Word: countrymen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impartial judge. Each brings his own prejudice and bias to the competitions, probably without realizing it. I hope that this country will somehow let Judy Blumberg and Michael Seibert know that even though the bronze eluded them in their ice-dancing feats, they are brilliant gold to their countrymen...
...else but the speaker ever took himself quite so seriously? The man who rescued France from ignominy in World War II and from constitutional paralysis afterward was not always as good as his word, much to the exasperation of his wartime Allies and the puzzlement of his countrymen. But as Don Cook, longtime Paris bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, points out in this robust, unsentimental biography, Charles de Gaulle never deviated from the idea that animated his entire career. As he once summed it up, "France cannot be France without greatness...
...France fell, the general fled to Britain and, with less than $500 in his treasury, proclaimed himself leader of the Free French forces. Most of his countrymen-including 90% of the 2,000 French soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk-ignored him, remaining loyal to the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Cook summarizes De Gaulle's monumental presumption: "A marshal of France and head of government had ordered French soldiers to lay down their arms before the enemy. A brigadier general virtually unknown outside military circles was refusing to obey, and compounding this disobedience...
...same time, De Gaulle made the world defer to France as no leader had since Napoleon. He withdrew his country from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's command structure, gave France its nuclear force de frappe and blocked Britain's entry into the Common Market To many countrymen, he was merely demanding the respect a great nation deserved. To others, he was being thin-skinned and dictatorial. Indeed in ten years after De Gaulle returned to power, Cook reports, his government obtained 350 convictions under an old law against "insulting the head of state," up from three...
...month rule sentenced 15 people to death for subversion and crimes against the state. He reduced value-added taxes from 10% to 7%, hoping to revive an economy plagued by 40% unemployment. Mejía has also won favor simply for being a Roman Catholic; most of his countrymen (90% of whom are Catholic) had grown uncomfortable with Ríos Montt's eccentric Protestant evangelism...