Word: grips
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...enormous loss of life marked a bloody milestone in Beijing's administration of the troubled zone, in which Muslim Uighurs make up the majority of the population. It also presages a severe tightening of the already viselike grip the authorities maintain on the semiautonomous region, one that could be even harsher than the crackdown that followed the violent suppression of protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in March 2008. Officials said several hundred protesters had already been arrested and some 90 more were still being sought on Monday afternoon. "I fear for what is to come," said Nicholas Bequelin...
...property to be assessed at market value. To relieve the logjam in California politics, momentum is growing for an open primary system, in which the two top vote getters in the primary, regardless of party, would face each other in the general election. Proponents believe it would loosen the grip of partisan ideologies and make it easier of moderates to win elections. In addition, a redistricting reform won narrow approval last November and proponents of good government keep trying to lengthen the state's term limits on legislators...