Word: basic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rise, the Senate hearings on campaign-finance abuse are shaping up like the movie Titanic, an ambitious production that Hollywood can't seem to bring to the screen. By last week Thompson, an ex-actor who was chief Republican counsel in the Watergate hearings, was still looking for the basic elements of political spectacle: star witness, clear story line, boffo ending. Virtually every principal figure on the foreign-money side of the scandal plans to take the Fifth or has fled--bankrollers James Riady, Charlie Yah Lin Trie and Pauline Kanchanalak are living in Asia, beyond the reach of subpoenas...
...that China funneled money to Democrats through a cast of Asian Americans. The panel had tried on its own to set up missions to four countries by going from embassy to embassy in Washington. But foreign governments insisted on working out approval for this through the State Department--a basic piece of protocol that Thompson finally acceded...
There are some other basic reasons why I'm opposed to executing him. First, it doesn't make any difference. The bottom line is that my little kid's not coming back. I'll have to deal with this till the day I die. Killing McVeigh will not change that. The second reason is that dead men don't talk. If he's in prison long enough, McVeigh may tell us what his thought processes were, why he did what he did, and who else was involved. I want to hear that information, even if comes out in the form...
...themselves in Hicks' and Cockrell's shoes. So-called high-stakes testing is the latest silver bullet designed to cure all that ails public education, and accountability is the vocabulary word of the day. High schools, it is widely believed, are graduating too many kids who haven't mastered basic skills. Solution: all students, even after passing their courses, must also pass a statewide standardized "exit test" to graduate. And the test scores can then be used to gauge how well teachers and school administrators are doing their jobs...
...notion that a film's look and tone can be its subject is, well, foreign to Hollywood directors, for whom the basic elements are a propulsive story and some slambang special effects. But as Chen Kaige shows in the humid, tumid Temptress Moon, image is all. Reuniting the stars (Hong Kong's Leslie Cheung and the mainland's Gong Li) of his 1993 Farewell My Concubine, Chen paints a glamorous portrait of drugs and decadence in 1920s China. The leaders of today's China, addicted to the old narcotic of Maoism, may have seen the film as an unflattering mirror...