Word: states
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supernatural compared with the German miracle, which was 99% hard work. But there are rational elements. Italians are great savers, squirreling away 15% of income, much of it in government securities. Fully 97% of the national debt is funded domestically, and nearly two-thirds of the negotiable state debt is in the hands of individuals. This mode of saving doubtless owes something to exchange controls and preferential tax treatment, but Italians have been willing buyers of state paper, thus absorbing the burgeoning debt. In this situation, rises in interest rates have the perverse effect of stimulating consumption by putting more...
...metaphysics of the possibilities can flare and darken. The Holocaust and other catastrophes of the 20th century invite the term post-apocalyptic. But a world veering toward the 21st century sometimes has an edgy intuition that it is "pre-apocalyptic." Last summer Francis Fukuyama, a State Department planner, resolved the matter peacefully. He published an article proclaiming the "end of history," a result of the worldwide triumph of Western liberal democracy. Hence this is the posthistoric age, a fourth dimension in which the human pageant terminates in a fuzz of meaningless well-being. Intellectuals sometimes nurture a spectacular narcissism about...
...trying to do was "get the wheel moving," Mubarak said, when he drew up a ten-point plan for opening a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians on the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Mubarak's ideas, explained Secretary of State James Baker, are not competing with but are "complementary" to the peace proposal Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put forward last May, which calls for elections in the occupied territories. "We don't think we'll get to peace until we have Palestinians and Israelis speaking to each other," said Baker...
...timing of Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to East Germany could not have been more awkward. On the 40th anniversary of the country's founding as a separate socialist state, the government in East Berlin found itself utterly humiliated. Like storm-besieged dikes, the borders of the country had sprung one leak after another, and thousands of refugees were pouring out. The routine anniversary visit threatened to turn into another diplomatic nightmare for the Soviet President, fraught with the kind of tensions and prodemocracy demonstrations that marred his trip to China last spring. It was Gorbachev's message of change, after...
...Nine states have such programs, and 30 more are considering them. They have also become a key idea in drug czar William Bennett's war on illicit substances. Usually the programs fence off parts of state prisons into "boot camps," where 17-to-25-year-old first offenders convicted of drug or property crimes are held for three to six months. Between head shaving, close-order drills and servile work, the youthful felons are screamed and hollered at by correctional officers skilled in the art of humiliation. They are compelled to rise at dawn, eat meals in silence, speak only...