Word: civilization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reason to despise what had gone before. Hitler's father was an Austrian civil servant, born illegitimate as Alois Schicklgruber (Alois was 39 before he acknowledged his origins and took his presumed father's surname). Although Alois was nominally a Roman Catholic, he placed his faith in the whip. When the sixth of his eight children misbehaved, he was beaten unmercifully. Schicklgruber/Hitler died when Adolf was 13, a lively and artistic youth racked by the need for recognition and the appetite for vengeance...
...with $650 million in penalties. Equally troubling to RICO targets is the law's ability to seize temporarily the assets of an accused before a trial begins -- even funds that would be used to pay a defense attorney. "Suddenly, there are a lot of born-again civil libertarians on Wall Street," says Michael Waldman, legislative director for Public Citizen Congress Watch...
...Although civil RICO lawsuits total less than half of a percent of the federal civil caseload, the statute's civil provisions draw some of the heaviest fire. "The imaginations of prosecutors in drafting RICO indictments are at least restrained by the Justice Department," explains University of Texas law professor Michael Tigar, "but the imaginations of plaintiffs' lawyers are not similarly restrained." What encourages the creativity, says critics, is the possibility of obtaining treble damages and the enormous leverage of labeling an opponent a "racketeer." The result has been a widening array of civil RICO lawsuits, from common commercial litigation...
This June, for the second time in four years, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to narrow the sweep of civil RICO, preferring to leave the matter to Congress. Not surprisingly, that ruling recharged ongoing legislative efforts to reform RICO's civil provisions. Among the broad coalition pressing for changes are some of the very groups that have recently attracted the attention of prosecutors: accountants and securities and commodities dealers. Says Waldman: "It's a combination of The Untouchables and Showdown at Gucci Gulch." The congressional shoot-out to determine what happens to RICO could come this fall...
Syria, in fact, appears just as powerless as other would-be peacekeepers in Lebanon, which has been reduced by 14 years of civil war to a lawless slum where kidnaping and murder are the norm. The fate of the hostages is tied as much to the bitter backyard struggle for power in Beirut as to international diplomacy, and that struggle has grown worse. Over the past five months, artillery duels between the Lebanese Christian General Michel Aoun and the Syrians have killed at least 600 people and wounded nearly...