Word: legion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...troops who landed at Beirut's port at dawn on Saturday belong to one of the most decorated units in the French army: the Foreign Legion's Deuxième REP (Second Foreign Parachute Regiment), whose history goes back to 1948, when, as the Second Foreign Parachute Battalion, it was sent to Cambodia to maintain internal security. In 1954, as Viet Minh guerrillas tightened their siege of the French base at Dien Bien Phu, 700 members of the battalion were dropped into the camp at night as last-minute reinforcements. Although the French were eventually defeated, the legionnaires...
Like other troops in the Foreign Legion created by King Louis Philippe in 1831 to pursue France's colonial ambitions, members of the Deuxième REP ostensibly are foreigners. In fact, many are Frenchmen who, with the tacit complicity of the legion, join by pretending to be Belgian, Swiss or Canadian. One attraction for recruits: new identity papers that protect them from the police. The Deuxième claims to have killed or wounded some 4,000 rebels during the Algerian war, while only 171 of its men were killed and 427 wounded. The unit remained neutral when...
...horror stories are legion. A spiffy new car has to be brought back to the repair shop time after time to have the same problem fixed. In the past, consumers stuck with such lemons could do little but wage an expensive legal fight with the manufacturer. In Connecticut, however, all that will change on Oct. 1, when the state's new "lemon law" takes effect...
...Gymsuit by Paula Danziger. "Sometimes I feel guilty being so miserable, but middle-class kids have problems too." Indeed they do, and from Back Bay Boston to Bel Air, Calif., Marcy 's dilemmas and the perils of her fictional peers are avidly shared by a growing legion of juvenile readers. Once limited to such fare as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, teen fiction has blossomed into a lucrative new genre: suburban social realism...
Interior Secretary James Watt and his legion of antagonists have a perverse symbiosis going: he has a talent for enraging them, and they seem happy for the regular opportunities to lambaste him. Last week was a regular free-for-all of Watt-inspired controversy. Much of it stemmed from an ill-advised letter the Interior Secretary wrote to Moshe Arens, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., in which Watt argued that "liberals of the [U.S.] Jewish community" who oppose his aggressive oil-development policies "will weaken our ability to be a good friend of Israel...