But Mr Wang and his wife fared tolerably well.
Iranians can elect, in a tolerably fair way, the representatives they want; the question is how much authority and freedom their system then allows these representatives.
Having brought about a tolerably clean election, and ended a seven-year war, it is about to hand over Zimbabwe to a man who is the indisputable choice of most of his people.
In recent years the South Bronx's main retail corridor had fewer vacancy signs than Madison Avenue.If the distortions caused by crippled data were constant over time, trend analysis might still be tolerably accurate.
No more than $3,000 can now be taken out of the country undeclared.Still, Vietnam's economy is likely to get by tolerably, at least in the short term, despite the fall in exports.
Mr Bird won election after election and, allowing for such niceties as unlimited campaign money and with radio and television biased to the government, the ballots were tolerably free.
(Drafting hasn't yet begun, though, and some doubt that anything coherent will emerge).The big difficulty for such projects in advanced democracies is that they have to break into lawmaking systems that often function tolerably well.
Depressingly, fewer than one in ten of them have access to electricity just as in Taliban times.The reconstruction effort has always been less than the minimum required to make Afghanistan tolerably stable.
To the outside world, however, such sales, managed tolerably decently, would at least be a sign that Nigeria now understood its salvation no longer lies with oil and the political corruption the business has spawned.Split and fracturedOil, however, has not only cursed Nigeria's economy.
It is tolerably clear that on every fresh occasion there will be an outburst of world indignation, which in itself will encourage Africans to fresh resistance, with or without the instigation of "agitators".Diplomatically, South Africa's isolation is almost complete.
The Middle East and north Africa region the centrepiece of Mr Bush's efforts to promote freedom showed little measurable improvement over the previous year.More widely, the number of "electoral democracies" (those with tolerably free and fair elections) dropped by two, to 119 (thanks to four demotions and two promotions).
