Word: ironized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from the family's two-room farmhouse in the windswept hills outside the town of Chengde. Zhu, who sold vegetables in a nearby market, had gotten into a fight the previous day with other vendors while jostling for a prime spot; he was beaten repeatedly with an iron bar. "He was badly injured and the doctor gave him medicines and told him to rest," Yang says. "We have the prescriptions to prove it all, but the judge refused to listen...
...gray space. Joy, a 43-year-old Malay, needed to seek permission to legalize her conversion from the Shari'a court, which considers forsaking Islam a crime. And since she is still classified as a Muslim, she could not use the civil-law system. The Federal Court failed to iron out this catch-22, ruling that it had no jurisdiction over her religious conversion. With no further legal recourse left, only Joy's faith can give her solace...
...what was the biggest city in the 17th century Swedish empire? (Hint: it wasn't Stockholm.) For centuries, the stately medieval port on the shores of the eastern Baltic Sea served as the bustling gateway between Russia and the West. Then, following World War II, it withered after the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, cutting it off from the outside world. But Riga is now experiencing a renaissance. It may not have re-established the prominence it enjoyed 400 years ago, but as any of its trivia-wielding residents will tell you: it's getting there...
...container and passenger terminals sprang up. At its low ebb, in the early 1990s, only 1,000 ships entered the port each year; now more than 3,600 do so. Hermanis Cernovs, a naturalized Latvian born in Russia, has witnessed the transformation at first hand. When the Iron Curtain fell, he was commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine. Today, he organizes joint sea-rescue exercises with France, Sweden and the U.S. as the head of the Latvian coast guard. "The changes of the past decade were very, very fast," he says in English, the region's new lingua franca. "They...
...lesser of the pair is from Kim Ki-duk, who came to international prominence with The Isle (or, as aficionados describe it, the erotic fish-hook movie) and has ben paring down his style ever since, in Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring Again and the near-wordless 3-Iron. His new film is more conventional, not so rewarding. Yeon (the actress Zia) switches her affection from her faithless husband to a condemned killer (Taiwanese star Chang Chen) who keeps trying to commit suicide. Both, the movie says, are doomed, but to Yeon life is made precious by her devotion...