Word: defiant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proud to call himself a gambling man, felt the odds were in his favor when he took the stand last week in his trial on federal racketeering and fraud charges. For three days the bon temps Governor with silver hair and a golden tongue was by turns defiant and disarming, depicting himself as a loyal friend ("Man, I spent my life helping people, friends and enemies") and an absent-minded administrator ("I'm not a detail person"). Playing to the jury with the verve of a fiddler at a fais- dodo, the son of a Cajun sharecropper provoked chuckles from...
DIED. Philip Larkin, 63, critically acclaimed British poet of almost defiant diffidence and pervasive melancholy who once said that "deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth"; of throat cancer; in Hull, England. A reclusive provincial librarian for more than 40 years after graduating from Oxford, Larkin honed his clarity of observation, particularly regarding homely, accessible subject matter, in two novels (Jill, 1946, and A Girl in Winter, 1947) and four spare collections of verse published at roughly ten- year intervals. He shunned the readings, lectures and interviews that increasing fame brought him. The overwhelming favorite to succeed Poet...
...nearly 25 years. A leading antiapartheid activist in her own right, Mandela has endured arrests and solitary confinement. She was banished eight years ago to Brandfort, a remote area of the Orange Free State. But since her home was firebombed by unidentified arsonists in August, she has become increasingly defiant, leaving Brandfort without permission, traveling throughout the country and meeting with the press...
...mall and began firing at shoppers with a .22-cal. carbine. Before being disarmed by a graduate student who thought she was firing blanks, she shot ten people, killing a 2 1/2-year-old boy and a 64-year-old man. At her arraignment on murder charges, Seegrist was as defiant as she had been with her mother. "I hope you starve," she told the judge. "Hurry up, man. You know I'm guilty. Kill me on the spot...
...owes $96 billion, and Venezuela, a $35 billion debtor, had persuaded bankers to stretch out many of their loans. Adhering to their agreements with the IMF, the Latin countries were struggling to reduce inflationary government spending and curb expensive imports. Even Argentina ($50 billion), which last year took a defiant stance toward its creditors, successfully froze wages and prices last summer and issued a new unit of currency, the austral, which is equal to 100 old pesos. As a result, Argentine consumer prices rose only 2% last month, compared with a 30% rise in June...