Word: spasms
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...wriggles out of her top to sunbathe. But last month pet-shop assistant Rosemeri da Costa, 34, was tanning herself topless on Recreio beach when a shadow fell across her towel. She looked up and saw a gang of policemen armed with truncheons standing over her. In a spasm of puritanism, the police had decided to enforce a 70-year-old law against immorality. They demanded that Da Costa slip back into her top. When she refused, the police dragged her away in handcuffs...
...despaired that "my life's work seems to be over." Had liberty been won by the long years of peaceful and moral coercion or the violent spasm of Quit India? Resentment of Britain had been replaced by religious hatred. The killing before partition made it inevitable, and the slaughter afterward trampled on his appeals to tolerance and trust. All the village pilgrimages he made in 1946 and 1947 could not stop Muslims and Hindus from killing one another. All the famous fasts he undertook could not persuade them to live permanently in harmony. He blamed himself when Indians rejected...
...country fell under total army rule late last week, few Pakistanis regretted the snuffing out of democracy. Militant Islamists tied to Afghanistan's Taliban government hailed the downfall of Sharif, who had suddenly clamped down on fundamentalist groups inside Pakistan following a three-week spasm of sectarian violence that left 40 dead. "There should be no elections in Pakistan--there should be a Taliban-like system in Pakistan," said the chief of the Harkatul Mujahideen, a militant group whose training centers were attacked by U.S. cruise missiles last year. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, twice sacked for alleged corruption, praised...
...large numbers of Kosovars and to destroy the Albanian intellectual and political culture. But Pec was also subject to a special fury. Going far beyond the brutal demands of military tactics or ethnic cleansing. Serbian forces swept through three times, wreaking destruction and expelling Albanians, including a final useless spasm of fury two weeks ago that razed most of the city and surrounding villages when Milosevic was about to surrender. "In Pec," said Astrit Hasani, "it was total vengeance...
What was it about Diana, Princess of Wales, that brought such huge numbers of people from all walks of life literally to their knees after her death in 1997? What was her special appeal, not just to British subjects but also to people the world over? A late spasm of royalism hardly explains it, even in Britain, for many true British monarchists despised her for cheapening the royal institution by behaving more like a movie star or a pop diva than a princess. To many others, however, that was precisely her attraction...