Word: transformers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Calvi began spinning his web in 1971, shortly after he became director-general of Banco Ambrosiano. An employee of the bank for 24 years, Calvi was determined to transform it into a major international financial institution from a relatively small regional bank with strong religious overtones (until ten years ago, would-be shareholders had to present baptismal certificates to prove their Catholicism). One of his initial steps was to form a Luxembourg holding company, Compendium, which later became Banco Ambrosiano Holding. The advantage of a foreign subsidiary: it is not subject to Italy's banking regulations. Calvi...
Even U.S. prisons were supposed to be part of the New World's promised land. The first American prisons would not merely punish inmates, but transform them from idlers and hooligans into good, industrious citizens. In 1790 a group of Philadelphia Quakers, brimming with revolutionary optimism, began the experiment in a renovated downtown jail. They were bent on "such degrees and modes of punishment . . . as may . . . become the means of restoring our fellow creatures to virtue and happiness." No other country was so seduced for so long by that ambitious charter. The language, ever malleable, conformed to the ideal: when...
...Portillo is attacking the symptoms of his country's disease rather than the root causes, for which many assign him the blame. After taking office in 1976, López Portillo launched an overly ambitious industrial expansion program and lavished money on an effort to transform the country into a Third World power. He provided cheap oil and other aid to Central American neighbors. Riddled with corruption, his government has a payroll loaded with jobs that do not really exist. López Portillo's extravagance unleashed Mexico's virulent inflation...
Byplay becomes foreplay. They fall into each other's arms and then violently push away. She taunts him with gossip about her former conquests: Shakespeare, Aristophanes, T.S. Eliot, everyone, in fact, whom Miles might hopelessly wish to emulate. He wonders aloud why she will not transform herself more frequently into the shape of that delightful West Indian nurse, simply for the sake of varied stimulation, if she is so confident of her own seductive powers...
...ordinary citizens began to mass outside the shipyard's main gates, decorating them with flowers, ribbons, papal portraits and red-and-white banners. And before the year was out, Solidarity had finally become a reality, a free trade union, 10 million members strong and powerful enough to transform the political life of Poland...