Word: westernizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But this spring the monument to the past came into the news again when the man who had overseen the torture for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as Duch, was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western Cambodian village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism to prove his status as a born-again Christian. The man who oversaw the execution of at least 16,000 of his countrymen had papers from American churches testifying to his "personal leadership...
...moon shuttered parts of the earth from its rays. And hundreds of millions of people from England to India dropped everything to behold the power -? most evident by its absence -? of the star?s light. Even as thick cloud obscured many in Britain and Western Europe from a clear view of the last solar eclipse of the millennium, the masses crowding beaches, city streets and autobahns felt the awesome minutes of daytime darkness as a profound, collective moment. "We were under a total cloud," said British astronomer Patrick Moore. "(But) the drop in light and temperature was quite amazing...
...America was mainly the invention of gunmaker Samuel Colt, who managed to convince a malleable 19th century public that no household was complete without a firearm--"an armed society is a peaceful society." This ludicrous aphorism, says historian Michael Bellesiles of Emory University, turned 200 years of Western tradition on its ear. Until 1850, fewer than 10% of U.S. citizens had guns. Only 15% of violent deaths between 1800 and 1845 were caused by guns. Reputedly wide-open Western towns, such as Dodge City and Tombstone, had strict gun-control laws; guns were confiscated at the Dodge City limits...
...control until the 1960s, when gun buying sharply increased--it would seem that creating a gun-free society would be fairly easy. But the culture itself has retarded such progress by creating and embellishing an absurd though appealing connection among guns, personal power, freedom and beauty. The old western novels established a cowboy corollary to the Declaration of Independence by depicting the cowboy as a moral loner who preserves the peace and his own honor by shooting faster and surer than the competition. The old gangster movies gave us opposite versions of the same character. Little Caesar is simply...
...reaches as high as President Jiang. The 72-year-old leader, not known for late-night Web surfing, has reportedly become obsessed with the sect and its ability to organize its activities in cyberspace. Apparently Jiang frequently brings up Falun Gong in conversations with high-level foreign visitors, and Western diplomatic sources say he was driven outside Zhongnanhai in a car with tinted windows to observe for himself the group's silent protest in April...