Word: austrians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When I met Kurt Waldheim in Vienna in 1994, the Balkans were doubly at issue, a generation apart. Though I lived in the Austrian capital, I was spending most of my time covering the brutal fighting and ethnic displacements then racking a disintegrating Yugoslavia. Waldheim had served a painful term as Austrian President, marked from beginning to end by controversy over what he had done, seen or known as a young Wehrmacht first lieutenant in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia in 1942. When his activities there first came under scrutiny during his 1986 campaign, Waldheim, who had served two terms...
When I went to visit Waldheim in 1994, he was ensconced in his opulent offices at the Austrian League for the United Nations - but he was still under siege. Freedom of Information Act requests had pried open the 1987 Washington report that put Waldheim on the Justice Department's "watch list." The document placed him in Banja Luka in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis had rounded up the city's Jews and the Wehrmacht was fighting an anti-partisan offensive in the Kozara Mountains to the north. Reprisal killings against civilians were part of the Germans' brutal efforts...
...late Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that the meaning of a word was derived from the way it is used in language. Not according to McDonald's. The fast-food giant is currently lobbying dictionary publishers to change the meaning of the word McJob - or remove it altogether - on the grounds that it denigrates the company's employees...
...Import Export. Director Ulrich Seidl tells two unrelated stories - of Austrian men working in Ukraine, and of a young Ukrainian woman who comes to Austria - with the earthshaking message that men are bad and women put up with them. The guys spend their spare time degrading women they pick up in bars, making one strip, crawl on the floor and bark like a dog. Women pose naked before a camera, following the rude commands of Web cam masturbators. In a hospital for the aged, nurses perform perfunctory tasks for old droolers, whom Seidl photographs unpityingly. The humiliations - of the characters...
...Last month State Department officials lodged a futile protest after Austrian energy company OMV announced an $18 billion deal to exploit Iran's South Pars gas field. "The Americans may refuse to invest in Iran's oil industry," Austria's Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik told the Austrian Die Presse newspaper. "But Austria is not bound...