Word: fortnighters
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...Africa never ceases to amaze." So wrote V.S. Naipaul in A Bend in the River, and last week, true to the novelist's assessment, Africa amazed again. As recently as a fortnight ago, Nigerian President Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 58, was being hailed as the enlightened leader of black Africa's most populous and, in many ways, most promising democracy. Several days later, he was under detention in Lagos, while Major General Mohammed Buhari, 41, organizer of a coup that deposed Shagari, was proclaiming to his countrymen that the armed forces had saved the nation from "total collapse...
...that the Chou Emperor who ruled China in 1090 had one empress, three consorts, nine spouses, 27 concubines and 81 assistant concubines, whose rotation of duty was exactly scheduled over the course of each fortnight so that the women of highest rank occupied the imperial bed on the nights closest to the full moon...
Other Marines spoke of their frustrated desire for revenge. "I think we ought to start shooting first," said one. Pointing across to the nearby slum Hayes Sullum, the source of sniper fire that had killed two Marines a fortnight earlier, he added, "You see guys running around there with AK-47 rifles and grenades. We should hit them." Yet others realized that punishment should be meted out only to those directly responsible for the attacks and that finding them would be impossible. "We just want to hit back, but hit back at whom?" asked another Marine...
...fortnight ago, the Reagan aides assembled their charts and facts in the White House Situation Room to show the President's Commission on Strategic Forces how the White House planned to approach the members of Congress advocating the build-down idea. Instantly the commission members, all old hands in the power game, could sense the resistance. The White House, they knew, would again irritate the men on the Hill by emphasizing the areas of difference, the doubts and anticipated inflexibilities of Reagan. Men like James Schlesinger, the former Defense Secretary; Lloyd Cutler, a former Carter aide; and Richard Helms...
Interior Secretary James Watt last week tried a new tack in his campaign to survive in office. His method: lying low in the wake of criticism loosed a fortnight ago when he described a newly appointed advisory commission by saying, "I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple." Watt reportedly drafted a resignation letter but did not send it. President Reagan told aides he thought Watt ran his department well, then announced that he would not ask him to resign. Instead, said Reagan, "I have accepted his apology...