Word: polishing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ridiculous proceedings somewhat, leading the film to a previously avoided mass-appeal glossiness. Distributed through Universal Pictures, Meaning of Life is the first Python film wholly backed by a major concern and released smack into the American commercial mainstream. The difference, which shows subtly in the film's professional polish, in its tilt towards topical satire and identifiable allusion, is not altogether encouraging...
...answer that question once and for all, but it tightens the web of circumstantial evidence around the Kremlin. A Bulgarian embassy worker who defected to France in 1981 has told French intelligence officials that the KGB devised the plot to kill the Pope out of fear that the Polish-born prelate was part of a U.S.-inspired scheme to undermine the Polish government...
Savov is said to have told Mantarov that the KGB concluded in 1979 that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's Polish-born National Security Adviser, had somehow engineered the election of Pope John Paul II the previous year. Brzezinski's supposed purpose: to use the Pope to inspire further unrest in Poland and eventually to wrench the country out of the Soviet orbit. Mantarov claims that he was told that as the troubles in Poland mounted, and as the Pontiff came to be identified with the budding Solidarity movement, Soviet authorities gave the command to "eliminate" the Pope...
...February 1982 on charges of spying for Bulgaria and aiding the terrorist Red Brigades, has identified as one of his contacts Todor Aivazov, one of the other Bulgarians implicated by Agca in the papal plot. Agca has also claimed that in January 1981 he and Antonov talked about killing Polish Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa, perhaps by planting a bomb in his car or hotel room. An Italian magistrate investigating the allegation has already officially warned Antonov and six others, including Scricciolo, of the charge...
Martella expects his own inquiry to last at least several more months. Within a month after the shooting, however, the Vatican had already concluded that Agca was part of a conspiracy. "The Soviet intention was to cut off the head of Polish nationalism," says a top aide to John Paul. The last straw may have come in the summer of 1980, when the Pope sent a message to the Soviets threatening to return to Poland if the Soviets invaded his homeland. Vatican officials believe that Moscow feared not only the Pope's growing role as the symbolic leader...