Word: sterner
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...thought modern Britain showed the best of itself in the week after Diana died: a feeling and a compassion and an openness to emotional expression that it had for too long kept bottled up. But perhaps--as stock markets stumble and wars drag on--these are sterner times than the mid-1990s, ones when the virtues of reason, reserve and order become apparent. You can't fuel a society on flowers alone...
...Iran had no aim of damaging its relationship with Britain, explained an editorial in the news website Khedmat, linked to ,President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and "reacted to a situation that presented itself." But when Britain sought to aggravate the situation by involving the United States, Tehran was forced to take sterner measures, such as airing footage of the detainees. "Iran had no desire to repeat any sort of hostage crisis, says Amir Mohebbian, an editor at the conservative daily Resalat. "The matter could have easily been resolved with a simple British apology...
...yards to the rhythms of fervent auctioneers; in the distant, dusty bush, illegal immigrants were being detained. Howard's relatively narrow agenda of social cohesion, free enterprise and wealth accumulation was now a mass movement. And when the U.S. was attacked by terrorists and further calamity threatened, Howard became sterner and more somber - someone who would see the challenge through. His moment arrived. Instinctively, he did not try to charm. Polling wasn't necessary for him to understand where Middle Australia had come to rest...
...dialogue, song and story, Music still contains too much sugar, too little spice ... [The film's] gem?tlich heart tugs make a Lehar operetta seem grimly realistic by comparison. Viewers who want a movie to swell around them in big, warm blobs will find Sound of Music easy to take. Sterner types may resist at the outset but are apt to loosen up after a buoyant, heels-in-the-air song or two by Julie Andrews. Seconding her perky triumph as Mary Poppins, Julie turns every number into a bell ringer and gives the comedy its zestiest scene when she punctures...
...Tanna's brushes with the outside world have not always been happy. Explorers, whalers, traders and blackbirders snatching laborers for the canefields of Queensland all figure in the island's memory. Missionaries arrived in the 1840s; the sterner among them tried to stamp out the arranged marriages, kava drinking and other rituals that underpin Tannese kastom life. Today, a jumble of Christian groups still jostle for believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still...