Word: blasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been stationed in Rome, where his duties include covering the Vatican, since 1985, and he accompanied the Pontiff's entourage to India in 1986 and to Poland this year. But this trip had some especially grueling conditions. First, following the eleven-hour flight from Rome, there was the blast-furnace Florida heat. Then there was the pace. Allis often found himself asking, "How do you attend the Mass and the background briefing at the same time?" Then there was the unusually tight security around the Holy Father. To cover a papal Mass at 10 a.m. in Miami, reporters...
Shortly after 1 a.m., a woman sitting in a snack bar near the palace saw about 50 soldiers wearing black ski masks run past. Moments later the night was shattered by automatic-weapons fire and the blast of mortars and grenades. Those unexpected sounds of combat signaled the beginning last Thursday night of the bloodiest, most dangerous coup attempt yet mounted against Aquino's 18- month-old government...
...strolling during his London vacation, an ex-Marine named Jack Ryan hears an explosion and sees a Rolls-Royce disabled by the blast. Armed men approach the car, clearly intending harm to its passengers. Ryan singlehanded puts a stop to this nefariousness, suffering a shoulder wound in the process. Next morning in the hospital, he learns that he has rescued the Prince and Princess of Wales from a terrorist attack by the U.L.A., a Maoist offshoot of the Irish Republican Army...
...Hirsch, 59, a professor of English, aims his blast at academe from a slightly different sniper's perch. He charges that schools have given up teaching the unifying facts, values and writings of Western culture, creating a generation of cultural illiterates. As evidence he cites a 1985 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Among other lacunae, it found that two-thirds of the high schoolers surveyed did not know when the Civil War was fought, and half could not identify Winston Churchill. "One's literacy depends upon the breadth of one's acquaintance with a national culture," Hirsch...
...decision seemed simple enough when the Israeli Cabinet approved the Lavi in 1980. Jerusalem had long wanted an advanced fighter that could dodge antiaircraft missiles while skimming battlefields to blast enemy targets. As then Defense Minister Ezer Weizman envisioned it, the plane was to be "small and cheap -- but a bastard" in combat. Over the years, though, Weizman has become a leading opponent of the plane. Says he: "It is too costly, comes too late and at the expense of more important objectives." Today the aircraft represents the perils that a small, defense-minded country can confront when it sets...