Word: shattering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact, the Marines were withdrawn long before the embassy had been made secure. Officials knew that shatter-resistant windows, reinforced blast walls, earthen berms, and even simple gates were crucial to containing terrorist attacks. But they allowed the embassy personnel to move in before protective devices had been completely installed. Only a few easily negotiated concrete barriers stood between the killer-car and the embassy...
...become a major target of their hostility. They covet its money, but fear the consequences of borrowing it. Argentina, for example, desperately needs $2.1 billion in IMF credits. But in return for the money, the fund insists on a range of tightfisted economic policies that could shatter the country's brittle new democracy. Two weeks ago, Argentine President Raúl Alfonsín bypassed fund negotiators and appealed directly to IMF Managing Director Jacques de Larosière for more lenient terms. Yet neither Alfonsín nor any other leader can simply defy the fund. Its seal...
...religion, all the shame there was in sex. He dressed in his own kind of sackcloth-sneakers, work pants, sweat-stained shirt. He allowed his teeth to rot. When anger and frustration built up in him, he would smash his fist into the nearest wall or bloodily shatter the glass he was holding. "Nearly all the time," he wrote after one bender, "I am incompetent for work, or for thinking of work, or of anything except crawling around in a whisky-logged blur...
...government finds itself making devices which nobody wants, everyone fears, and are never intended for use. But we are also left with a type of weapon which, sadly, cannot really escape the cruel dictates of deterrence theory. Despite their admitted horror, weapons which burn lungs, spread plague or shatter central nervous systems still respond to the same "logic" as nukes--if the United States has them the Soviets will be less tempted to use them...
...richer for its reaching out. He claims throughout that the book is not open-ended. But were it in fact closed, its source of vitality would disappear. Even in the story's framework. Donoso questions the validity of his assertion that art is only artifice. Facades of fiction continuously shatter, and the characters reconstruct them each time. Eventually it becomes impossible to distinguish lies from truth, fiction from reality...