Word: basic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...awakened the conscience of the U.S. and the world to the plight of America's blacks. More than any other single person, King was responsible for the endowment with legal equality of a people who had been enslaved for two centuries, then denied many of their country's basic civil rights for another hundred years. In 1968, at the age of 39, this Southern Baptist preacher, winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, was cut down by an assassin's bullet. On that day the charismatic leader became the transcendent martyr...
Luigi Pirandello died 50 years ago this December, but his influence is still palpable in Italian cinema. Recently Marcello Mastroianni has starred in two adaptations, of the novel The Late Mattia Pascal and the play Henry IV. Both movies offer aspects of the basic Pirandello theme, in which the universe is a carrousel whirling off its moral axis, and man's ego is a mask that conceals a gaping void. In their entrancing new film, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have revived a less familiar Pirandello: the compulsive storyteller, spinning tales about his native Sicily, its stern landscape and elemental passions...
...whatever the merits of these and other specific cases, the insurance companies are correct in their basic contention: an evolution in liability law has led to higher jury awards and is at least partly responsible for the rise in insurance rates. One important change: the amounts assessed by juries to compensate for lost wages, medical payments and the like now make up a small part of many liability awards. Juries are increasingly likely to add on far larger amounts for noneconomic damages, that is, for such unquantifiable things as pain and suffering...
...predicted, Mitterrand would have had little choice but to name as Premier Jacques Chirac, 53, the mayor of Paris and the energetic leader of the R.P.R., the largest opposition party. Chirac had made it clear that if he were named Premier, he, not Mitterrand, would determine the government's basic policies...
...coupled with spiraling interest rates had left Mexico $85 billion in debt and forced international bankers to cobble together an emergency rescue plan. The Harvard-trained De la Madrid instituted a painful austerity program that devalued the peso, sharply curtailed imports and cut government spending, including costly subsidies on basic goods and services. In an effort to stimulate future growth, he sold off some state-owned enterprises and invited foreign investment. Now, halfway through De la Madrid's six-year term, another precipitous drop in the price of oil, which is expected to cost Mexico $6 billion in revenues...