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Mengistu was tried along with 72 of his former aides (South Carolina fraternity brothers sued November 9, claiming they were tricked into making racist and sexist remarks), although there were only 34 people in court Tuesday. The fraternity brothers claim the filmmakers got them drunk before getting them to sign release forms agreeing to appear in the film. Racism also can be a factor in getting a job. At a bend in a tributary of the Congo River, dirt-poor villagers pan for the shiny stones that have proved as elusive as they are rare — diamonds. A three-year undercover investigation by the National Fair Housing Alliance found that real estate agents steered whites away from integrated neighborhoods and steered blacks in to predominantly black neighborhoods. Mengistu, sometimes called “the butcher of Addis Ababa,” ruled from 1974 to 1991 after his military junta ended Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign in a bloody coup. Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu’s Marxist regime, though no one knows for sure.
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In a liberal society, there is as much disagreement on what constitutes the best life as there is on what constitutes the best built environment to live it in. “People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added. “It gives me a great deal of pride to think he’s never coming out of there,” said Diane Derzis, who runs a Birmingham, Alabama, women’s clinic Rudolph bombed in 1998. Horace Walpole struck a blow by building the world’s first Gothic house, a picturesque pile on the banks of the Thames, which he called Strawberry Hill. “He should never see daylight again.” “We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. ” All my childhood, we waited for something like this.” As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? “It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis.”
26
Erik Estrada and other lesser celebrities have been sworn in as reserve officers of the city police department here, allowing them to carry badges and guns as part of a reality television series.
25
Mr. Stallone has also tried to widen Rocky’s audience by going virtual. Rocky is drawn back to the ring after a national sports show features a digital boxing match between Rocky Balboa and the current champ, Mason (the Line) Dixon. “It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic underdog versus the establishment,” offered Mr. Sealey.
24
Seeking a place where he could freely walk unrecognized, he moved all the way to Amsterdam, where he still lives today. “He’d go to events and women would come up to him and go, ‘rape me, Luke,’ which I guess is a bit disorienting,” Hinsey said.
23
This weekend, her sorority sister talked her into going to homecoming. Needless to say, it is colder than she predicted. Her fleece isn’t doing the job. So she decided to stay warm by tucking her pants into her fallopian tubes. She is thinking to herself, “I should have stayed in the city. This wasn’t even fun when I was in school.” In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig. “I made a few compromises. I wanted to be as close to the original as possible, but let’s face it: I’m not the same shape as either Bruce Boxleitner or Jeff Bridges (the actors who played Tron and Flynn, respectively).” “The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.” “My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire. I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.” I’m somewhat overweight, as you see (one drawback of wearing spandex is that it does nothing to hide one’s obesity). This woman probably has a name like Courtney Worthington or something similar. She probably went to a backup school like Lafayette or Colgate or Yale. She graduated a couple of years ago, and slaves away at some advertising agency, making less than the Fedex guy. “That was my pig,” he said.
22
“Ellefson shall not use, or authorize anyone else to use, the work or mark ‘Megadeth” to advertise, market or promote any person, band, company, organization, product or services without Megadeth’s prior express written permission,” according to the lawsuit. Mustaine said an ad in this month’s issue of Bass Player features Ellefson holding a pedal tuner for bass guitars and includes the names of several bands he is involved with — including Megadeth. Mustaine is seeking unspecified compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages.
21
“The type we are interested in is this six and a quarter liter-sized container with a white plastic lid,” he said. “It has a label describing it as a ‘Delta 6250 with Lid,’ and also has another colored label with the description ‘Family Containers, Delta, Superior Quality.’ Please note that we are only interested in the white lid variety. They are also produced in other colors.”
20
Here, a businessman sighs wearily, already worn out by the day ahead, then turns on his iPod. There, a young man in shorts pulls out a Dan Brown novel and begins to skim it.
19
The family’s neighbors include two slightly older teenage girls who use the 14-year-old brother as a practice object for oral sex, asking him to judge which of them does it better. “We have the technology that can give us the iPod and everything else, but it’s not all these things. We have to work on the minds and the hearts.” When the father’s seemingly respectable co-worker makes lewd suggestions to the girls, they teasingly kiss in front of him. But when they finally dare to ring his doorbell, he cowers and hides.