He said about 25% of his work included "defending my people against more cuts", a task which dragged him away from his work tackling the BSE crisis.

BBC: Medical officer tells of BSE secrecy

Although today's white-hot labour market has dragged ever more poor people into work, it has only halted, rather than reversed, this decades-long decline in low-skilled earning power.

ECONOMIST: Out of sight, out of mind

That great Reserve Army of the Unemployed that could be dragged out of the rural hinterland to work in the factories is now exhausted.

FORBES: Apple's Foxconn Is Improving Labour Conditions In China

It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeding from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.

NPR: Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

Increasingly, the humanities too are dragged into the same debate, as if the work of imagination the humanities can promote would have no effect on the knowledge to which it relates.

UNESCO: EDUCATION

And it might just work, if BP can avoid getting dragged into a morass of tangential health claims like the ones that sank just about every company that manufactured or installed asbestos products as a main line of business.

FORBES: Asbestos Is A Good Lesson For BP -- To Avoid

"The bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud, " Cutts wrote.

FORBES: More Evil Than Google?

Their fanaticism was underlined by a report on May 26th that Care International had suspended a food programme in Kabul for 10, 000 widows after Taliban police had stopped a bus carrying five of its Afghan women employees, dragged them out and beaten them with sticks all for the crime of going to work.

ECONOMIST: The battle for Afghanistan