Word: ordeal
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...democratically elected President, who unseated Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the Maldives' ruler since 1978, in a landmark election last October. In 1991, Nasheed was named an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, a victim of repeated government crackdowns on dissidents. Though he is tight-lipped about the particulars of his own ordeal, testimony from many other detainees tells of men dunked into the sea, forced to eat glass, kept in solitary confinement or left exposed in the sun for days, or doused in molasses and tied to palm trees, at the mercy of the inevitable insect swarm. "It was God's will...
...some French colonists, Indochina was an idyll of sun-dappled verandas, silent servants and long glasses of Pernod in the afternoon. For others, like the family of novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, it was an exhausting ordeal. Their story, as told in Duras' semi-autobiographical novel Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique (1950), is the subject of Cambodian director Rithy Panh's most recent work, The Sea Wall...
...there are rewards for the patient or masochistic viewer. If you get into the movie's unsteady rhythms, the experience can be an enthralling ordeal. That's because Swinton gives Julia, and Julia, all her power and coherence. It's like so much of Swinton's work: a huge star performance in an ornery little film. When she meets directors with grand or weird or disturbing ideas, she does make their dreams come true. We expect no less of the queen of the indies...
Leopold Engleitner, the world’s oldest-known male concentration camp survivor, recounted the story of his ordeal to a packed Science Center lecture hall on Monday evening. Students and other attendees overflowed into the stairwell and along the back walls to hear Engleithner, a 103-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who was incarcerated by the Nazis for having refused military service. His presentation was conducted in interview format, with questions posed by graduate student Johann Boedecker. Engleithner’s biographer, Bernhard Rammerstorfer, sat alongside the survivor to translate questions into his native Austrian dialect...
Back in the cramped Mexico City apartment he shares with two daughters and two grandchildren, Bonilla, 46, a maintenance worker, recounts his ordeal to TIME. He has been out of hospital for two days but is still coughing and spluttering behind a blue facemask, his head aching slightly as he finishes his course of anti-viral drugs. The Mexican government has tried to protect the names of swine flu victims, fearing publicity could stigmatize them. But Bonilla is unafraid to tell his tale, hoping his words will give the world better insight into the H1N1 virus. He also wants...