Word: ragtag
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...bygone centuries, an unorthodox vision like Martin Scorsese's might have prompted heresy trials and burnings at the stake. Perhaps even a quick crusade mounted by ragtag armies. In the summer of 1988, the preferred methods of resistance are picket lines, economic boycotts and angry appearances on talk shows. If the furor surrounding Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ proves one thing, it is that in any era, seismic emotions are involved when people probe the nature of the man who is worshiped as God by well over a billion souls...
...cover its retreat, Moscow is banking on the tenacity of Najibullah, the Afghan Communist leader installed by the Soviets in 1986, and his ragtag 150,000-member security force. Najibullah, the former chief of KHAD, the Afghan secret police, is trying to win over the mujahedin by promoting capitalism and elections and by playing up his adherence to the Muslim faith. His efforts have not impressed the rebels, but he evidently hopes to gain credibility in Western eyes...
...African continent, a land as close to nowhere as the planet could provide." The southward creep of the Sahara and the drying up of nearby Lake Kotto have driven most of the native residents away, leaving the physician with hardly anyone to treat but General Harare and his ragtag band of Marxist guerrillas. But these rebel patients do not trust Mallory, because he has conceived a scheme to drill the dry lake bed and tap into a potential third Nile, which will turn the parched land green and fruitful. Such a happy result would bring credit and profit...
...week's cover and has lunched with New York Mafia heads involved in the trade. "Despite all the political verbal pyrotechnics, cocaine is cheaper and more plentiful than it ever was," says Beaty. "The drug cartels are posing a greater threat to U.S. national security than any bands of ragtag Communist insurgents. That is a lesson still to be learned...
Gomez is not the only one wondering what is going on in the sprawling, demoralized empire controlled by Eastern's corporate parent, Texas Air. Over the past two years Chairman Frank Lorenzo has fashioned a ragtag collection of disparate and sometimes dying carriers into the largest U.S. airline company (1986 revenues: $4.4 billion). Besides Eastern, Texas Air runs Continental, which has absorbed New York Air, Frontier and People Express. All told, Lorenzo and his lieutenants oversee 628 jets and 72,500 employees, ferrying 94 million passengers (roughly the combined populations of France and Spain) on more than 1 million flights...