Word: spectacularly
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Gorbachev had demonstrated his clout four weeks before the plenum by taking swift action against the military in the wake of West German Pilot Mathias Rust's spectacular landing just outside Red Square. When the Hamburg teenager's single-engine Cessna penetrated some 400 miles of Soviet airspace with impunity, Gorbachev immediately sacked Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov and Air Defense Chief Alexander Koldunov. In addition to giving the country an object lesson in the personal accountability of those in power -- and demonstrating the military's subservience to the political leadership -- Gorbachev seized the occasion to place a reform-minded ally...
Meanwhile, what is by Soviet standards a spectacular thaw has got under way in the cultural domain. During the past year more than a dozen previously banned movies have been screened before fascinated audiences. On the stage, plays like Mikhail Shatrov's Dictatorship of Conscience examine past failures of Communism. Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a novel that chronicles the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, appeared in a literary journal after going unpublished for two decades. Last month a group of ex-political prisoners and dissident writers applied for permission to publish their own magazine, aptly titled...
Foreigners are sometimes bemused -- and appalled -- by the American habit of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate kind. Is America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a compulsion periodically to tear out the wiring of its own Government? One had thought Reagan would be the first President since Eisenhower to retire happily after two terms...
...operation. As the police tell it, ZZZZ Best was probably acting as a front for organized crime figures, who would buy equipment for the company with "dirty" money and replace their investment with "clean" cash skimmed from the proceeds of the firm's legitimate business. According to Gates, the spectacular growth in revenues that led to Minkow's fame was in fact an elaborate fiction...
Other celebrations range from the spectacular to the frivolous. This week, on July 4, if some technical problems can be overcome, former Chief Justice Burger and Bob Hope will watch as St. Louisans raise the world's largest flag on the banks of the Mississippi. Measuring 208 ft. by 420 ft., the flag will be hoisted with the help of a helicopter. Illinois has printed long, canvas versions of the Constitution which it hopes every citizen in the state will sign. But at least one man has refused. "I never sign anything I can't have a copy...