Word: el
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hijacking of U.S. airliners for unscheduled trips to Cuba has become so commonplace that a virtually automatic routine has evolved for the prompt release of planes and passengers. The matter was far more serious last week when three well-dressed Arab passengers seized Israel's El Al Flight 426 an hour out of Rome and forced it to divert its course from Tel Aviv to Algiers. What the Arabs wanted from their skyway robbery was not a free trip but bounty and hostages to use against Israel...
When the big Boeing 707 touched down at Algiers' Dar-el-Beida airport, Algerian authorities impounded the plane. Next day they sent all passengers identified as non-Israelis to France on Air Algérie Caravelle jets after treating the detoured travelers well and giving them a sightseeing trip around Algiers. Twelve Israeli passengers and the crew of ten were held along with the plane, possibly as hostages for hundreds of Arab guerrillas currently in Israeli custody, though ten women and children were released at week's end. The hijackers were quickly identified as Palestinian Arab commandos attached...
Israel at once started dealing through diplomatic channels for the return of the plane, its male Israeli passengers and crew. It may take a while. Algeria formally declared war on Israel a year ago and rejected the cease-fire that ended the six-day Arab-Israeli conflict. Because El Al carried military cargo in the war, Algeria considers it a paramilitary organization. Furthermore, there is local precedent for long detention of unexpected guests. When a private plane carrying former Congolese Premier Moise Tshombe was hijacked to Algiers in June of last year, the Algerians took three months to release...
...frame through which El Cordobés' life is seen is his Big Fight - the 1964 Madrid corrida in which he was elevated to the status of matador de toros and in which he survived a near-fatal goring. Every tense moment in this corrida is the cue for a flashback: the future El Cordobés growing up in an earth-floored hovel where he sometimes has only grass to eat; serving a grueling apprenticeship at village fiestas where the only available medical care is a slosh of alcohol in an open wound; rising under the tutelage...
Authors Collins and Lapierre, whose first collaboration was the bestselling Is Paris Burning?, make prime melodrama out of El Cordobés' story, and they are frequently informative about the brutal, corrupt realities beneath bullfighting's cloak of romanticism. But the problem with their cinematic technique is that while it requires only a grainy black-and-white script, they give it a glossy, Technicolor treatment. Every irony is underlined, every climax hammered home, every scene overstuffed with authentic touches from their well-stocked notebooks. The result, paradoxically, is that their finished product is rarely as vivid and compelling...