Word: firsthand
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...news. And after Deng Xiaoping declared martial law several weeks later, Yang voluntarily returned to China to support the demonstrators. "He knew that something major was happening, and he couldn't bear the thought of not being a part of it," says Fu. The killings he witnessed firsthand became a part of him. Yang returned to the U.S. a political activist. He wrote prolifically about the massacre. He decided to pursue a second Ph.D. in political economy at Harvard. He testified before Congress and spoke at numerous international human-rights conferences. Still, he talked constantly of returning to China...
...entering the country on a false passport, and was denied access to a lawyer and family members for nearly a year. Blacklisted as a result of his activism during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, Yang settled in the U.S. His wife says he returned to China to see firsthand how the country has changed. But last month, the Chinese government accused him of spying for Taiwan. Yang's detention has been criticized by various international agencies, and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Lorne Craner says Yang's is "one of the particular cases...
When Terry Neese cuts her charity checks each year, she's thinking about more than a tax deduction. One beneficiary, the March of Dimes, has deep personal significance for her. Neese, 54, learned of birth defects firsthand when her grandchild Emily, 8, was born with one arm shorter than the other. "In addition to giving to nonprofits that have important meaning to me," says Neese, who sits on the local board of March of Dimes in Oklahoma City, Okla., "I've done my homework to make sure these groups were getting the job done...
...Inspired in part by the music they made, I put my fledgling career as a jazz saxophonist on hold and headed with my girlfriend to experience Havana firsthand. Before long I was playing with El Septeto Tipico de la Habana, a talented and remarkably underpaid group of musicians who played weeknights at la Casa de Amistad (The House of Friendship). The casa was a mansion that had been nationalized to become a cultural institute and was now hosting Puerto Rican socialists on solidarity junkets, Cuban black marketeers and bureaucrats, and the occasional stray tourist...
Their individual experiences eventually drove the two men apart. Benjamin was one of the most reluctant of the colonies' reluctant revolutionaries. But living for years in London as a colonial agent, he saw firsthand the artifice and chicanery of what he thought of as a corrupt regime. As a colonial Governor, William was subject to attacks by a legislature whose leaders seemed bent on sundering the ties that bound the ungrateful colonists to England. The Franklins were divided by a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence, one in which brothers fought brothers...