Word: wiring
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reforms in Hungary were begun slowly in the early 1960s, with care taken not to aggravate the Soviet sensibilities that caused tanks to roll in 1956. Today the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain separating Hungary from Austria has been snipped into souvenirs, Russian is no longer required in school, the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest has stopped preaching Marxist economics, and there is open discussion about withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact...
...driven to suicide when he learns that an unsavory syndicated columnist is about to print the politically devastating charges. A fictional Washington Post executive explains haplessly that while no responsible paper will publish the scurrilous column, "some little paper somewhere will run it big as life, and then the wire services will feel they have to pick it up and send it across the country . . . And there we'll be, trapped in our own operation...
...itself trapped by the rituals that govern its coverage of scabrous gossip. Today the journalistic rules of righteous rumormongering have been liberalized, even though the results in the form of tarnished reputations often remain all too familiar. Leading newspapers and the television networks are less likely to permit the wire services to do their dirty work for them. Instead, the new, more permissive approach allows them to write and broadcast artfully crafted stories about the rumors themselves, thereby spreading calumny while piously decrying...
...crush by packing refugees into overcrowded detention centers and camps. Upwards of 14,000 are warehoused in Hong Kong's three "closed centers," the detention areas for those boat people recognized as potentially legitimate refugees. In Thailand . about 300,000 Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees are held behind barbed wire, subsisting on meager rations; some have lived this way for ten years. Detention centers at Britain's Heathrow and Gatwick airports shelter some arrivals for as long as a year. In Miami up to 700 refugees, mostly Haitians, have at times been crammed into the Krome Avenue Detention Center, which...
...local joke is that the crime rate is finally starting to level off because there's not much left to steal. Block after city block is boarded up or burned out. Many buildings have been reduced to rubble as thieves cart away everything of value: bricks, aluminum siding, copper wire, even heavy cast-iron manhole covers from the potholed streets to be sold for scrap. The housing authority complains that aluminum downspouts are swiped from its buildings within hours of installation. Trash-strewn vacant lots along the river stand in stark contrast to the gleaming Gateway Arch of St. Louis...