Word: spasms
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...front group for Colombia's drug traffickers, in a communique last week. Admitting defeat in the drug war launched by President Virgilio Barco Vargas five months ago, the narcolords pledged to surrender their arms and abandon their trade if granted "legal guarantees." Translation: immunity from prosecution for the spasm of violence they committed in response to Barco's crackdown, and freedom from extradition...
Nothing could have prepared the mind for Timisoara and the tableau of horrors left by the regime's last and worst spasm of barbarity. In the same muddy field, laid out on white sheets, were two dozen other naked bodies, more victims of a massacre Dec. 16 and 17 by the Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police. These bodies too had been subjected to efforts to render them unrecognizable, an obvious attempt not only to spite those the victims left behind but also to intimidate them. The bodies bore various marks of torture: ankles entwined in barbed wire, stomachs crudely sewn...
...Tiananmen Square. The whole affair, in fact, had developed the aura of a surrealistic ritual, with both sides' forces stepping in circles as if they were performing some stately, stylized pavane. Violence, it seemed, was out of the question. And then, early Sunday morning, the dance ended in a spasm of fury, the worst day of bloodshed in Communist China's history...
...spasm of mudslinging was painful and messy, and certainly contained a measure of revenge for the earlier Democratic assaults on such Republicans as John Tower and Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese. The atmosphere also suffered from the fact that minority whip Gingrich was leading the ethics charge. Gingrich early on admitted that an investigation of the Speaker was the G.O.P.'s chance to undo three decades of Democratic dominance in Congress...
...Anyi and his wife Li Lanting, the street scenes in Beijing last week seemed eerily reminiscent of another spasm of unrest that began to rock China 23 years ago. Then, as now, students marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, waving red flags and chanting slogans defying an entrenched political establishment. Destination: Tiananmen Square. Then, as now, the demonstrators vilified aging national leaders -- including, as he must have recalled bitterly last week, Deng Xiaoping, then Communist Party General Secretary, who at one point was paraded around Beijing wearing a dunce...