Word: befallen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...frightening a natural cataclysm as had befallen the young nation. Buildings tumbled and forests were destroyed. Giant fissures opened in the ground, accompanied by a thunderous roar and a spreading sulfurous odor. Wrote one eyewitness: "The whole land was moved and waved like waves of the sea." The usually placid Mississippi became an angry torrent of whirlpools and rapids, overflowing its banks and possibly even briefly reversing course...
Famine is only the latest in a series of wrenching tragedies that have befallen Cambodia since it first became engulfed by the Indochina war in 1970. Following the Communist takeover by China-backed Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1975, between 2 million and 3 million Cambodians were systematically murdered or otherwise eliminated under a genocidal "purification" policy. It was aimed at destroying the educated class and creating a peasant society. Some journalists who have visited the country have seen mass graves and torture camps reminiscent of Dachau and Auschwitz...
...other owners believed that the Nixons would have attracted curiosity seekers and destroyed what one blackballer called the ambiance of the building on the corner of Madison Avenue. "Just imagine," she said, "what would happen if the Shah of Iran visited him." For similar reasons, the same fate has befallen Barbra Streisand, Pat Lawford and even dashing Princeton-educated Prince Saud, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, who was voted out of a Fifth Avenue flat because of fears of anti-Arab protests...
...most famous contemporary explorer, the peaceful intervention on Sumatra was almost a workaday mission. As head of an unusual London-based organization called Survival International, Hanbury-Tenison has been aiding endangered tribal peoples for a decade. By his reckoning, what happened to Sumatra's Mentaweians could have befallen almost any of some 3 million people in a dozen countries round the world who pursue simple lives as hunters and gatherers or as nomadic herdsmen...
Still, what happened to Paul Morantz is only the latest in a series of curious misfortunes that have befallen people who have challenged Synanon in court, in print or on the air. Among the other victims...