Word: lavishness
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...Burmese junta. But Burma’s gas income does not trickle down to the country’s 52 million people, more than 30 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Rather, these petrodollars sate the junta leaders’ appetite for luxury goods and lavish mansions. More disturbingly, according to the Burma Campaign UK, nearly half of the government’s revenue goes to the military. These dollars paid for the guns that were used last week to shoot down Buddhist monks and pro-democracy activists who were protesting peacefully against the regime?...
...other Danilov bells will remain in Lowell House until Commencement in June, when they will sound for the last time before returning to Moscow and being replaced with the new bells. Harvard’s new set was sanctified by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church at a lavish ceremony in Moscow in July. A Russian metals tycoon, Viktor Vekselberg, reportedly paid millions of dollars to bring the bells home and cast new ones for Harvard. —Staff writer Victoria B. Kabak can be reached at vkabak@fas.harvard.edu...
...upstairs, near the brand-new Armani wing, where a customer or two browsed suits, the fitting rooms, which double as sales associates' offices, were abuzz with personal fittings. Any free time for associates would go to calling clients to inform them of the perfect snug Balenciaga jacket or lavish Nina Ricci ball gown to fill out their holiday wardrobes. Of course, part of this is standard luxury protocol at Neiman Marcus, where you will rarely find a knit that isn't cashmere and where the shoes are Manolo Blahnik but in exclusive styles a customer won't see anywhere else...
...Golden Age, the sequel to 1998's Elizabeth, costume designer Alexandra Byrne has hatched the most lavish and rarefied survey of the period. Elizabeth's court was, to be sure, far more elaborate than that of her predecessors: she had a handmaiden whose sole purpose was to retrieve errant jewels that detached from the Queen's gowns. Byrne searched for visual cues in seminal books like Janet Arnold's Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd, a recent Elizabethan exhibition at London's National Maritime Museum and Balenciaga's designs from the 1940s, which referenced 16th century Spanish court painting...
...China, Thailand and India. The ruling class cruises around in luxury cars and cloisters itself in compounds ablaze with lights, even as most Burmese face constant electricity rationing. A samizdat video circulating in Rangoon shows junta chief Than Shwe's daughter, decked out in jewels, getting married in a lavish ceremony - this in a country where the average annual per capita income is just $225. Even more galling, the junta turned a thicket of jungle into a brand new administrative capital in late 2005, a project that doubtless cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Today, Naypyidaw...