Word: ransoming
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...Even so, many countries found themselves increasingly strapped for dollars with which to pay their mountainous debts. Among the most surprising victims were a number of oil-exporting nations: Mexico and Nigeria, to name two. Two years ago, the 13-nation OPEC oil cartel gloatingly held the world at ransom for crude oil at prices that eventually exceeded $40 per bbl. But the combination of recession and conservation caused prices to weaken, and by year's end the price of crude had dropped to $30 per bbl. and appeared to be headed even lower. Unbelievable as it would have...
...creative energy. When Lowell announced his intention to marry Dick, his alarmed parents arranged to have him spend the summer in Tennessee with a friend of the family. Lowell had already been interested in poetry, but the people he met in Tennessee--Allen Tate and the celebrated John Crowe Ransom--cemented his involvement with...
Lowell did not return to Harvard. Instead he followed Ransom to Kenyon College, where he formed lasting friendships with Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell. From that point onward, his life becomes a turbulent, often sensational tale. He married writer Jean Stafford; after a miserable six years they split. For the remainder of his days. Lowell fell in and out of love with various women--his 20-year marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick was stable only in its endurance...
Finally, the terrorists turned their political demands into a simple plea for safe conduct to Albania or China, and a $1.4 million ransom. The Swiss government immediately rejected that idea. Warsaw offered to send in its own antiterrorist squad to help the Bern police, but the Swiss firmly refused. Then the Swiss police made their move...
Lawyers for Hoare argued that the mercenaries had harmed no one nor demanded any ransom. Indeed, the government had initially released most of the men after their flight to South Africa, holding only Hoare and four others on the lesser charge of kidnaping, which carries no minimum sentence. But that leniency was abandoned after other nations, including the U.S., warned that South Africa could be struck from air-travel routings unless Pretoria enforced international agreements against harboring of air hijackers. The government then brought hijacking charges against all 43 of the escaped mercenaries...