Word: thickness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While the Ayatullah's body lay in state inside a refrigerated glass box, the crowd of mourners in Tehran became so thick that eight were reportedly crushed to death. The next day, as a helicopter brought the open wooden coffin containing Khomeini's remains to the city's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, nearly a million mourners thrust forward in the blistering heat and choking dust, many wailing and pounding their heads as they groped to touch the body and snatch a piece of the linen burial shroud...
With spirits running so high and the crowds so thick, the total absence of violence up until Saturday bordered on the miraculous -- a testament to the skill of the demonstration's young organizers. "This was not an explosion from nowhere. This had been building for a long time," explains David Zweig, an assistant professor of government at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Even so, he adds, "it is remarkable how unviolent it has been...
...make a comeback. Some lodgepole pinecones are serotinous: they open and release seeds only when activated by the heat generated by fires. In some areas surveyed by Yellowstone biologists, seed densities from such cone releases measure in the millions per acre. As a result, the ground will soon be thick with pine sprouts...
Anyone who can boss Los Angeles for 16 straight years without falling on his face needs a bit of luck, a bit of skill or a thick coating of Teflon -- and maybe all three. Through four terms, Mayor Tom Bradley, 71, managed to keep his troubled nation-within-a-state from disintegrating completely without himself succumbing to hubris or, worse, scandal. A diffident, dedicated man, Bradley seemed the personification of rectitude. He never got too big for his britches. Bad judgment was something else...
...across the state a near miracle was happening. On that same day, West Virginia legislators completed a session unlike any other in the state's history. Democrats and Republicans pushed through a thick package of legislation that would trim the state's tangled bureaucracy, reorganize its disastrous finances and launch an ambitious program of educational reform. The measures were ramrodded into law by rookie Democratic Governor Gaston Caperton, 49, a man who is determined to upend the state's feckless political tradition and sell mountaineers something they haven't had in decades: hope...