A new 30-second television commercial features a youth with a shiny black 4x4 pickup truck, his girlfriend and a stern state trooper.
"We have to make Camden a magnet for more than just poverty," said Joseph J. Roberts Jr., leader of the Democratic majority in the State Assembly and Camden homeowner who wrote the legislation, which combines generous state spending with stern state controls that would give the state effective control over the city's faltering government.
Mr. Metcalf's response was at first diplomatic and then stern: "Democratic states do not execute people without first going through the judicial process," he wrote on the Metro editor's blog.
The events in 1982 come up in almost every interview, less as a lesson about the price of opposition and more as a warning to Mr. Assad, who until the uprising had managed to dismantle much of the stern police state facade that had characterized his father's three decades of rule.
Father on, black and white photos of stern-faced state leaders receiving education in drug prevention flank meticulous records of military offensives, which document the precise quantity of detonators, magazines, bombs, and drugs captured in each operation.
The 1912 publication, History of the province of Alberta, praised May's stern and ambitious personality, stating that "in the most adverse circumstances [he] endured with fortitude".
Instead of repairing old infrastructure, the preference has been for launching huge new projects named after the king: a giant financial centre on the outskirts of Riyadh, industrial cities, a university, and so on.The second pillar of the Saudi state, its stern Wahhabist clerics, is also weaker than it was.
This is an age of rational and moral comedy, and Murphy hasn't reconfigured his comedic performances to the new tone (even though he daringly and frankly stated his stern principles on the biggest stage of all, the Oscars, in 1988).
What made a big difference, delegates told me earlier, was stern discussions by some state party leaders and a reimposition of a two-word term I used to hear a lot but not much lately: party discipline.
The state is seen as a stern father, whereas the nation is regarded as a compassionate mother.
