Word: ransoming
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...Civil War Ransom. When Confederate soldiers surrounded Frederick, Md., in 1864 and threatened to destroy federal stores unless a ransom was paid, townspeople rustled up $200,000. The victorious Union never repaid the money, and outgoing Maryland Senator Charles Mathias has been trying to collect it for a dozen years. Last week he finally succeeded...
...Iraq for more than five months; in Baghdad. Aubenas, who was kidnapped with her Iraqi interpreter Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi by Sunni insurgents, received euphoric media coverage and public attention upon her return to France. The French government had negotiated for her release for months, and said no ransom was paid. "My kidnappers told me that I was as famous as Lady Di in France," said Aubenas after arriving in Paris...
...schoolboy; after being shot during an eight-hour siege of an international school; in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Chea Sokhom, 23, a former driver for a South Korean restaurant owner, and three accomplices entered the school and took about 30 schoolchildren and teachers hostage. Cambodian police delivered $30,000 in ransom and a van per the four's demands, but they were overpowered by police and arrested before they could drive away. Police reported that Sokhom wanted to take revenge on his former employer, who he said had slapped him, by kidnapping the man's two children. Sokhom told police...
...Higher Education under former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, puts the number at 66. Just last week a deputy dean at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University was killed along with three bodyguards, and a Basra University professor of agriculture was kidnapped and killed. Scores of teachers have been kidnapped for ransom, and many more have received death threats simply for doing their jobs. Many top professors have quit and fled the country. As a result, only 28% of those now teaching have a Ph.D., according to the U.N. study; several colleges have been forced to suspend postgraduate courses and reduce the number...
...Meanwhile, the North's ability to wage nuclear war may be growing, thereby increasing the ransom?food and fuel to prop up Kim's ailing economy?that he's expected to demand as the price of nuclear disarmament. North Korea recently shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, raising concerns that it might be harvesting up to 8,000 spent plutonium fuel rods that could be used to build as many as six atomic bombs. Equally troubling, the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, testified in Congress last week that the North may now be capable...