Word: polishing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Swiss commandos lift the bizarre siege of a Polish embassy...
...commando-style operation unfolded in typically Swiss fashion: it was a combination of precise timing and meticulous efficiency. At 10:42 a.m. last Thursday, a young, casually dressed, plainclothes policeman placed an aluminum container on the front doorstep of a three-story, white stucco mansion that houses the Polish embassy in the leafy Kirchenfeld neighborhood of Bern. Then the policeman climbed back into his beige Volkswagen and slowly drove away. Seconds later, the parcel exploded. The front door of the residence dissolved in smoke and flame, and some 20 members of an elite Bern police squad burst into the building...
...ended a bizarre siege in which members of a selfstyled, inchoate Polish "Independent Home Army" imposed a brief reign of terror upon their country's local embassy. The terrorists' demands during the siege were hopelessly quixotic: curtailment of martial law in Poland, the release of all political prisoners held in that beleaguered country, and "an end to repression of the Polish "people" by the military regime run by General Wojciech Jaruzelski...
...will. But it was never supposed to work out so bluntly. U.S. prisons were to be the ultimate social experiment, where lapidaries of the soul would smooth and polish criminals. Under what conditions? Inside locked catacombs, filled to overflowing with inmates wrenched from their families for years, all overseen by men with searchlights and rifles. The contradiction was ignored for 200 years, partly out of earnestness and hope, but eventually because of a squeamish hypocrisy, a refusal to admit that imprisonment is any society's darkest chore...
DIED. Wladyslaw Gomulka, 77, Polish leader who retained a fierce loyalty to traditional Communist dogma despite his "Polish road to socialism" approach that irritated the Kremlin; of cancer; in Warsaw. Once considered one of the most influential leaders in the Communist world, Gomulka insisted that Communist countries should retain a degree of independence in domestic matters, even while supporting the general Soviet policy line, a view that resulted in his removal in 1948 as Poland's leader. Jailed from 1951 to 1954 for opposing Stalinist economic collectivization, he returned to power in 1956 following the Poznan "bread and freedom...