Word: venal
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...nonexistent public-transit system, and a new $400 million downtown performing-arts center. And a majority of Miamians support Alvarez's efforts to reduce the inordinate powers of their county commission--which include housing-agency oversight--especially since its members have long run Miami-Dade like a collection of venal fiefdoms. A judge has ordered the commission to schedule a referendum on the issue. But in the meantime, Miamians are likely to see more of their neighbors winging north...
...places on earth deserve a break more than Nicaragua does. For most of the last century, it was devastated by natural disasters like the massive 1972 Managua earthquake, brutalized by the Somoza family dictatorship and then betrayed by the venal incompetents of the Sandinista Front even as it was scarred by the U.S.-backed ontra war of the 1980s. But as the Western hemisphere's third poorest nation goes to the polls this Sunday to elect a new president, it looks set to prolong if not worsen its misery - thanks, in part, to Washington's failure to give Nicaragua...
...story behind that Iwo Jima image, Clint Eastwood has crafted a bold and meticulous epic. The script, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, is faithful both to the honor of young men who became warriors in their country's service and to the tangle of impulses--noble and venal--leading a nation to demand that a war create simple messages and clear-cut heroes. The movie is about the real theater of war: how a battle campaign morphed into a p.r. campaign and, implicitly, how later generations of politicians have used symbols to sell a war. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, anyone...
...most influential works in American lit; without it, no Pulp Fiction. The 1946 movie expands the action with a long flashback about the gangster's prey, a haunted boxer called Swede (Burt Lancaster in his first movie). The 1964 version has murderous Lee Marvin tangling with the even more venal Ronald Reagan (in his last movie). The set also includes a third film, a short by renegade Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky...
...working-class voters, who are pouring out for his whirlwind campaign stops through small, dusty pueblos like Teloloapan. Many are disillusioned with the progress of Mexico's democratization - especially its economic democratization - under current President Vicente Fox, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), who in 2000 overthrew the venal and authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for seven decades...