Balboa who got clobbered until he was half deaf, and whose Adrian dumped him to marry the town scumball...
...Hong Kong's handover [ONE COUNTRY, MANY SYSTEMS, June 30] is that neither the Chinese monarchists, Nationalists nor Communists in their succession have been able to accomplish on the mainland what the British did through their colonial administration of Hong Kong. Colonialism, in general, has had an ugly and venal past, but not so the British version. To be sure, the British may seem to be stereotypically aloof, superior and uncompromising, but wherever the British went they performed better than their predecessors and successors. They brought democracy and made a better civilization. Moreover, they fostered in their subjects the cultural...