Word: western
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tall, exuding self-assurance and intelligence, Bigelow is both a receptive and commanding presence - the perfect combination for a person who makes thoughtful movies about tough guys, and things blowing up. She's known for her adrenaline-pumped action sequences in films like the vampire western Near Dark (1987) and the surfer-heist cult classic Point Break (1991); the subtitle of the Directors' Cuts volume of film criticism about her is "Hollywood Transgressor." With The Hurt Locker, she's transgressed her way right to the threshold of the industry's highest honor. Breaking the Oscars' glass ceiling after a career...
...That's understandable thinking in Haiti, the western hemisphere's poorest country, where children are frequently given up by their destitute parents. Those kids are all too often funneled to more-affluent families who turn them into slaves, known in Creole as restaveks, or to outright traffickers who force them into lives of prostitution in Haiti and abroad. The Haitian government estimates that there are about 300,000 restaveks in Haiti today. In many cases before and after the quake, parents and orphanages have delivered their kids to well-meaning but naive foreigners like the Idaho missionaries, who were collared...
...part, Ryan considers balancing the budget a moral imperative. "Do we want to reclaim and renew the American idea, where the role of government is to promote equal opportunity?" he asks. "Or do we want to replace that with a more Western European notion of a welfare state, where the role of government is to equalize the results of people's lives?" Ryan, not surprisingly, is an Ayn Rand acolyte - he once cited her as the thinker who spurred his pursuit of public service. And while he says he does not subscribe to Rand's objectivist philosophy, he shares...
...most countries today, even developing ones like Haiti, the answer would be: Get a prosthesis. But in the western hemisphere's poorest nation, where prosthetics are primitive when they exist at all, that's easier said than done. It looks even harder after the earthquake, given the overwhelming demand for artificial limbs: of the 250,000 people injured, doctors estimate as many as 100,000 are amputees. And that doesn't count the victims who will probably need limbs amputated down the line because of wound infections. Outside the Medishare tent ward, Florida orthopedic surgeon Dr. Albert Volk watches...
...former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier after his family appealed a lower court's decision to turn the money over to charities, arguing the statute of limitations on any purported wrong-doing had expired. Moreover, despite a 2005 U.N. convention setting legal requirements for fighting corruption, Valerian says many Western countries have been slow to apply the measures and tend to view corruption in the developing nations they deal with as being too rife and politically touchy to battle...