Word: fief
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...latest acronym for an organization that was founded in 1917 as the Cheka and was successively known as GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB. A fief within the Soviet state, the KGB is an intelligence agency, counterintelligence organization and internal security police with its own uniformed military branch. Administratively it is divided into various "directorates" whose number and function are frequently scrambled, partly to confuse rival foreign intelligence services...
...Italy's city-states were being ravaged by imperialist-republican quarrels, and the papacy went into exile in Avignon, part of a papal fief on the borders of France. Not unjustly, the exile of the papacy was called the "Babylonian captivity": the avarice and corruption of the papal court was unequaled even in the days of the Medicis and Borgias. Seven French Popes resided at Avignon before Gregory XI (1370-78) finally returned the papal seat to Rome...
...ranks as leader of the relatively small western Cape, still the historically sacred region of Afrikaner origins. He is not the patient negotiator that Vorster was. But he has proved to be a shrewd organizer. After becoming Defense Minister in 1966, he characteristically turned the ministry into a personal fief. At the same time he systematically built up an awesome military machine...
...seemed an ordinary mountain town, each family clustered around a house that gave it not only shelter but identity. There was little class distinction and considerable sharing of resources. The villagers were united in fierce anticlericalism, and with reason. The regional ruler, the Count de Foix, had defended his fief from exorbitant church taxes. But when the aristocrat died, the bishops of Pamiers imposed ever more onerous tithes. The new church exactions doubtless influenced many villagers to consider the teachings of the Cathar parfaits (perfect ones, the heresy's elect...
...degree. Not only had Charles taken time out for state visits abroad and his elaborate investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, but he had also spent a term at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, taking a cram course in Welsh to cool nationalist resentment in his titular fief. Even so, a large part of Charles' education at Cambridge was extracurricular. His happiest hours at Trinity were apparently spent performing in a series of comic revues, in which Charles showed a talent for daffy comedy and self-deprecating good humor...