Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...creeping military takeover of Ethiopia last week left Emperor Haile Selassie virtually stripped of his absolute power. For the first time since Selassie, 82, came to power 44 years ago, government-controlled newspapers published letters and articles critical of the monarchy. One particularly vitriolic magazine accused the Emperor of "defecating on his people." As additional insult, the military forcibly entered Selassie's palace in Addis Ababa and arrested the commander of the Imperial Bodyguard. Most important, the Armed Forces Coordinating Committee, which dictates policy to Prime Minister Michael Imru's five-week-old civilian government, announced that...
...military is pressuring Imru's government to adopt a new constitution that would make official Selassie's loss of power. Drafted by a reform-minded committee of 30 military-approved civilians, the constitution provides for a bicameral Parliament that will be vested with most of the Emperor's powers. The Prime Minister will be chosen by the Parliament, as will judges and Cabinet members. The Emperor's Imperial Court will be replaced by an independent judiciary and Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice will be elected for life by the Parliament. The Emperor will also lose...
Just a Figurehead. In its present draft form, the document allows Selassie to retain the title of Emperor, but he will serve only as "a symbol of Ethiopian unity and history." Although some of the more radical leaders of the military coup object to even a figurehead monarch, they have been persuaded, at least temporarily, that the success of their reform movement depends upon continued support among the peasant majority (95% of the country's people are illiterate), who still revere the Emperor...
Widespread arrests of Selassie's former aides have left the Emperor friendless as well as powerless. His official function reduced to ritual approval of the military's reforms, Ethiopia's "King of Kings" has little to do but attend daily services of the Coptic Church, visit his aging pride of lions in cages on the palace grounds, and walk his pet Chihuahua...
There can hardly have been two distant cities whose fate was, for good and ill, more intimately linked than Venice and Constantinople. Soon after the Emperor Constantino the Great established his new Christian Rome by the Bosporus in 334 A.D., Constantinople, the fabled golden city of Byzantium, became the matrix of European civilization. During Constantinople's rise, Rome was a tract of ruins and Venice only a cluster of wattle huts on a lagoon mudbank...