Everywhere in "Desperate Characters," obsessively burnished exteriors conceal the rotting state of what lies within.
This year it was the turn of Cyril Ramaphosa, whose narrow election, a few days before Christmas, had decisively turned the tide on years of rot under State President Jacob Zuma.
Syria's president felt secure enough recently to venture out to a restaurant.Despite the rotting of state institutions under one-party rule, Mr Assad's army and security forces have, to general surprise, so far suffered relatively few defections.
A human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage".
Nothing in America or Europe matches the rot in the state of Japan.
One of our key spending pledges is to restore the earnings link at once, so that we stop the rot before the state pension withers away completely.
"To our non-Indigenous brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, who the government is leaving to rot in the state's worst adult prison, we stand by you," he said in a statement.
If they rot and the state denies coverage, Roger has no idea what he'll do.
The government has promised to raise underwriting standards and institute more effective controls, but observers, both foreign and domestic, doubt its will and ability to do so.What is remarkable about this story is that the rot at the state-owned banks has not brought the economy to a halt.
Today, April 22, marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1964 65 New York World's Fair, an event that simultaneously birthed one of the city's most popular civic spaces Flushing Meadows Corona Park and littered it with bizarre Cold War ruins, rotting in midcentury state as though frozen by nuclear winter.
