Word: harshness
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...leaders are still groping for a way out of the political morass. The desire to grind out all traces of the democracy movement takes precedence. A court in Shanghai accused three people of burning a train that ran over a human barricade, and quickly sentenced them to death. The harsh actions open the door to a wave of execution orders. Such a move would be tragic for China's psychic well-being and potentially fatal for its economic health, and it was unthinkable just a few weeks ago. But if China's leaders can get away with rewriting so recent...
...District Judge Richard Williams of Alexandria, Va., had harsh words last week about the abuses uncovered by Operation Ill Wind, the federal investigation of Pentagon procurement fraud: "I can't believe our Government, the Congress and Executive, lets a system like this endure." In fact, the judge was so disgusted that he handed out astonishingly light sentences to the first two defendants convicted by a jury as a result of the probe (twelve other people have pleaded guilty). Teledyne Electronics executive George Kaub could have received 40 years in prison. His co-worker Eugene Sullivan could have got 20 years...
...about the same time, the government issued harsh martial-law decrees ordering leaders of the prodemocracy movement, "important figures who incited and organized this counterrevolutionary insurrection in the capital," to turn themselves in for "lenient treatment." The decrees set up a spy-and-report network, complete with 18 telephone hot lines, so that citizens could help round up dissidents. Fearful of arrest, student leaders who had survived the carnage went underground or fled the city. The astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a leading dissident who was prevented by the government from dining with George Bush during the President's visit last February...
Yang turned to the 27th Army, normally based in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, and largely composed of ill-educated peasant conscripts with no ties to Beijing, for the harsh job of clearing Tiananmen. The President has personal links to the 27th through his brother Yang Baibing, who is top political commissar of the P.L.A., and Chief of Staff Chi Haotian, said to be another relative...
Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous, cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn...