Word: ragtag
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Graduate students aren't the only people you'll overhear discussing astrophysics or Assyrian art at Out of Town News. Harvard Square harbors a ragtag community of itinerant intellectuals, secret geniuses, closet poets and conspiracy theorists who have no official connection to the University ("I'm not enrolled at Harvard, I just go there...
...hitched rides on oxcarts and trucks, the group made its way to the northwest, a distance of some 250 miles. Along the way, Seng's wife died. Finally, in May -- more than four years after he got his first close look at a Khmer Rouge guerrilla -- Seng and his ragtag, nearly starved company of survivors crossed into Thailand. Today they live in the Washington, D.C., area, where Seng is a successful taxi driver...
...President Samuel Doe, who belongs to the Krahn tribe, would like to eradicate their people. Lately their fears have been reinforced as Doe's troops moved into northern Nimba county, a Gio stronghold and hotbed of opposition to the government. The army's ostensible purpose is to rout a ragtag band of perhaps 200 insurgents, but the soldiers have exceeded that mandate, looting and burning towns and firing on Gio civilians...
...erect defenses to prevent a mere truck from crashing into a Marine barracks and killing 241 American servicemen with a load of explosives. The invasion of Grenada that same year was ultimately successful, but so botched that 18 Americans died even though the island was defended only by a ragtag of Cuban construction workers and Cuban and Grenadian soldiers...
Every morning for months a ragtag line of Soviet citizens has formed outside the American embassy in Moscow, jamming the guarded main entrance and snaking 100 yards down Tchaikovsky Street. The crowds push and break into noisy arguments. On particularly rowdy days some desperate applicants offer Soviet policemen as much as 700 rubles ($1,120) to sneak them to the front of the queue. Soviet emigration, for so long a trickle, has turned into an avalanche. Each year for three years the number of emigres has doubled, and so far in 1989 some 80,000 Soviets have applied to leave...