Word: sprees
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decision overturned the conviction and death sentence of Glen Burton Ake, who killed a minister and his wife in Oklahoma in 1979 at the start of a monthlong crime spree. Ake pleaded insanity and asked for a psychiatric examination to evaluate his mental state at the time of the crime. The state refused and unsuccessfully argued before the Supreme Court that providing psychiatrists would prove too costly. Ake now faces a new trial. The wider effect of the court's ruling was not immediately clear. Forty-two states as well as the Federal Government already make psychiatrists available to poor...
...Gannett Co. Inc., the year has opened with a shopping spree. In January the Rosslyn, Va.-based media giant, which publishes 124 newspapers, including the national daily USA Today, announced it was buying the respected Des Moines Register (circ. 240,000) and three sister papers in Tennessee and Iowa for $200 million from the Des Moines Register & Tribune Co. Last week Gannett purchased the nation's fourth-largestcirculation periodical, Family Weekly (the leaders: Parade, 23 million; the Reader's Digest, 18 million; TV Guide, 17 million...
...here come seven new youth movies to glut the glut. Tuff Turf, a gang movie set in Los Angeles, plays like the Beat It video at feature length. Fandango sends five college guys on a West Texas spree. Heaven Help Us has five Roman Catholic schoolboys getting cute in the confessional and decapitating a statue of their school's patron saint. Mischief pairs a wimp and a stud in the small-town '50s. In Tomboy, Betsy Russell is a Flashdance- style mechanic who goes stock-car racing. In Vision Quest, Rocky pins Flashdance on the high school wrestling...
...reason for the spin-off spree is that many conglomerates have taken a beating in the stock market. Investors are increasingly disillusioned with the notion that a single management can successfully handle a grab bag of companies. Observes Norman Berg, a professor at Harvard Business School: "In the 1960s and 1970s, the stock market favored growth by acquisition. Now the liquidation value of companies is thought to be greater than the sum of their parts...
...reason for the shopping spree is that calendars are bargains, costing from $4.95 for wall models to $14.95 for desk versions. Another factor: freebies from local merchants and major companies are disappearing. Cost-conscious Chemical Bank, for instance, gave away 550,000 calendars in its New York branches in 1982 but has printed less than half that number this year. Calendars are becoming personal statements. "There's no such thing as the family calendar any more," says Paul Gottlieb, president of Harry N. Abrams, which publishes seven calendars. "Everyone in the family has to have one, and they have...