Word: pretexts
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Stalin's own dotage and death in 1953 were marked by a macabre irony. His last purge was to have been a mammoth pogrom. The pretext was the spurious charge that the Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, were poisoning political luminaries in their care. In his terminal paranoia, Stalin came to believe in the plot and suspected that his personal physician was a British agent. As blood vessels began to burst inside his own brain, plunging him into a prolonged agony, the dictator would not let any doctor near him on his deathbed...
...timing of Deng Xiaoping's (Teng Hsiao-p'ing) forthcoming visit to Washington in late January. They did not like the idea of Brezhnev preceding Deng and very likely being eclipsed by him. Therefore Gromyko might have been using these eleventh-hour wrangles over third-rate issues as a pretext to postpone the Carter-Brezhnev summit...
...concern that has never been shown by gynecologists conducting vaginal examinations. Says Dr. Robert Kolodny, M & J's heir apparent at the research institute: "Documenting the similarity of physiological process gives less excuse for the health-care professional to shrink from treatment of the homosexual patient, under the pretext that his health problems may be in some way different...
...criminal fugitive. That could enable the regime to seize the Pahlavi family's foreign financial holdings and discourage other states from giving refuge to the Shah. Iran's Foreign Minister Karim Sanjabi has warned that any country that grants asylum to the Shah "under any pretext" can expect a "negative effect" on its relations with Iran...
...anything else about the embassy affair was the way in which the Soviet Union tried to exploit the incident for its own ends. The official news agency Tass charged that the embassy attack had been inspired by remnants of SAVAK, under orders of the CIA, to create a pretext for U.S. intervention. The Soviet press further declared that Washington was trying to provoke a split in Iran between the new regime's "religious section" and the "left forces...