Word: venezuelan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this took place because of an old Spanish custom brought up to date. For years, Venezuelan employers gave their workers a Christmas aguinaldo, an annual bonus, sometimes amounting to as much as two weeks' pay. In 1936, President Eleazar Lopez Contreras turned the aguinaldo principle into law. He decreed that employers must split 10% of their profits among their workers...
They also hope for a break to develop from the general uneasiness that now characterizes Venezuelan life. Some of the uneasiness stems from last winter's 20% cutback in oil production which threw hundreds out of jobs. Even more has been caused by the junta's failure so far to fulfill its promise to restore constitutional rights and to free political prisoners...
Whether or not William Beebe's discoveries put him among the great naturalists, his best books have as much charm and descriptive power as anything of the sort since Darwin's Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. In Beebe's career, High Jungle covers the Venezuelan phase, which began in 1945 after Beebe had abandoned his underseas adventures (during which he had successfully stared sharks out of countenance)* and returned to the job he loved best, the study of the jungle...
...builder, Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. If Rancho Grande was in the jungle, the jungle was also in Rancho Grande-nesting in its crevices, pattering and pullulating in its chambers, making every wall "a landscape of mold and slime." With the consent of the Venezuelan government and the support of the New York Zoological Society and the Creole Petroleum Corp., the Beebe expedition moved...
...laugh from Venezuelan vertebrates in the neighborhood, Beebe and company put up a sign reading "LABORATORIO: MANICOMO," i.e., bughouse. Some of the natives watched with great interest as Beebe experimented with such insects as the Hercules beetles, six inches long, which outweigh some of the smallest mammals and fight with their horns like embittered rhinoceroses. Though ocelots hunted by night in the rooms of the Rancho Grande, and army ants on the march once had to be diverted from the laboratory by 20 gallons of flaming gasoline, Beebe firmly maintains that the jungle was as safe as a church. During...