Word: makeshifts
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...stretch is as alive as payday in a port city -- specifically, Saigon. Between 20,000 and 50,000 Vietnamese flock each weekend to 800 shops and restaurants, buying herbal medicine and dining out on snail-tomato-rice-noodle soup. In the mornings people may attend Buddhist ceremonies in makeshift temples; in the evenings they can applaud Elvis Phuong, who, complete with skintight pants and sneer, does Presley Vietnamese-style...
Once the decision to intervene in Azerbaijan was made, Soviet army tanks, so often the Kremlin's tool for political repression, thundered through makeshift barricades and swept easily into the center of riotous Baku. Since then, however, nothing has been easy for the occupying force of some 40,000 from the army, Interior Ministry and KGB. They have found it almost impossible to pacify the people of Azerbaijan, who for two years have been inflamed by a bitter blood feud with neighboring Armenia over control of the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last week black flags waved from housetops, sirens...
After hesitating for four days, the Kremlin was finally compelled, in the words of the official news agency TASS, "to take the measure of last resort" and declare a state of emergency. Early Saturday morning, Soviet troops stormed the center of Baku in tanks and armored cars, smashing through makeshift barricades of buses and trucks. The troops exchanged fire with extremists, armed with submachine guns and sniper rifles. Eyewitnesses described streets awash with "pools of blood" and corpses strewn on the road to the highway; there were even unconfirmed reports that Soviet tanks had opened fire on the demonstrators...
...matchstick that ignited the powder was struck the previous Saturday when a rally, staged in Baku by Azerbaijanis demanding independence from the Soviet Union, gave way to anti-Armenian rioting. Marauding bands of Azerbaijanis armed with guns and makeshift weapons ransacked Armenian homes, beating and sometimes killing the residents. Within days, vigilante groups from both sides were organized and dispatched to assist their ethnic brethren in the contested autonomous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and along the border with Armenia...
...evil of Nicolae Ceausescu's ironfisted 24-year reign, national television last week replayed the taped record of his final ignominious hours. Haggard, wrapped in a fur-lined overcoat, his hair in tangles, he sat with his wife Elena behind two folding tables pushed together to form a makeshift dock...