Word: defection
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Austria toward the end of the 1930s, Jewishness is a defect; there can be no denying such a truth. But life itself is far from perfect, and there is no reason to despair because of that. Perhaps the fault is correctable, a matter of inflamed nerves, bad habits, insufficient exercise. A few months in clean mountain air should help. Early bedtime, rise at dawn. Plain food. Hard work. Early morning runs. Reform is possible. Anything is possible...
...Olympic sites and to distribute 500,000 leaflets. A small squadron of propaganda planes was to buzz the city, each pulling a banner having 5-ft.-high letters, with exhortations like STOP THE GENOCIDE IN AFGHANISTAN or REMEMBER KAL 007. The coalition planned to rent billboards to encourage Soviet defections ("Wish to defect? Telephone ..."), and some 500 "safe houses" in the Los Angeles area were said to be ready to receive the defectors...
...Soviets have a real concern over groups like the Ban the Soviets Coalition, a band of California activists that has vowed to stage anti-Communist demonstrations during the Games and do what it can to encourage Soviet athletes to defect. It is presumably this group that Moscow had in mind last week when it expressed the fear that at the Games, "the civil rights of athletes may be infringed and their dignity outraged...
...dangerous as Johnny Carson makes it out to be in his monologues. On the other hand, things are not as beamish in the Big Apple as Director Paul Mazursky would have them seem in this all too agreeable fable about a Soviet circus saxophonist who suddenly decides to defect from his touring troupe when his previously apolitical mind is blown by the capitalist splendors of Bloomingdale...
...aside from its most obvious defect-the absence of Bill Murray from the cast led by Steve Guttenberg-the picture does not awaken the denunciatory spirit. Like others of its ilk it is solidly grounded in three great traditions of low comedy: it is cheerfully contemptuous of authority; it is leeringly respectful of the shapely female form; and, above all, its director, Hugh Wilson (who wrote the film with Neal Israel and Pat Proft), understands that you can go a long way in comedy on sheer energy. His picture seethes like a study hall when the teacher has stepped...