Word: coupe
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...that began suddenly one afternoon in August 1972. A few years earlier, she had been allowed to return to the home of General Mohammed Oufkir, her father. Oufkir, Morocco's feared police chief and Defense Minister, tried to seize power by having the King's plane shot down. The coup d'etat failed, and Oufkir was summarily executed. Exacting further vengeance for the betrayal, Hassan II had Oufkir's wife and six children banished to a series of desert prisons. In 1987, Malika and three of her siblings briefly escaped and alerted the world to their plight, forcing Hassan...
...rights abuses. The Oufkirs were immediately transferred to a luxury villa in Marrakech, where they spent four years being fattened up under house arrest before finally being freed in 1991. Not long afterward, Hassan II released the Tazmamart prisoners--58 ex-soldiers who had allegedly taken part in another coup and had been locked in tiny cells with little food and no light 24 hours a day for 18 years. After Hassan II's death in 1999, his son, King Mohammed VI, hastened the turning of the page, allowing the publication of two Tazmamart memoirs and permitting a commemorative march...
...world of American historians, Thomas Jefferson is considered a tad overexposed. That's why Joseph Ellis' 1997 National Book Award- winning American Sphinx was such a coup. Here was the familiar Jefferson--egalitarian aristocrat, slaveholding author of the Declaration of Independence, globetrotting homebody--plumbed one step further. Ellis used his empathic powers to convey how Jefferson explained himself to himself--as a young idealist constructing "interior worlds of great imaginative appeal," even if they didn't jibe with reality, and later on keeping his contradictions alive with an "internal ability to generate multiple versions of the truth...
...Even then, Lumumba was not an easy subject to tackle. In the two months he served as prime minister before being overthrown in a coup and eventually executed, Lumumba had managed to alienate the outgoing Belgians, the United States and the U.N. Worse - from a Western point of view - he deigned to flirt with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The accumulation of propaganda against Lumumba was so damning that Peck initially found it hard to focus on the man. "I couldn't feel any sympathy for Lumumba," he says. "It took me time...
...Daschle got Jim Jeffords to leave the G.O.P. and throw power to the Democrats, Daschle phoned George W. Bush as a peace gesture. "What's the protocol here?" Bush asked. After a political coup, does the President call the new Senate majority leader or vice versa? They both chuckled. No matter who dials first, the two most powerful politicians in Washington will be talking a lot more than they have in the past five months...