Word: spate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up." So wrote Michael Herr in Dispatches, published in 1977, a year before the first spate of Viet Nam dramas. (The mid-'60s had offered a couple of World War II wheezes disguised as topical films: A Yank in Viet-Nam, so poorly received that it changed its name to Year of the Tiger, and John Wayne's hilariously wrongheaded The Green Berets, with its famous...
...immediate result of Meese's revelations was a spate of denials. In Jerusalem, the three top officials of the Israeli government -- Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- met in a crisis session and drafted a statement. For the first time, the government admitted what everyone knew: Israel had "helped in the transfer of defensive weapons and spare parts from the U.S. to Iran." But the Israelis flatly denied funneling any money to the contras. According to the statement, "The payment for this equipment was made directly by an Iranian representative to a Swiss...
Reports of Kim's demise have surfaced several times over the years, but last week's spate of false rumors was the most bizarre episode yet. They originated, so South Korea claimed, with announcements made by North Koreans over loudspeakers along the 151-mile Demilitarized Zone that divides the two countries. The same rumors popped up independently in Peking, Hanoi and Tokyo, apparently before officials in Seoul began spreading the word. Until Kim's ceremonial airport appearance, the North Koreans did nothing either to dispel or confirm the story. Little could be made of their unresponsiveness...
...reports followed a spate of rumors in recent days that the North Korean leader, who officially was listed as 74 years old, had died...
...spate of such letters has apparently influenced decisions to abandon a project to reverse the course of several rivers in the northern part of the country and to scale back a widely criticized plan for a war memorial. The huge monument, if built, would have obliterated the top of the Poklannaya Hill, which gives visitors a panoramic view of Moscow from the west. The projected war memorial was denounced by letter writers as "shameful," "monstrous" and an example of "gigantomania." Such public censure of projects already approved by the top leadership would never have been tolerated under previous Soviet regimes...