The staggering wave of land invasions that followed was, many experts and critics say, a naked effort to intimidate opposition, and with presidential elections due early next year, the tactics have persisted and even spread.
"It's a staggering waste of taxpayers' money.
In his landscapes Soutine's sinuous and viscous brushstrokes bring trees and buildings up close to the surface, almost dissolving the world into painterly abstraction, and it is as though you were seeing through the thick, undulating air of a staggering heat wave.
This summer's withering heat wave claimed a staggering number of victims -- the government talks of perhaps 5,000 deaths, the country's largest undertaker twice that number -- most of whom were elderly.
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Ivan Aivozovsky's The Ninth Wave, 1850, which is a staggering painting of a small raft at sea.
A result was a wave of refugees.
All in all, I had spent a staggering amount of time and energy looking for and riding waves.
That is a staggering set of numbers.
There were a staggering 35 of them.
It's a staggering failure of responsibility.
