Word: hand
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...democracy for Chinese everywhere, Hong Kong included. While Hong Kong is democratic in spirit, members of its legislature are mostly appointed. An elected legislature could be installed by 1997, but the Basic Law does not call for an elected chief executive until at least 15 years after the hand-over. But now a fearful Hong Kong is demanding a faster pace for its own democratization, to make it all the harder for Beijing to overturn...
Acting directly or through subordinates, this trio last week worked to spread a long-standing unsubstantiated rumor designed to humiliate new House Speaker Thomas Foley. Just as Foley was poised to take the gavel from departing Speaker Jim Wright's hand, a memo from the Republican National Committee was circulating to state party chairmen and G.O.P. Congressmen. Titled "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet," the memo compared his voting record with that of Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, an acknowledged homosexual. For days, an aide to Republican minority whip Newt Gingrich had been calling more than a dozen reporters...
...Polish experience posed a special dilemma for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On the one hand, Warsaw's bold moves toward economic and political liberalization would have been unthinkable had Gorbachev not come to power in 1985 and launched his own reforms. On the other hand, the crushing defeat of the Polish Communists could be exploited by Soviet hard-liners as an argument against political reform at home. In fact, Gorbachev's party seemed in little danger of suffering a Polish-style humiliation at the polls. For one thing, the Soviet reform impulse is coming down from the leadership rather than...
...turn its back on the martyred students who rallied around a sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty? Or break its ties with the Chinese government and risk a devastating setback to both strategic and commercial interests? Neither, said the President, who is something of an old China hand, having headed the U.S. mission to Beijing in 1974-75. Bush tried, as he put it, "to find a proper, prudent balance" -- to toe-dance between the horns of the dilemma...
...familiar mixes easily with material less so: William Carleton's eerie The Death of a Devotee, Bernard Mac Laverty's grim Life Drawing. All this diversity is held together by a common trait, an irresistible claim on attention, the written equivalent of a tug at the lapel or a hand on the shoulder. This book can be picked up and put down many times, but hardly ever in the middle of a story...