Word: circusing
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...dinner was served, the TV crew began filming. "It's a bloody circus, all this television stuff," complained Peter Hill from Illinois. "We are just serving their ends, and we wonder sometimes what it is all about." Another hostage whispered: "Maybe ABC had us hijacked to improve their ratings...
...weeks, Mehmet Ali Agca had threatened to turn Italy's "trial of the century" into a three-ring circus. He repeatedly insisted that he was Jesus Christ. He refused to elaborate on his claim that there was an international plot to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, declaring that further testimony would endanger his life. But last week Agca was suddenly all business. "I have decided to continue," the 27-year-old Turk briskly informed the Rome court where he and seven other defendants are standing trial, four of them in absentia, on charges related to the alleged conspiracy...
Initially, the Brazilians' handling of the remains had been attended by some controversy. The circus atmosphere in which the corpse had been exhumed, with TV cameras broadcasting live from grave-side and remains passed casually out for public inspection, prompted foreign observers to charge Brazilian officials with negligence. Fears mounted when the experts in Sao Paulo initially declined assistance from abroad. Last week, however, the Wiesenthal Center supplied the Brazilians with the dossier it had assembled on Mengele and prevailed on them to allow three U.S. experts to observe the forensic process. "I understand that it is Brazil's national...
...radiation and, when he was finished with an experiment, had his subjects exterminated. Of particular interest to Mengele were twins and dwarfs: at a tribunal in Jerusalem last February, Auschwitz survivors told of how he had had two toddler twins stitched together and of how, discovering a Rumanian circus family of seven dwarfs, he exhibited them naked before an audience of 2,000 cheering SS men. On the walls of one of the doctor's labs were, remembered one victim, rows upon rows of eyes "pinned up like butterflies...
DIED. John Ringling North, 81, flamboyant, fast-talking showman who from 1937 to '43 and from 1947 to '67 ran "The Greatest Show on Earth," the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, started by his five uncles in 1884; of a stroke; in Brussels. North took over the debt-spangled show after the death of his last uncle, John Ringling, and modernized it with such attractions as Gargantua the Great, the "vehemently vicious" 550-lb. gorilla that drew more than 40 million circusgoers. In 1956, North folded the big top and reincarnated the show for new arenas...