Definition
To completely destroy or erase something so that it no longer exists or is recognizable.
Pronunciation
US English
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Excerpts from News Articles
And while there is no denying that El Salvador has long been terrorised by gangs, the current obliteration of rights is also definitively terrifying.
In the early weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a music video surfaced online. It featured clips of missile launchers and Russian tanks in a drone's crosshairs, as deep-voiced men sang the words in Ukrainian: "The occupiers came to us in Ukraine, with brand new uniforms and military vehicles, but their inventory melted into steel … Bayraktar!" The last word drops as an explosion is seen obliterating a Russian target. The video quickly went viral, the song written as an homage to the powerful Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drone that helped Ukrainian forces devastate Russia's initial offensive.
This use of the US as a prism, through which American racial failings could be seen all too clearly while Britain’s own shortcomings were at best obscured and at worst obliterated , has continued virtually uninterrupted.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Middle East has been the biggest victim of the US undying love for unopposed world dominance. America in the first Gulf War obliterated Iraq and then placed sanctions on Baghdad. These crippling sanctions on the war-devastated country threw millions into living a miserable life and led to countless deaths, including children.
Some of Antakya’s ancient treasures survived the earthquake intact; others perhaps can be restored. But the city centre is completely ruined and unliveable, its charming backstreets are obliterated and devoid of life; its residents are either dead – 21,000 people reportedly perished in Hatay province – or departed. Rebuilding physical structures may be possible, but bringing back the city’s unique atmosphere may be much more challenging.
The new rate is “unbearable,” Chavret told CNN, and will all but obliterate her profits, already squeezed by rising raw material and gasoline costs, and higher wages for her six employees.
More than 50 tornadoes touched down in several states Friday and Saturday, obliterating houses and leaving communities wondering how they’ll recover.
It represents a world in which this kind of action is the only option to prevent an ecological apocalypse. It asks what steps are necessary to meaningfully avert rampant obliteration . And it offers a reminder of a strategy that is still on the table—and, as Malm notes, has worked many times before.
Albert Einstein warned that ‘successful radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought within the realm of technical possibilities’. Churchill commissioned the Strath Report on what would happen to Britain in the event of a nuclear attack, and its conclusions were grim: ‘Life and property would be obliterated by blast and fire on a vast scale… No part of the country would be free from the risk of radioactive contamination.’.
Also known as aerosol bombs or vacuum bombs, the artillery system can help fire thermobaric missiles filled with a highly explosive fuel and chemical mix, which, on exploding, can cause supersonic blast waves capable of obliterating everything in their path, including buildings and humans.
Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory gave a jubilant opening to Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People; the horrific Grenfell tragedy begins the sequel-of-sorts, A House for Alice. The blaze is described as “a massacre by negligence, a criminal activity, a corporate atrocity, an obliteration of families”. Evans imagines the fire with a righteous rage rarely seen in British contemporary fiction.
It was an important cause, in support of retaining and defending women’s rights, in the face of relentless efforts by a minority of transgender activists to effectively obliterate women’s rights and elevate those of trans women.
Considering that Musk reckons Twitter is only just getting back on the straight and narrow, and not forgetting that he obliterated the workforce, "X, the everything app" looks set to remain but a twinkle in a flaky entrepreneur's eye for the foreseeable, not to mention that it's in all likelihood completely unworkable. ®
Trump vowed to “totally obliterate the Deep State,” directing the Department of Justice to go after local prosecutors deemed as “Marxist” or “racist-in-reverse.” He pledged to sign an executive order cutting federal funding from schools that teach critical race theory or “inappropriate” sexual content, as well as for schools and colleges implementing mask or vaccine requirements. And he said he would sign a federal law forbidding sex-change procedures on children.
“In the current state of things, the only avowed refuge of the mythic spirit is poetry. And poetry is an insurrection against society because it is a devotion to abandoned or exiled or obliterated myth.”
“But we didn’t lose everything. We didn’t get obliterated ,” Girdusky told POLITICO of his group’s performance. “We still pulled our weight through, and we just have to keep on pushing forward on this.”
The other struck the back of his upper right arm, pierced the shoulder joint and opened up a gaping hole on the way out. The four bullets that obliterated Peter’s head were the last four he received, medical examiner Wendolyn Sneed, who performed the autopsy, testified at Cruz’s sentencing trial last year. Surveillance video showed that Peter’s legs were moving as the killer came closer to him and fired rapidly.
