Word: spasms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...make sense out of a country, and a spasm of violence, that makes little sense in itself? Whom to sympathize with, in a struggle among hostile and unreasonable antagonists? In whose hands is the country called Yugoslavia, stitched together from unwilling parts? Why can't the claims of self- determination be solved peacefully...
Armageddon is a serious game that any number can play. The electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations. And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid imaginations...
Saddam Hussein and the Persian Gulf? A last spasm, perhaps, of the Old Paradigm -- a conflict over natural resources in the way that so many of the wars of the O.P. were fought over land. In the New Paradigm, big land means less than microchips, which contain the new riches. The implications of landscape are environmental and recreational. Power has gone miniature -- out of muscle and expanse, into mind. The Soviet Union has endless territory. Japan has little, Hong Kong virtually none...
...spasm of communal violence has almost brought down the 11-month-old government of Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who offered to resign for the second time in three months. It was the most serious challenge yet to Singh, who is struggling to hold his party together, even as the rise of Hindu nationalism threatens to undermine the secular foundations of the world's most populous democracy. Said S.R. Bommai, president of the Prime Minister's Janata Dal party: "The country is at a crossroads. We have to choose between secularism and religious fundamentalism, between democracy and mobocracy, between unity...
Stress, Benson explains, brings on a rise in blood pressure and spurs the release of catecholamines, substances that increase the tendency of blood to clot and make arteries more vulnerable to spasm. Over time, these changes play an important role, many doctors believe, in the progression of heart disease. However, Benson has shown, the changes can be largely counteracted by the "relaxation response" that follows 15 minutes of meditation...