Word: sofia
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...Markov had won national acclaim as a writer and TV commentator. One of his later plays, The Assassins, dealt with a plot to kill a general in a police state. His defection, and his subsequent BBC and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, had been an embarrassment to the Sofia government and triggered a shake-up in its propaganda establishment. The 1977 defection of Kostov, formerly a political commentator and correspondent for the state radio and television, meant more loss of government prestige, and of sensitive political information...
There was another reason to suspect Sofia. If Markov had in fact been jabbed by a poison-tipped or poison-firing umbrella?or had been shot with a pellet gun by a man holding an umbrella?only a security service would probably have such sophisticated gadgetry at hand. Today's secret agents and hit men have access to numerous James Bondian devices that can make murder look like natural death ?poison delivered by aerosol spray, tiny darts fired from pens or cigarette boxes. In the late '50s a KGB agent killed two Ukrainian exile leaders in Germany by squirting...
...point up the ideological distance between the two ends of Europe, a more traditional Communist gathering of Soviet-bloc nations was taking place in Sofia, Bulgaria, even as Carrillo spoke. There, the prime topics were containing dissidence and seeking coexistence with the Euro-Communists...
Urged on by an electronic barrage of such jingles, nearly four-fifths of Spain's 23 million voters−including King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia −turned out last week for the country's first free vote since 1936. By a resounding 94.2%, the political reform bill drafted by Premier Adolfo Suárez's five-month-old government was approved, setting the stage for the election next spring of a bicameral legislature...
...route to the U.S., the royal couple stopped off in the Dominican Republic, where Christopher Columbus, financed by Queen Isabella of Spain, made one of his first landfalls in the New World in 1492. In Washington, President Ford welcomed Juan Carlos and Sofia on the south lawn of the White House, then went off with the King and aides for a 40-minute review of Spanish-American relations. The talk centered on the proposed five-year treaty renewing U.S. base rights in Spain in return for $1.2 billion in grants and credits. Though the treaty is likely to be approved...