Word: baguio
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...just a game, and it is a long way from Moscow. But for the Kremlin, the world chess championship beginning in the Philippine mountain resort of Baguio City this week is a grudge match involving national pride and politics. Philippines President Marcos had spent a fortune providing a new 1,000-seat amphitheater and other facilities for the event. As newsmen and chess aficionados from all over began to gather, much of the early betting was not on who would win but on just how many of the Soviets accompanying Anatoly Karpov, 27, the slim, intense defending champion from Leningrad...
...Soviet skittishness is understandable. Ideologically, the stakes in Baguio City are even higher than they were in Iceland six years ago, when Bobby Fischer came out of Brooklyn to whip Boris Spassky and temporarily break the long Soviet domination of the game that Lenin himself consecrated as "a gymnasium of the mind." Defending the Soviet honor this time is Karpov, a onetime prodigy who inherited the world title in 1975, when Fischer failed to defend it,* and is now a major Soviet hero, complete with membership on the Young Communist League's central committee. But facing...
Tass has blasted him for being "obsessed with vanity." Korchnoi, for his part, has said that he sees Baguio as a "political challenge." and is eager to take on an opponent "who licks the boots of the authorities...
Today, Korchnoi is the Lear of chess: pacing and grimacing, given to lavish tirades and, on occasion, paranoia. During a qualifying match with Spassky earlier this year, he accused his opponent of inducing hallucinations via hypnosis, and even suspected microwaves had been employed to destroy his concentration. In Baguio City last week he demanded the right to bring to the match a fountain pen-sized device designed to detect "X rays, gamma rays and other radiation...
...From Baguio City, where they met in conference, the islands' 69 bishops denounced widespread corruption and exploitation of the poor. "The failure of government is the failure of every citizen," read the bishops' statement. It went on to detail the governmental sins: "Bribery and extortion . . . illegal traffic in arms and their use to oppress the weak . . . unjust dispossession of farmers . . . the wanton destruction and pillage of homes as a display of force or vendetta . . . the miscarriage of justice through political stratagem...