Word: jackal
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There are ceremonial differences too. When new President Nelson Mandela enters the House, he is preceded by a loinclothed, jackal-skinned imbongi -- a traditional Xhosa praise singer. And in a multiracial assembly that represents 11 languages, several religions and any number of different churches, the traditional opening prayer -- once led by a minister of religion -- is out, replaced by a minute of silence for personal meditation...
...JACKAL FLASHED A WICKED smile as he ushered 38 invited guests into the red brick schoolhouse. Before the Nicaraguan government delegates could take in their surroundings in the muddy mountain town of El Zungano, the Jackal's band of former contra guerrillas closed around them in a tight cordon. Training automatic weapons on the hostages, the rightist rebels announced the price for freedom: dismissal of Sandinista army chief Humberto Ortega and top presidential aide Antonio Lacayo, viewed as too easy on the country's ousted Marxist rulers...
Some acknowledged spy masters have joined the funeral march. "The public won't accept that espionage is still happening," observes novelist Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal). "The KGB general as the all-purpose bad guy isn't going to work anymore...
...preferable to surrender. "Even if he loses militarily," says a Bush adviser, Saddam may calculate that "he will survive and will have won for having stood up to the U.S." -- a political victory like Nasser's in & 1967. This last, apparently quite real, possibility confirms a Bedouin proverb: "A jackal is a lion in his own neighborhood." It is "increasingly obvious," says Ajami, that "Saddam sees himself as the avenger of the Arab nation, history's instrument to redress the slights visited on Arabs for milleniums...
French novelist Loup Durand fills out this scenario with the graceless prose that marks other classics of the genre, including John Buchan's The Thirty- nine Steps, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and almost everything written by Ian Fleming. The boy's doomed mother Maria is not merely an eyeful, she has a "passion for beautiful things and more than enough money to indulge it . . . Coco Chanel suits, tea roses, the best restaurants, jazz, and driving her Bugatti at a reckless speed...