In an extended meteorological conceit, Brown observes: "The sunshine of publicity in which Diana would at first be happy to bask, posing and smiling for the cameras, grew steadily hotter and harsher.
As a whole America is steadily moving toward less harsh drug laws, but on a state-by-state level things vary widely.
As time made those possibilities seem increasingly remote, the drive for harsher action has steadily built.
Myanmar has been a closed state under military rule since U Ne Win staged a coup in 1962 and instituted the "Burmese way to socialism," an autocratic government that drove his country from prosperity and a flourishing culture steadily backward into poverty and harsh repression.
Even as the administration has maintained in secret Justice Department legal opinions that its harshest methods are legal, it has quietly but steadily backed away from them in practice.
Better armed and financed, it has encroached steadily into areas freed from government control by other rebel groups, enforcing harsh, state-like authority along the Euphrates valley and across much of the north.
The Shabab took over much of the country in 2006, putting in place a harsh version of Islamic law, banning music, soccer and bras, but they have been steadily losing power and support.
Moreover, the insurgents' harsh rules prohibiting music, television and even bras, as well as the unrelenting fighting, have steadily alienated much of Somali society, making it harder for the militants to raise money and find recruits.
But administration officials said there were psychological benefits to dropping bags of food, because under the harsh rule of the Taliban -- and four years of drought -- conditions have become steadily more bleak.
But behind that screen, the burdens of life as Bernie Madoff's son - the continuing suspicion from the public, the harsh accusations in numerous lawsuits, and his exile from the world of Wall Street - were steadily becoming unsustainable.
