Word: plainclothesman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...national scale, violence abated slightly, but disturbances boiled up in the huge township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, as police attempted to get students to return to their classrooms, on one occasion arresting more than 700. Near Cape Town, an angry crowd killed a plainclothesman after he fired at mourners following a funeral. Said General Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner: "We do not have a state of war or revolution in this country." Still, unrest and violence remain daily features of South Africa's life...
...union Solidarity was spent. In its place they felt only grief. What brought more than 10,000 of them together in a moving show of defiance was the funeral of Bogdan Wlosik, 20, a trainee electrician at the steel mill who had been shot in a scuffle with a plainclothesman. He was the 15th Pole known to have been killed since the imposition of martial law last December, and if Solidarity activists had no desire to confront the forces ranged against them in downtown Nowa Huta last week, they did use his burial rites to send a clear message...
Archer maintains that most people can improve their S.I. simply by staying alert to subtle clues, just as a criminal learns to spot a plainclothesman by some quirk of manner or dress, or a basketball star tells a head fake from a real jump shot by some giveaway preliminary movement. He even has a solution to the age-old problem of how to choose the quickest line at a fast-food restaurant: go for the one with the most young adults wearing backpacks; they generally turn out to be students or bicycle riders ordering only for themselves...