Word: 1980s
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...mania only seems to grow. On May 9, the total turnover on Chinese bourses exceeded that of all other Asian stock exchanges combined, a first. There are even reports of retail investors borrowing against newly purchased apartments or houses-shades of Japan in the late 1980s-to buy stocks. "I'm afraid this thing is in its final frenzy," says Andy Xie, an independent economist in Shanghai. "People are going to get hurt...
...happened the first time the nations of the Persian Gulf found themselves in a dollar gusher, during the oil crises of the 1970s. They handed back much of that money to Western banks, which loaned it out to developing countries that couldn't repay it. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese firms recycled their dollars by investing in trophy U.S. properties, including Rockefeller Center and the Pebble Beach resort. Both those deals ended in bankruptcy for the acquirers...
...turned out, the most famous of those would be Tilted Arc, a 120-ft.-long curving steel wall that was commissioned by the U.S. government for the plaza outside a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, only to become the focus of a huge public battle in the late 1980s when some office workers complained that it had laid claim to so much of the plaza as to make the space unusable. (For the record, they had a point.) When the feds decided to remove the work, Serra sued the government and lost. "It was painful," he says...
...society with as much experience of violence as Iraq - up to half a million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war with Iran in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands were massacred on Saddam Hussein's orders in the 1990s, and tens of thousands have died in the Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian carnage in the past two years - learns to adapt its mourning traditions to its circumstances. During the war with Iran, Saddam barred newspapers from publishing wake notices; he worried that the sheer numbers of such notices would advertise just how badly his ill-judged war was going...
...Being Africa's premier diva is not a crown that Kidjo wears lightly. As an African, she says, she comes from a place with problems. But as a musician, she argues, she can solve them. Kidjo first came to prominence in the 1980s, a time when Bob Geldof was fashioning Live Aid around the idea that music could be charity. Kidjo had an even more ambitious idea, which drew on her voodoo roots in the old African slave port of Cotonou, Benin, where she grew up: music is "the ultimate power," she explains over lunch in Paris, her adopted home...