Word: chieftain
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...subsequent rise to criminal eminence was swift: she fell in with a dacoit named Babu Gujar, seduced his lieutenant Vikram Mallaha and, while bathing Gujar one evening, stabbed him to death. Thus Mallaha became chieftain, Phoolan second in command. Dressed in blue jeans and a multicolored turban, brandishing a stolen bullhorn and a rifle, she quickly earned a reputation as a deadly shot. When Mallaha's restive followers killed him, Phoolan formed her own gang. On Feb. 14, 1981, to avenge her lover's murder, she and her marauders gunned down 20 apparently innocent citizens in the village...
Rick's Café Americain is the state of the stateless. Rick sets himself up as a kind of chieftain or caliph in his isolated, autonomous, amoral fiefdom, where he rules absolutely. Victor and Rick are splintered aspects, it may be, of the same man. Ultimately, the ego rises above mere selfish despair and selfish desire. It is reborn in sacrifice and community: "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill o' beans in this crazy world." Idealism and its bride ascend into heaven...
...great maples leads to the Hall of Philosophy, a determinedly Greek structure with large white columns. It would be impossible to utter a facetious word in this edifice, and Gene Outka, a professor of religious studies at Yale, is seriously posing conundrums, one of which concerns a military chieftain in some benighted land who has condemned ten political prisoners to death but who offers to spare nine if an American will personally shoot the remaining wretch. Outka is taking his audience carefully over difficult ground. Still, there is something off-putting about the contrast between the violence of the parable...
...mountain. At the foot of the peak were parked ten huge 24-wheel trucks. They were sophisticated surveillance stations equipped with electronic gear that receives signals from the equipment above. The writing on the spy trucks was in Russian letters. Near by were 30 Iranian army British-made Chieftain tanks...
...bizarre showcase for all this lethal hardware is the 13-month-old Persian Gulf conflict. Iraq has been using Soviet MiG jets, French Mirage jets, Brazilian Urutu armored personnel carriers, and Soviet T-72 tanks to fight Iran's American F-4 jets, British Chieftain tanks and Italian-built Chinook helicopters. "The Iran-Iraq arms buildup is a classic case of internal pressures and external fears combining to produce a disaster," says a diplomat who has served in both countries...