Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...charade began when about 8,000 Marcos loyalists gathered in the capital's Rizal Park, as they have done every Sunday since mid-March, to champion their exiled leader, now reigning over a seaside villa in Honolulu. Then, as is their custom, more than 1,000 members of the ragtag group drifted into the nearby Manila Hotel, the onetime playground of Imelda Marcos, for drinks. This time, however, they were joined by two truckloads of armed soldiers. The next thing they knew, Arturo Tolentino, Marcos' vice-presidential running mate in last February's elections, was reading out a letter from...
...file, each R like every other R. It is not an art form, God knows, in Toad script, not Japanese calligraphy. Printed (typed) words march in uniform, standardized, cloned shapes done by assembly line. But now, thought Toad, as I write this down in pencil, the words look like ragtag militia, irregulars shambling across the page, out of step, slovenly but distinctive...
...visitors to raise ominous questions about the region's future. Two days after the last Israeli convoy of some 40 vehicles had left Sidon (pop. 200,000), the largest city in southern Lebanon, there was a brief invasion of another kind. Into Sidon, by bus from Beirut, came a ragtag army of Shi'ite Muslim militants, swearing vengeance against Israel and Lebanon's Christian leadership and vowing to rebuild the country in the image of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran...
...beset by tribal rivalries ever since it won its independence from Britain in 1962. The once powerful and privileged Baganda tribe in the south has chafed under a central government and army largely controlled by Langi and Acholi tribesmen from the north. The discontent has given rise to a ragtag insurgent movement that has tried to disrupt Obote's efforts to reassert control. The government has taken brutal countermeasures. Ugandan soldiers have destroyed villages and crops and herded civilians into detention camps in an effort, as Abrams put it, "to dry up the civilian sea that the guerrillas swim...
...were dressed in something like the raggedy irregular's garb they had worn in the field, festooned with badges and other ornaments, some wearing beards and mustaches. It was an affecting spectacle, but it irritated some other Viet Nam veterans who watched from the sidelines. For them, the ragtag " brigade unfairly reinforced the image of losers or outcasts or victims...