Word: fire
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shooting grew most intense by 2:15 a.m. A Belgian tourist said he saw a hundred soldiers line up in front of the Museum of the Revolution and fire into the crowd. Panic-stricken people fell to the pavement or cowered behind the imperial city's ornate stone lions. Many sought sanctuary at the Beijing Hotel complex, where military officers later combed through rooms searching for foreign journalists' notebooks and audio-and videotapes...
...capital from all over China during the past few weeks are said to be loyal not to some central command but to various factions in the leadership. Thus while numerous units remained behind barricades, others, like the 27th Army, wreaked destruction in the city. Reports of heavy fire inside the Forbidden City, where police and P.L.A. units are routinely billeted, led to speculation that the rival units were shooting it out with one another. Furthermore, said a Western academic in Beijing, "there was very clearly a battle between two different army units on the road to the airport...
There has not been a municipal audit since 1985, but estimates of current debt run as high as $40 million. The city's mercurial third-term mayor, Carl Officer, 37, has gone so far as to propose selling city hall and six fire stations to raise cash, assuming anybody would buy them. City employees routinely get paid a month or more late...
Khomeini vowed to pursue the conflict with Iraq to the "frontiers of martyrdom," and sent an estimated 900,000 Iranians, many of them not yet teenagers, beyond that frontier. But in August 1988, the loss of key positions forced Tehran to accept a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire in the eight- year war. It was, said the Ayatullah, a decision "more deadly than drinking poison...
Tehran's utter isolation in the world of nations had become apparent just two weeks before the cease-fire decision, when a U.S. frigate mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner with 290 people aboard: international response was notably muted. In the following months, leading Iranian politicians such as Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 54, attempted to soften their country's radical image. But Khomeini would have none of it. Last February he prompted a worldwide outcry when he demanded the death of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born, British author of The Satanic Verses, a book many regard as blasphemous...