Word: makeshift
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...Newry operation--dubbed "Bloody Thursday" by the British press--began when two masked I.R.A. men hijacked a truck. Later, the makeshift mortar tubes were bolted onto the flatbed and the vehicle was then driven into town and parked in a vacant lot close to the R.U.C. station. The nine metal tubes on the truck--each 6 ft. long and 6 in. in diameter--were linked by detonating wires, suggesting to police that they had been fired by timing devices. Despite the apparent sophistication of the weapon, not all the shells found their target. Some fell in front of the station...
...settlement, and a squad of toughs had been brought in to add muscle to the operation. The rumors proved false, but by dawn, the men of Crossroads, a wretched black squatters' camp in the sand dunes just outside Cape Town, began blocking the roads around their shacks with makeshift barricades of logs, stones, oil drums, old tires and anything else they could find. Then they set the barriers ablaze...
...emergency efforts made during the deadly winter assault provided some temporary relief. In Chicago, where the temperature dropped to a record -27 degrees F, police picked up those in danger of freezing and delivered them to makeshift dormitories in schools and park recreation centers. As the temperature plummeted to -18 degrees in Pittsburgh, most of the city's 1,500 street people squeezed into shelters and missions, while some slept in jail. In New York City, where the temperature dipped to -2 degrees, a record low for the date, 19,269 of the homeless (another record) jammed into city shelters...
...flood. Gaunt, starving, often dressed in rags, thousands of Ethiopian refugees continued to stagger across the drought-stricken northern wastelands of their country last week. Their destination was neighboring Sudan. On their heels came disturbing reports of Ethiopian air force planes strafing refugee columns and bombing villages. As makeshift relief camps sprang up and swelled with alarming rapidity on the Sudanese side of the border, yet another specter began to haunt Africa: the threat that the exodus of starving people would overwhelm the meager resources of Sudan, whose population of 21 million already has been increased by 600,000 Ethiopian...
Despite its magnitude, the Ethiopian evacuation is relatively orderly. Traveling on foot for as long as eight weeks from their homes in the drought- ridden northern provinces of Eritrea, Tigre and Welo, the refugees stop at makeshift rest camps provided by two of Ethiopia's major antigovernment guerrilla organizations, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) and the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.). The refugees move largely at night; otherwise, they might be attacked by Ethiopian air force planes. In one widely reported strafing run on a refugee column last month, Ethiopian jets killed 18 travelers and wounded...