Word: week
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most serious obstacles to successful truce making between the two Communist powers, however, seemed highly contemporary. One week before the Moscow talks, with obvious support from the Soviet Union, Viet Nam lashed out with a series of attacks in Cambodia, where troops loyal to deposed Premier Pol Pot, backed by China, have been carrying on a stubborn insurgency...
...successor had been picked, paratroops were at the ready, and when the despised dictator left the country, voilà! "Operation Barracuda" would go into effect. So well, in fact, did the plot come off that when tyrannical Emperor Bokassa I was overthrown in the Central African Empire two weeks ago, it was hailed as a triumph of sanity over murderous despotism. By last week, however, the French connection in the affair was proving an embarrassment, and the all too Francophile new regime of President David Dacko was proving less than popular...
...members of Bokassa's Cabinet. At the same time, supporters of former Prime Minister Ange Patasse, a prominent opposition figure who had quit the Bokassa regime in 1978 in protest over its atrocities, staged anti-French demonstrations when his departure from Paris was held up by technicalities. At week's end Patasse castigated Dacko as an accomplice of Bokassa and demanded he resign. Part of it, no doubt, was pique that Dacko got there first; reportedly, Patasse had been plotting a coup...
...sooner had Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet hobbled home, aching from the loss of three dancers who had defected on the troupe's U.S. tour last month, than Soviet prestige was hit by an even more bruising blow: the defection in Switzerland last week of Figure Skating Champions Oleg Protopopov, 47, and Ludmila Belousova, 43. So alarmed were Soviet officials over the rash of recent defections that they canceled a scheduled 28-concert U.S. tour by the Moscow State Symphony. Before the drastic decision was made, the orchestra's U.S. booking agent, Samuel Niefeld, was suddenly summoned...
...Protopopov and Belousova defection had been the cause of particular consternation in the Soviet Union, where the husband-and-wife couple were among the country's most honored athletes. They had vanished at the end of a four-week exhibition tour of West Germany and Switzerland. When it was reported that they had requested political asylum in Switzerland, shock waves struck Moscow. Said a stunned and baffled Soviet sports official: "For sports personalities of their caliber, there are no problems. They had everything they wanted here...