Word: first
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...criminal sentencing system is still based on an idiosyncratic set of decisions made by crime-busting legislatures and individual trial judges. New York State law, for example, sets extremely broad parameters for various crimes -- one to 25 years for a bank robbery, 1 1/2 to 15 years for first-degree assault -- but leaves it to the discretion of each judge to fix the actual sentence. The theory behind this system is that punishment should be tailored to such factors as the circumstances of a crime and the culpability of the individual defendant...
...really be just ten months since Hungary took its first tentative step toward democracy by passing a law to permit the formation of independent political parties? Last week Hungary's largest opposition party named a candidate for November's presidential election -- and he stands a good chance of winning...
Have only four months passed since Solidarity forces rejected an invitation from Poland's Communist leader to join a coalition government? Last week in Warsaw, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze conferred with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a longtime Solidarity activist and the first non- Communist to head a Soviet satellite...
...ideological earthquake rocks the Soviet empire, fracturing the social, political and economic arrangements that have guided East bloc relations since 1945, the first impulse is to check its force on the Richter scale. But the next task, the part where the debris must be cleared away and planners must construct something new, has not been addressed. No one -- not Mikhail Gorbachev, not George Bush, not any of the bloc's reform-minded leaders -- has presented a blueprint for the future of the Continent as a whole. Will Gorbachev's "common European house" mean political as well as economic integration with...
...Viet Nam memorial in Washington has become a touchstone for American feelings about that war. Now in Montgomery the artist has created the first- ever memorial to the civil rights movement -- a risky work that may delve even deeper into the American character...