Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reform ranked among the most wildly farfetched. But last week the prospect of abolishing the party's "leading role" in the U.S.S.R. gained momentum when the Lithuanian legislature voted 243 to 1 in favor of a constitutional amendment legalizing rivals to the Communist Party. While Lithuania thus became the first Soviet republic to do so, in neighboring Estonia the Communist Party Central Committee approved a similar proposal that should easily pass the legislature next month. In Armenia angry crowds surrounded parliament after legislators rejected a multiparty system. This week Andrei Sakharov and other members of the Congress of People...
...create new problems, even as it seeks to solve old ones. The country lacks economic institutions that took centuries to develop in the West: it has no stock exchange, no commercial banks, little experience in the rough-and-tumble of a free market. Barry Sullivan, chairman of the First National Bank of Chicago, wondered whether the Poles' eagerness will prove to have been "monumental courage or sheer folly." While none of the Americans doubted the commitment to reform at the top of the Polish government, some questioned how it would be received once subsidies are ended and prices begin fluctuating...
Until recently, Newton's First Law was that home prices could only go up. Now residents of that Boston suburb -- and homeowners nationwide -- are having apples dropped on their heads. Suddenly a lot of people are talking about home prices going down. And I don't mean just in Houston (actually, they've begun to recover in Houston) or Billy Joel's penthouse on Central Park South, first offered at $2.8 million, then at $2 million, then $1.5 million, now $1.1 million -- and still unsold. Your average home may be affected...
...MORTGAGE CEILING LOWERED, reports the New York Times. "The ceiling on the size of single-family home loans purchased by the Federal National Mortgage Association is declining by $150, to $187,450 next year, the first drop in at least a decade...
...thing that's bound to slow is the turnover of houses. People are stubborn when it comes to selling their homes at less than they were counting on, let alone at a loss; and, especially after allowing for selling expenses, the equity available from the sale of one's first house may now be less, not more, than what's needed to trade...