Word: knifings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem with all these figures is that they are useless in determining how many of the killings are political. In the climate of violence that has characterized El Salvador for decades, the pettiest disputes are settled permanently by gun or knife. In many cases the death squads have murdered people not for ideological reasons but for personal ones. In other cases, death squads have no role whatsoever. Rumors occasionally circulate about how this businessman or that official found with EM (for escuadron de la muerte) carved on his chest was actually killed by a jealous husband or business rival. Sometimes...
...bearded man wearing camouflage army gear and a beret and with a knife strapped to his leg walked into the studios of CJRP, a Quebec City radio station, one morning last week. He handed a cassette tape to a reporter and told her, "To you, my name is Mr. D." A short time later, a man fitting Mr. D.'s description burst into the Quebec provincial legislature, called the National Assembly, firing a submachine gun as he went and shouting, "Où sont les députés? Jevais les tuer!" (Where are the legislators? I am going...
...public rites of exorcism led to a series of grisly deaths. In one notorious incident, Party Member Liu Wenxue enlisted a self-styled witch to exorcise his wife, who had just received hospital treatment for heart disease. The witch proceeded to puncture the woman's nose with a knife, string her up to the ceiling and jerk her neck with a whip. Four days later, the patient died. Liu received only a mild official reprimand...
Fear of an explosion of discontent may have persuaded Honecker to open the gates a little. "A few months ago, you could have cut the mood here with a knife," says a Western diplomat in East Berlin. "The whole thing smacks of crisis management." But the exodus also enhances Honecker's image across the border as a more benign, if not exactly popular, patriarch who is willing to take risks for the sake of detente. Explains a West German official: "Honecker knows the road to other West European capitals goes through Bonn...
...Tuchman, character is fate, and the characters who blunder through her book are ineluctably fatal to cause or country. The six Renaissance Popes Tuchman puts to the knife are old and easy targets, always diverting to re-examine for some moments of low humor or lofty dudgeon. The author may be a bit extravagant in her criticism, as when she says that Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia Pope, was "as close to the prince of darkness as human beings are likely to come." What then of Caligula? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? But she correctly upbraids the Pontiffs for squandering...