Word: befallen
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...hope Mr. Reagan is not serious when he says, "We don't care if they like us or not. We intend to be respected throughout the world." History is only too full of disasters that have befallen nations, leaders and mankind in general, when such ideas have been carried to their extreme...
...oilfields of the Persian Gulf are in jeopardy not so much because of Soviet tanks in Afghanistan as because of local outbreaks like the dissident Arab invasion of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca and the Iranian militants' seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The biggest disaster that has befallen Western interests in the area in the past decade remains the collapse of the Shah?for which Moscow was not responsible. And the worst threat to Western interests in the near future is a spread of turmoil to Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, for which the Soviets might...
This sort of court behavior, also indulged in by John McEnroe and Hie Nastase, is what kindergarten teachers call "age inappropriate." It is punk tennis, the transformation of a formerly pristine game into the moral equivalent of roller derby. The spectacle is symptomatic of something that has befallen the American's idea of how one ought to behave. What would once have been intolerable and impermissible public conduct has now become commonplace. If it is not exactly accepted, then at least it is abjectly and wearily endured...
...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...