Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Indeed, Giotto's mission is by far the most grueling of the five. Looking rather like an oil drum with an upended beach umbrella stuck on top, the 5-ft. by 6-ft. probe was launched from Kourou, French Guiana, last July; as of last week it was 21 million miles from earth and nearly three times as far from Halley's. The little ship and everything on it are built for survival, and with good reason. The dust particles around the nucleus are expected to strike Giotto with such great velocity that a speck weighing a tenth...
...evening it was evident that a landslide was in the making. As Liberal Party faithful gathered to celebrate at Montreal's Centre Pierre Charbonneau, loudspeakers boomed What a Feeling, the stirring theme song from the movie Flashdance. Liberal Party Chief Robert Bourassa, 52, took the microphone and, speaking in French, hailed his party's triumph as "a great victory for Canada." Switching to English, he pledged to "give back to Quebec the prosperity we had 15 years...
Across town, at the election-night headquarters of the Parti Quebecois, which had swept to power in 1976 vowing to withdraw the predominantly French- speaking province from the Canadian confederation, incumbent Premier Pierre- Marc Johnson, 39, conceded the election. "The people of Quebec have spoken," he declared. "They wanted a change, and from the appearance of things, they wanted a profound change." The scale of the victory surprised even veteran political observers. Liberals won 98 of the 122 seats in the provincial legislature with 58% of the vote, up from 46% in the 1981 provincial elections. The Parti Quebecois...
Most observers attribute the Liberals' triumph to a decline of separatist sentiment among Quebec's 4.6 million voters, some 80% of whom speak French. Over the past decade, laws requiring special treatment for the French-speaking majority have caused more than 100,000 English speakers, many of them leaders in finance and business, to leave the province. The subsequent economic drain has worsened unemployment, now nearly 12%. At the same time, many French speakers feel confident that their language and culture are now adequately protected. The result: few wish to risk any longer the economic costs of separatist politics...
...they prance and canter across the page, Gericault's Horses (Vendome; 183 pages; $60) assume a life of their own. French Artist Theodore Gericault brilliantly portrayed stallions and draft horses, Arabians and English racers in settings that vary from battlegrounds to stables. In his equestrian oeuvre, created over a span of some ten years, Gericault even depicted, with an unflinching naturalism, horses being devoured by lions. As Art Historian Philippe Grunchec notes, the painter's devotion to the animals had its tragic side, foreshadowed by some of these works: he died in 1824 at age 32 of complications from...