THROWBACK THURSDAY • As we are coming to the end of 2014, look at the highlights of 1985 for our #TBT.  Pictures are explained clockwise from the upper left-hand corner:

— President Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva for the first summit conference Reagan had with any Soviet leader after assuming his presidency.

— Students at Columbia University in New York demonstrated against their school’s investments in U.S. firms that did business in South Africa.

— Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails gave the victory sign as they filed out of captivity in a prisoner exchange that outraged many Israelis.

— Minister of Islam Louis Farrakhan preached to a capacity crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden.  Farrakhan denounced Judiasm as a “gutter religion” in 1984, and continued to stir controversy wherever he traveled in 1985.

— Cross at military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany that also contains the graves of several Waffen SS soldiers, Nazi elite guards responsible for many World War II atrocities. President Reagan’s decision to visit the cemetery in 1985 touched off a worldwide controversy.

— John Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, is pictured preaching at New York’s Temple Emanu-El, on the 20th anniversary of the papal encyclical on Roman Catholic relations and attitudes towards Jews, “Nostra Aetate.”