Word: emperors
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...Butcher of Bangui," as the African newspaper has dubbed His Imperial Majesty Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire, is a ruler whose future may be on the block. Last week the U.S. suddenly recalled Ambassador Goodwin Cooke, following reports by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, that in April about 100 schoolchildren had been murdered by Bokassa's imperial guard in the capital of Bangui. A week earlier, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing pointedly avoided shaking hands with the Emperor at a Franco-African conference in Rwanda...
...April killings climaxed a year of unrest and protest over the big-spending ways of the self-crowned Emperor, a for mer French army sergeant who seized power in a 1965 coup. Although his landlocked, Texas-size country is one of the world's poorest, Bokassa reportedly has been dipping heavily into the public treasury to pay for his six homes in France (including a chateau in the Loire Valley), his three wives, his royal court, and tuition for many of his 35 children at Swiss boarding schools...
Last January the Emperor ordered all primary and secondary students to wear special uniforms bearing his own imperial likeness. The uniforms cost an extortionate $165 each and were sold exclusively by a factory owned by one of the Emperor's wives. Weeks of strikes and rioting followed the decree. On the night of April 18, according to the Amnesty report, Bokassa's soldiers rounded up a large number of children and youths in districts where protests had occurred and took them to Ngaragba prison. About 100 were killed that night. Some were shot, some clubbed, others bayoneted; about...
SEXUAL perversity is perhaps Zappa's best-known theme, stemming from his noted lack of sexual inhibitions. If, as a cherubic young schoolboy, Francis Vincent has been cast as the innocent child in "The Emperor and His Clothes," he would sooner have made unflattering remarks about the emperor's genitals than about his lack of apparel. Always fond of extended "comedy show" tunes, Zappa has recorded rock's kinkiest scenarios on wax with nary a batting of his beady eyes. (Those of unsalvageable purient interest may refer to the Live at the Fillmore East "white album," or the equally memorable...
...Compared with Jesus or the Buddha, information about the life of the man who became known as the Messenger of Allah is relatively abundant, although the facts have been embellished with pious folklore. Some have claimed that at Muhammad's birth the palace of the Persian emperor trembled, or that a mysterious light ignited at his mother's breast, shining all the way to Syria, 800 miles away. It was said that his body cast no shadow and that when Ms hair fell into a fire it would not burn. Muhammad himself disdained any miraculous claims, insisting that...