Word: chessboard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When it dawned on MacArthur that he too was being abandoned, he spoke grandly of his destiny. "They will never take me alive," he said as he slipped a loaded pistol into his pocket. But MacArthur was just a pawn on an enormous political chessboard. Australia, threatened by the Japanese advances, demanded the return of three divisions sent to help Britain fight Germany. But the Australians said they would not insist if the U.S. promised troops and appointed an American supreme commander for the whole South Pacific. Churchill, unwilling to withdraw the Australians then battling Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps...
...still alive. Reuters quoted an unidentified official in Beirut as saying an American and a Briton, possibly envoy Terry Waite, would be released "for certain" within a week. That sounded as though the end game may now be under way in earnest. But nothing on the Middle East chessboard is for certain...
...bans all Chinese food, language and customs from the house and abandons her stepson to regular beatings at the hands of neighborhood bullies who call him by the humiliating name China Boy. Kai gets little help from his father, who "was in an untenable position, forked on the cultural chessboard where the white squares of intellectual China met the hard black industrial squares of the West." But the boy does find allies in a black family, a Hispanic mechanic, a Chinese scholar who is an old family friend and a trio of boxing coaches at the Y.M.C.A. With their help...
...that the cold war is over, intervention need no longer be quite so suspect as a cynical gambit on the East-West chessboard. The concept of benevolent interference is already coming back into fashion. Last year, while Liberia was in the throes of its tribal self-immolation, five European envoys in Monrovia pleaded for the U.S. to send in troops to stop the killing. "The interdependence of nations," said an Italian diplomat, "no longer permits other nations to sit idle while one country plunges into anarchy and national suicide." Or, he might have added, mass murder at the hand...
Taking a cue from Carroll, Keene read the map as a drawing of the British Isles with mirror images of towns outlined on opposite sides of a blank, gridless chessboard, which he took to be Ireland. Turning to the code, he concluded that WK meant white king, representing the police, that BQ (black queen) was the missing woman, and that BK (black king) was the suspect. Using these clues, Keene deduced that Theresa Terry must be buried in the Irish town of Limerick. His theory tallied with police discoveries that the suspect had hired a car and used credit cards...