Word: silver
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Shortly before 5 o'clock, the dignitaries were introduced. Poland's President Henryk Jablonski, a silver-haired figure in a black overcoat: a smattering of applause. Franciszek Cardinal Macharski of Cracow wearing crimson biretta and robes: hearty applause. Then Union Leader Lech Walesa, the improbable hero of last summer's strikes, bundled in his customary duffel coat: tumultuous applause. After a minute of silence, the city's church bells began to peal, and ship sirens wailed from the port, a keening cry that sent shivers through the crowd. The names of those who died at Gdansk...
Walesa is a devout Roman Catholic who rarely misses morning Mass. A wood-and-silver crucifix is prominently displayed wherever he speaks. On his left lapel he always wears a badge depicting the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the revered symbol of Polish nationalism. He wrote a widely reproduced prayer that begins, "Virgin Mary, I come to you in the total modesty of my heart...
Thousands of moneymen also discovered that the glitter of gold and silver can be a sometime thing. Unrest in the Middle East and inflation in the U.S. sent the price of gold soaring to a high of $875 per oz. in late January, an increase of more than $300 in less than four weeks. That same month, silver went from $39.50 per oz. to $50.35 per oz. People rushed to determine the value of their ancestral sterling silverware or gold rings, and of that was soon in the melting ovens metal dealers. The inevitable sell-off followed even more quickly...
Leading the routed silver and bulls were Bunker and Herbert Hunt, Dallas bullionaires, who at one owned an estimated 100 million oz. of silver. In March, they used their $2 silver hoard to buy even more of the metal. After the market collapsed later month, the pair had to use their vast holdings, including race horses, art and antiques, as collateral to back the loans had made in their attempt to corner world silver market. A battered Hunt later said, "A billion dollars is what it used...
Soldiers wielding automatic rifles patrolled the dusty plaza outside as 14 priests celebrated a requiem Mass in the village church of Chalatenango, El Salvador. Local children, black-veiled peasant women and silver-haired men filled the pews alongside relatives of the deceased. Inside the coffins lay the bodies of two New York nuns, Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke. Along with another U.S. nun, Sister Dorothy Kazel, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, they had been murdered by right-wing terrorists who regarded their relief activities among the poor as "Communist work...