Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Negotiators were "optimistic" that Farrell and Munadi would be freed within days, without payment of a ransom. Hostage-taking is a long-standing Afghan practice and almost always ends with captives being freed in exchange for money after days or weeks of haggling. But in this case, sources tell TIME, the senior Taliban commanders of Kunduz were "acting reasonably" and seemed willing to hand the reporter and his aide over without a payoff. (See pictures of election day in Afghanistan...
...shop where the owner, a friend, assured me that everything was fine, thanks to Allah, for him and his family. Then, in a whisper, he told me that his brother was kidnapped and held for 20 days before the captors and the family could agree on a ransom. Now he and his brother, who survived the communists, a brutal civil war and the Taliban, are thinking about quitting the business and leaving Afghanistan. "It doesn't look good," he told me, and over the years I've come to trust his merchant's instincts above all the embassy pundits...
Recently we've become used to the idea of modern-day piracy, as we hear more and more stories of gangs hijacking ships for ransom in the lawless waters of East Africa. But the mysterious disappearance of a 4,000-ton cargo ship off the coast of England two weeks ago suggests the most unlikely of scenarios: buccaneering has returned to Europe...
USAGE: "A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom [in] the latest example of what is being dubbed 'silver crime'--the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world." --Times of London, June...
...Still, South Carolina's deeply conservative voters re-elected him in 2006, and last year Sanford became chairman of the Republican Governors Association. "But he always seemed to care more about his ideology than about rolling up his sleeves and figuring out how to get things done," says Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University in South Carolina...