Word: ago
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...I.R.A.-I ran away!" With that derisive taunt, British troops arriving in Ulster ten years ago dismissed the threat posed by the remnants of the old Irish Republican Army. Their laughter died quickly after the birth of the Provisional I.R.A., whose cold-eyed gunmen began ambushing Protestant loyalist civilians, policemen and the newly arrived soldiers with ruthless efficiency. But a decade of Provo bloodshed, climaxed by the wanton murder of Lord Mountbatten in Southern Ireland last August, has eroded much of the I.R.A.'s support in the largely Catholic Republic. "They started well but now they're Communists...
When they first appeared in Germany 500 years ago, one chronicle denounced them as an "uncouth, dirty and barbarous" people who "live like dogs and are expert at thieving and cheating." During the Middle Ages, aristocrats out on a hunt considered them fair game, along with birds and boar. More than 400,000 of them were murdered by the Nazis in the course of the Holocaust that also claimed 6 million Jewish lives. Even today West Germany's gypsies are openly persecuted. Says Grattan Puxon, general secretary of the Roma World Union, an international gypsy organization based in Bern...
...race of dark-eyed, olive-skinned traders who began migrating out of India a millennium ago and still speak their own language (a guttural tongue with Aryan roots called Romany), gypsies have been vilified wherever they have gone. Of the 10 million who now live outside India, roughly half have settled in Eastern Europe, while a million are in Western Europe and 500,000 are in the U.S. But only 50,000 gypsies are in West Germany. It is the home, they believe, of the worst prejudice against them...
...dirt road running up Parachute Creek in western Colorado winds through an ever steeper canyon. As the road climbs, it deteriorates into first a stream bed and then a cliff-hugging path that passes a blackened ledge of shale rock that was struck by lightning two years ago and spouted flames for three days. The Indians once dubbed the magic mineral "the rock that burns...
Actually, "shale oil" is neither shale nor oil. The rock is marl, a variety of limestone laced with a solid fossil fuel called kerogen. The kerogen was deposited 40 million years ago in the form of millions of tons of vegetable matter that collected on the bottom of a mammoth freshwater lake that then covered Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. But these lake-bed accumulations were never subjected to temperatures as high as 300° F and to extreme pressures that in time created underground deposits of readily usable liquid oil and natural gas. Now man must finish nature...