Word: extract
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Fields of poppies have bloomed for centuries in the remote, jungle-clad valleys of northern Laos where five nations-Laos. Red China, Burma. Thailand and Communist North Viet Nam-meet in a tangle of ill-defined boundaries. The local Meos and kindred tribesmen delicately pierce the flowering buds, extract the sticky raw opium. Some of it they use themselves: when a Meo child complains of an ache, his mother may blow opium smoke into his mouth to ease the pain; for Meo adults, opium smoking provides a goofing-off pleasure that is their substitute for the combined attractions of alcohol...
...skinny, 15-year-old girl is well schooled in human relations (she has been a Harlem prostitute for a year) and chemistry (drinking water, she knows, helps the smoker extract that last bit of nourishment from a reefer). But Lu Ann is a little weak in geography. "Now Man," she says, "you aint gassin me you really got an ocean you can get to on the subway?" Duke Custis, a knife-scarred hard case at 14, knows well enough where the Atlantic is, even has a vague notion that Europe lies somewhere beyond Coney Island...
...cousin, Colonel Fadhil Abbas Mahdawi, a willing tool of the Communists, the court stages televised nightly trials of "enemies of the regime," i.e., enemies of the Communist Party. Mahdawi is a suety, quick-witted ruffian-"Egypt has always had bad rulers. Cleopatra was a whore"-who holds court to extract confessions rather than dispense justice. Making up his own rules, treating the accused as already convicted, interrupting to make long and wildly irrelevant speeches, Mahdawi, with his four fellow judges, has already sentenced to death dozens of victims, including two former Premiers of Iraq...
...Treasury's argument is that the allowance off taxable income (ranging from 5% for clay to 27½% for oil and gas) was originally conceived as a form of compensation to industries that extract raw materials and thus presumably "deplete" their storehouse of goods. It was meant to apply only to the raw material itself. But recent court decisions have extended the allowance to include a wide range of refined and processed products. Oilmen, for example, are able to compute the allowance on the value of petroleum products made from gas as they come from the cycling plants...
...book Anglo-Irish Novelist Lawrence Durrell, who once served with the British embassy in Belgrade, leaves his steamy Mideastern cabals (Balthazar, Justine) for airy Balkan spoofs. The eleven grotesque tales in Esprit de Corps (subtitled Sketches from Diplomatic Life) do not all come off, but the best of them extract a flavorsome slivovitz from the Titoesque...