Word: assassinates
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After five hours of negotiations with assistant attorney general Federico Ponce Rojas, Chavez surrendered last week and was flown to Mexico City aboard a government jet. Earlier, in a letter addressed to the New York Times, Chavez said he had been the target of a paid assassin, and would provide evidence implicating agents of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, who oversee antidrug efforts. Law-enforcement officials in Mexico and the U.S. have long complained about corruption among members of the federal police, who have been accused of murder, rape and other abuses, including the 1985 torture and killing of Enrique...
Amid the mangle of flesh and torn limbs was the garland offerer herself, apparently a suicidal assassin. Her back had taken the full force of the explosion, and her head had been sent flying nearly a dozen feet into the photographers' compound, where it was later discovered with face intact. As investigators reconstructed the crime, she had worn a brace of the kind usually associated with victims of back pain. But the girdle seems to have packed three to five sticks of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, a powerful plastic explosive commonly used for demolition work...
...Europe sampling has created some controversial musical stews. The techno- rockers EMF have stirred up a fuss with their single Lies, in which they sample the voice of Mark David Chapman, the John Lennon assassin, reciting lyrics from Lennon's last album. To create the disco hit Sadeness, Part I, Romanian-born producer Michael Cretu sampled Gregorian chants, juxtaposed them with whispered verses from the Marquis de Sade, and set them to a metronomic beat. Whether such sampling is artistry "depends on how you use it," says Cretu. "If you are a really creative person...
...wonder Congress elders turned immediately to Sonia Gandhi, 44, as party leader. But Sonia is a widow with no desire for power. She never wanted her husband Rajiv to enter politics, much less succeed his mother. It was Sonia who cradled Indira's head as she lay dying from assassins' bullets, and friends note that after the shooting in 1984, she became obsessed with the safety of her husband and children. Behind the dark glasses she wore during public appearances, her eyes constantly searched crowds for a possible assassin. Says a friend: "What she was most afraid...
Still, for all its wit, the text (by John Weidman, Sondheim's collaborator on Pacific Overtures) has no obvious topical resonances -- and probably could not, given that the authors view assassination as arising from thwarted ambition rather than any ideology or cause. As satire, Assassins is pointless: it attacks people who have no defenders. As pop sociology, it makes points about fame, envy and media culture that were made far more richly in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. One is left wondering -- not least because of an imagined conversation between a would-be assassin and composer Leonard...