Word: ils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dubious honor, even for the most hard-line of Communist nations. But after months of negotiations, North Korea, the xenophobic workers' state run by Communist Leader Kim Il Sung, was publicly declared by capitalist bankers to be in default on its foreign debt. Reason: the Pyongyang government's failure to make payments on $770 million in obligations to two syndicates representing 140 banks. Other countries in the past have halted payment of debt but struck deals with foreign lenders, earning more favorable terms and fresh credits. In North Korea's case, says one European banker, "nobody in their right minds...
What is Brownian motion? Who said we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame? How do you translate the phrase comme il faut? Failure to answer questions like these signifies a catastrophic ignorance, according to E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia and inventor of the latest intellectual parlor game...
...appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre listed but not Camus? Why Norman Mailer but not Saul Bellow or John Updike? Leonardo but not Michelangelo? Venereal disease but not AIDS? Why Beverly Hills...
...economically dynamic South. Hunkered behind miles of barbed wire and minefields, Communist North Korea is a constant, sometimes threatening presence in South Korean life. Spartan, plodding, more regimented than all but a few other Communist nations, it seems to act with one corporate mind. That mind belongs to Kim Il Sung, 75, the "Great Leader" who has been whipping North Korea into a model Communist state for 39 years. Kim's stable despotism is backed by an 885,000-strong army, navy and air force, the world's sixth largest fighting force...
South Korean suspicions about the North are matched only by uncertainties about the country's future after the Great Leader dies. Kim's eldest son, Kim Jong Il, 46, has been designated as his father's political heir, but there have been rumbles of discord within the North Korean Communist Party about the succession. Until the senior Kim dies, little is likely to change. His portrait peers from virtually every room in every home, office, school and hotel, and his statue decorates most corners. In the streets, North Koreans keep their conversations to a murmur and move at a uniform...