Word: socialist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film director Roman Polanski. Just two weeks after his impassioned protest of Polanski's Sept. 26 arrest, French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand finds himself under attack for his description of sex during trips to Thailand, which critics called sex tourism. Mitterrand, the nephew of late socialist President François Mitterrand, wrote about sex trips in a 2005 novel, detailing paying "boys" for sex. At the time the book was printed, the publisher's official description of La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life) unabashedly said the main character "greatly resembles" Mitterrand. Now detractors are using those...
...just the far right calling for Mitterrand's head. Socialist Party spokesman Benoît Hamon echoed Le Pen's criticism of the Culture Minister. Hamon said he was "violently shocked that a man could justify sexual tourism under the cover of literature." He also lamented that even as France and Thailand work together to halt Western exploitation of Asian sex workers, "here comes a government minister to explain how he himself is a consumer of it." Several other Socialist Party officials expressed concerns and demanded Mitterrand explain himself or resign...
Conscription played a recurring role in protests for the next century. At the start of World War I, Socialists and isolationists opposed the draft on the grounds of civil liberties: Charles Schenck, the general secretary of the Socialist Party of America, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing leaflets that urged men to resist the draft. In the famous case Schenck v. the United States, Schenck argued (unsuccessfully) that conscription was the equivalent of "involuntary servitude" and thus prohibited by the 13th Amendment...
...spent his lifetime trying to transform Chinese society in his utopian, socialist and revolutionary vision. He tried to create a "new socialist man" and an equitable society. His regime succeeded in providing the world's largest population with food to eat, housing and basic services. Social vices were eliminated, literacy was expanded, life expectancy increased and infant mortality decreased. These were no small achievements. But Mao's efforts to impose socialism had a deadening effect on urban and rural society alike, as political movements repeatedly harassed different groups of people...
...August last year, when 10 French soldiers were killed in a single Taliban attack, has a profound impact on the home front. "We cannot continue to remain ... where the [local] population is suffering and where we count our dead without asking ... what is France's role and interest," Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry said this month, a day after France lost two more soldiers. "In 2001, then in 2003, France joined NATO troops to continue taking out the Taliban, but above all to reconstruct the country. [But France] now finds our troops alongside the American army essentially in an antiterrorism...