Word: chieftain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...advanced F-14 interceptors. The principal problems with the planes as well as with the Iranian navy and ground forces: lack of maintenance and spare parts. According to Western analysts, only eight of the F-14s were airworthy and one-third of the army's 875 British-built Chieftain tanks were no longer serviceable. Army manpower was down from about 240,000 under the Shah to an estimated 180,000 as a result of desertions and purges; 250 generals had been replaced by inexperienced officers or by military-minded mullahs. Said a Pentagon expert: "In order to move full...
...South American Tupinamba tribe would take a prisoner of war, make him consort with a woman of their tribe, then allow the woman to bear a child so that they could increase the tragedy by slaughtering both the prisoner and his baby. Sometimes in New Zealand, when a chieftain was killed during a war between two tribes, hostilities were broken off while the body of the leader was chopped up by his opponents, roasted and devoured. Among the southern Slavs a mother has been known to ay her infant son down in the cradle to sleep upon the bloodstained shirt...
...four earlier negotiating sessions between two foreign ministry delegates and the woman guerrilla-always accompanied by Mexican Ambassador Ricardo Galan, representing the hostages-both sides had apparently made some concessions. The terrorists, under the orders of a mysterious masked chieftain called Comandante Uno, reportedly scaled down their original ransom demand from $50 million to $10 million; they also stopped insisting on worldwide dissemination of their revolutionary manifesto. For its part, the government promised a kind of prearranged amnesty for the entrenched terrorists by offering them safe passage out of the country and a plane to fly them to countries...
Inside the embassy the guerrillas were treating their captives with courtesy and consideration. The Costa Rican Ambassador, who was released shortly after the takeover, described the terrorists as "a group of highly educated intellectuals" who displayed "incredible discipline" in responding to their masked chieftain, "Commandante Número...
...crash of a small plane in 1964. Since his recovery, he has suffered periodically from back trouble-much as his brother John did in his rocking chair in the White House. On one extended foray, the Senator flinched visibly every time he clambered out of the eight-seat Piper Chieftain that took him from New York City to his stops in three New England states. In Northampton, Mass., from zealous Secret Service agents kept local TV newsmen too far from the plane to film Kennedy's arrival, the candidate summoned them to within camera range and then obligingly...