Word: gripped
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...Green Beret. But outcry over American involvement in Vietnam dampened enthusiasm for a camo-clad action figure, so Hasbro gave Joe an honorable discharge. It redesigned the toys and relaunched them in 1970 as Adventures of G.I. Joe: the figure received lifelike hair, moveable eyes and a "kung-fu" grip, enabling him to hold onto objects for the first time. But the changes proved to be a gimmick, taken even further by Hasbro with the development of a space-traveling "Super Joe" in 1976. The reception was lukewarm, and by 1978, Joe was retired from service entirely. (Read a brief...
...weeks, the East Germans had been trying to figure out a way to prevent Jackson's moonwalk through West Berlin from becoming political dynamite for East German youth. These were the days of Perestroika, when the Soviet Union's iron grip on Eastern Europe was slipping and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was becoming a source of hope for reformers in the East and the West. The Stasi was determined not to repeat the events of the year before, when East Germans amassed at the Wall to listen to a concert by Genesis, David Bowie and Eurythmics in West Berlin...
...June 12 presidential election was motivated by a desire to smooth his ally's path to a second term of office, it had quite the opposite effect. Eight weeks later, as Ahmadinejad was sworn in by Iran's parliament on Aug. 5, the Islamic Republic remains in the grip of an unprecedented political crisis over the legitimacy of both men - a crisis that shows no sign of abating, either on the streets or inside the corridors of power. (Read "Khamenei: The Power Behind the President...
...Presidents come and go," observed former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, "but the Supreme Court goes on forever." That prospect troubles historian James MacGregor Burns, whose 15th book is a provocative assault on the "imperious" court and its tightening grip on governmental power. Unaccountable Justices have seized the right to overturn acts of Congress--an authority not found in the Constitution--and increasingly thwart the popular will, Burns argues. From blocking Reconstruction-era civil rights to slowing the New Deal, the court's pro-business ideologues have time and again created "a chokepoint for progressive reforms." More recently...
...amid the turbulence of China's civil wars, Uighur leaders in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar declared a short-lived independent Republic of East Turkestan. But Xinjiang was wholly subsumed into the new state forged by China's victorious Communists after 1949, with Beijing steadily tightening its grip on the oil rich territory. Its official designation as an "autonomous region" belies rigid controls from the central government over Xinjiang, and a policy of settling hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese there that has left the Uighurs comprising a little less than half of the region's roughly...