The official death toll from the Ministry of Health after six days of fighting is at 331, with 3,180 wounded, but the true numbers are certainly many times higher. One resident sent The Washington Post photos of a mother and her two children obliterated by shrapnel from a shell that landed in his neighborhood. Another woman said an airstrike had killed her neighbor’s husband and three young children. A young human rights lawyer trying to flee was shot with seven members of her family, a heartbroken colleague tweeted.
We work from laboratories near the institution’s Bellville campus. Our satellites are built to last and to stay the course: they undergo a rigorous flight acceptance review that confirms not only that they’re fit to go into space but that they’ll work once they get there. The review includes environmental testing to ensure mechanical shocks don’t obliterate satellite and thermal testing to ensure they can operate within designated temperature ranges.
“We have no choice,” Antonio Mugica, the chief executive and founder of Smartmatic, told CNN Business in an interview about the company’s decision to file the lawsuit in February 2021. “The disinformation campaign that was launched against us is an obliterating one. For us, this is existential, and we have to take action.”
When he got angry, it was hard. I think maybe with the trauma from being completely obliterated by 10-15 guys, it just took a lot.
“Together, we are going to finish what we started,” Trump said at the Waco rally last month. “With you at my side, we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.”
But the Llano County showdown is emblematic of the general assault on any lingering sense of community in the US, where the bipartisan ruling elite directly profits from the divide-and-conquer approach and the obliteration of any notion of communal solidarity.
By 2017 China was home to nine education-technology firms worth at least {$}1bn. But in 2021 a sweeping government campaign against companies offering online courses to young students obliterated the industry. By the end of last year, no such unicorns existed.
The interview follows Field’s comments made in her podcast, Postcards from the Edge, in November, where she described her and Williams’ sex life as being “ obliterated ” because of their four children.
He smiled the moment the first missile was fired, leaving a trail of smoke in the sky, part of a coordinated coastal, inland artillery bombardment, and airstrike that obliterated the mock enemy target.
President Joe Biden’s student loan agenda would be all but obliterated by the U.S. debt legislation passed by House Republicans, dooming his mass cancellation s, scrapping a more generous loan repayment option and permanently barring future regulation around student debt.
That’s very different than how repeat radiation doses can obliterate tumors. Now Rentschler’s research team is testing human heart cells in lab dishes, measuring exactly how they conduct electrical impulses — in hopes that even lower radiation doses might work.
So Republicans framed the debt limit as though it was the limit on a credit card, suggesting that an increase to the limit was an increase in how much the government was allowed to spend. This analogy was inapt, however, since the spending had already occurred. It was more like having a limit on how much of your credit-card bill your parents were willing to pay off for you. The money was spent; the question now was whether you were going to obliterate your credit score.
A creature that humans came very close to obliterating now offers hope that we may be able to find ways to tackle one of the most pernicious environmental poisons, say scientists.
Obliterating any identity at all is one way to navigate the treacherous teen waters of today’s schoolrooms and chat groups, albeit highly defensive and passive. Haidt offers two solutions. He wants teens kept from social media until 18, and wants schools and colleges to abandon distorted ‘harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions’ such as diversity training, and the idea that words are violence.
The apartments were obliterated when a Russian missile crashed into this residential block, which sits beside a school in a neighbourhood just near the botanical gardens of Uman, a central Ukrainian city that before the war was known mostly as a Jewish pilgrimage site.
At the Salon of 1865, his painting Olympia, created two years earlier, caused a scandal. The painting’s reclining female nude gazes brazenly at the viewer and is depicted in a harsh, brilliant light that obliterates interior modeling and turns her into an almost two-dimensional figure. This contemporary odalisque—which the French statesman Georges Clemenceau was to install in the Louvre in 1907—was called indecent by critics and the public.
"State the facts. You have to give the information that you have," Stone told CNBC. Not everyone is going to believe what you say, "but some people will believe it. You have to trust in the truth ultimately will obliterate the lie. You have to believe that," Stone said.
Of course, von der Leyen singled out Russia for “its aggression” against Ukraine’s territorial integrity without bothering to note that Israel has launched calamitous ground invasions of Gaza in late 2008 to early 2009 and in 2014 that obliterated homes, schools, hospitals and livelihoods while killing, maiming and traumatising thousands of children, women and men who had no place to hide.