Word: switzerland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Uruguay, once the democratic Switzerland of South America, it is estimated that an astonishing one out of every 50 citizens has been either interrogated, detained or jailed since 1972. "Half the prisoners have been tortured," says former Senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, "by which is meant they have been submitted to electric shock or submerged in water until they passed out." Another common method is the "planton," whereby a prisoner is forced to stand for hours or even days with his weighted arms out stretched and feet spread far apart...
...source comes to light in the little that is known of Sabatini's reclusive life. The son of an Italian operatic tenor and an English soprano, he was raised in Oporto, Portugal, where his father found work as a singing teacher. The boy went off to school in Switzerland and at 17 got a job as a clerk in London. One day in 1901, rising 26 and bored with answering foreign mail for a rubber company, he dashed off a short story in English and sent it to a magazine. Within a year he had brought out his first...
...background shocked Traves. The local Communist Party started a campaign against him, and tracts announcing "A war criminal, an SS, is among you," soon appeared. PEIPER SS was painted on the road leading into town. Peiper received threatening phone calls and sent his wife and two children away to Switzerland but refused to budge himself. "Even if I was personally guilty, I paid the price with ten years in prison," he said...
...remaining volunteers were "philhellenes," or friends of Greece, most of them luckless university students from Germany, Poland, Switzerland or England who had taken the idealism of their Greek literature professors too much to heart. When they began to reach Greece by the dozens and then by the hundreds, they learned that no one knew they were coming, and no one wanted them. Devout Orthodox villagers, furthermore, did not share their reverence for the philosophers of the Golden Age, whom Eastern Christians abhorred as pagans. There was nothing for the philhellenes to do except flounder about and die. Enough...
While the rise in the franc has given Switzerland a reputation among tourists for high prices, the gap is gradually being narrowed by the absence of inflation. Vacationers are pleasantly surprised to find that the prices of hotels and ski-lift tickets have stayed the same from one season to the next. Last month Swiss newspapers carried full-page ads that seemed unreal to foreigners: because of the recent rise in the franc, the prices of some Japanese cars were being cut by anywhere from...