Word: gripped
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...crowds danced in the streets and chants of "Liberty!" filled the air. Duvalier's departure ended 28 years of totalitarian rule and brought hope to Haitians that the military, which helped bring down the dictator, would cooperate in rebuilding their impoverished country. Today, however, despair and confusion once again grip Haiti. The three-man provisional government headed by Lieut. General Henri Namphy is worse than ineffectual; the elections scheduled for next month threaten to turn into a sham; and the forces of order, as in Duvalier's days, continue to terrorize the people...
...credited and cursed for President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado's austerity program. Salinas' task will be to guide Mexico's economy from the sleepy epoch of the sombrero into the dynamic age of the superconductor. At the same time, he faces mounting demands to loosen the P.R.I.'s grip on the country's political system...
...Aquino-Laurel divorce was only the latest sign that the President was still struggling to get a grip on an increasingly fractious government. A week earlier she had demanded the resignation of all 26 members of her Cabinet. Now advisers who had been at her side since the beginning of her tumultuous political career were departing Malacanang Palace. Among them were the leaders of the Cabinet factions whose intramural bickering had made ruling virtually impossible: Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo, her closest confidant, and Finance Secretary Jaime Ongpin, the industrialist whose expertise had given the country's debt renegotiations a needed...
...comes at least in part from the truly awful seriousness of the high-culture industry, its inability to see how weird its own solipsism and sanctimony can look. The mock-religious cloud that formed around abstract expressionism when it was becoming America's first imperial style, coupled with the grip of the academies since, all but wrecked the middle ground between the sublime and the trivial. How many American artists, except for a few loners like Saul Steinberg and Ed Keinholz, are both really good and really, mordantly funny? By and large, America dislikes satire; it wants its humor cute...
...Lebanon, instability throughout the Persian Gulf, guerrilla wars that threatened El Salvador and other Third World allies, and the emergence of Soviet-aligned regimes in places like Nicaragua and Grenada have hammered home the need for ways to handle some very different military tasks: snatching hostages from the grip of terrorists, perhaps, or helping U.S.-allied governments fight Communist-led guerrillas...