Witnesses in the recently liberated city said an unknown number of hostages were held in the Timbuktu house of Abou Zeid, the feared commander of AQIM and the leading figure to impose a harsh form of Sharia law in northern Mali.
"It's the touch of poetry in that it saves her from being a harsh, unlikable figure," Basinger said.
Taneyev's vivisections of the sensitive Tchaikovsky's works were indeed fearsomely rigorous, and today we know him mostly as a harsh if well-meaning figure haunting the outskirts of Russian music, a virtuoso pianist and influential teacher.
Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, and because she was in fact a harsh and unscrupulous ruler, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled.
But these tidy figures hide a harsh and more complex reality: Because of regional geology, ocean currents, and shifts in gravitational pull caused by changes on Earth's surface, such as the melting of massive ice sheets, the ocean does not rise evenly everywhere.
He manages to be simultaneously disheveled and determined, phlegmatic and emotional, a harsh interrogator and a warm paternal figure in a performance that feels completely natural, even off the cuff.
Caravaggio and his followers used a harsh, dramatic light to isolate their figures and heighten their emotional tension.
Critics were also upset by how these figures were depicted in a harsh, impersonal light and placed in a woodland setting whose perspective is distinctly unrealistic.
Figure 3b shows IMV100/EM80 has a harsh trend, with around 2 m shifting over the same distance measurement in some places.
Figure 8(d) shows an example where the interjection "ee" is accompanied by a harsh whispery voice quality.
