Word: daggering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Critics have charged in the past that despite the proven value of open-source information, the government has tended to give more prominence to reports gained through cloak-and-dagger efforts. One glaring example: the CIA failed in 1998 to predict a nuclear test in India, even though the country's Prime Minister had campaigned on a platform promising a robust atomic-weapons program...
...Guinea's vast rivers. Hacked from the necks of enemies or retrieved from the graves of ancestors, the skulls were a central part of tribal culture. No youth could call himself a man until he had defeated an enemy warrior in battle, beheaded the corpse with a cassowary-bone dagger, and displayed the head on his clan's wooden slit drum. And few family houses were complete without the skull of an ancestor, decorated with clay features, shell eyes and real hair to create a lifelike image of the deceased...
...ancestors often kept in special beds in their descendants' huts. But now many of the slit drums and skull cradles are empty, for new European head-hunters have been prowling the river regions, ethnic art dealers armed with dollars and euros more deadly to native culture than any dagger. "These items are going to private homes," says p.n.g. National Museum director Soroi Eoe, the man responsible for thwarting the theft of cultural artifacts. "They are being lost not just to Papua New Guinea, but to the world. Under the law, these human remains are a prohibited export...
...course not,? he replies angrily. ?Sabbah never killed innocents. And his men only used a dagger, never poisons or easy ways of killing. They studied their victims, spent years getting close to them before they struck...
...despite all the cloak-and-dagger, it was impossible to keep the secret. At the appointed hour, 7 p.m. last Friday, a battalion of helicopters, chartered by enterprising reporters and photographers, hovered above the rambling $6.5 million Malibu home of Kurt Unger, a producer and friend of the bridegroom's parents. Some of the shutterbugs brought their choppers dangerously close to the ground during the ceremony. The whir of the copters' blades drowned out the vows of Rock Singer Madonna Louise Ciccone and Actor Sean Penn, the girl and boy idols of teen America. Said one guest: "No one knew...