Word: straitjacket
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communists hoped to squeeze satellite Germany tight into a straitjacket stamped with the words "democratic centralism." The five historic states were replaced by 14 administrative districts. After the East German "People's Chamber" in Berlin obediently ratified the plan, the parliaments of the five provinces solemnly voted themselves out of existence...
Then the Communists tightened the laces in the straitjacket. In each new district, buildings were requisitioned for military and secret police headquarters. The Soviet-sponsored newspaper Taegliche Rundschau was made the official government paper, thereby becoming East Germany's Izvestia. The East German SED (Communist) Party paper Neues Deutschland became its Pravda. Strict loyalty checks got under way among staffs of both newspapers...
...Hour. The river rose, a brown, swirling fury in a straitjacket, pushing with enormous force at the restraining walls, threatening to saturate the levees to the point where they would disintegrate. Along the levees guarding Omaha's airfield, the flood pressed by, 15 feet higher than the runways. Some 30,000 people were evacuated from the low-lying residential districts of Council Bluffs. By car and truck the evacuees hauled off what they could, trying to decide between the television set and the washing machine. Householders filled their basements with water to equalize the river pressure and save...
...over Japan, the defeated were slipping off the straitjacket of occupation and sliding into the comfortable kimono of freedom. Almost daily, another hotel, office building, golf course, dockyard or apartment house was reclaimed from the occupiers. The special ticket windows and the white-striped railroad cars (for occupation forces only) were on their way out. Japanese merchant vessels were allowed to fly the Japanese flag once more in foreign waters. Last week Pakistan became the seventh nation to ratify the Japanese Peace Treaty, which makes it official as soon as all seven signatures are deposited in Washington (this will probably...
Hardheaded Raoul realizes that by one stroke he has lost wife, children, job, friends, everything dear (and respectable) in his life: if he announces that he is Cerusier, he will wind up in a straitjacket. Simple enough to hire himself back into his business-but how to get back his wife and family? The only honest thing to do, he decides, is to seduce his own wife...