Word: ransoms
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...small but deadly Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which has been waging a battle against the entrenched regime of President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza Debayle, 52. Last month, in a daring attack on Managua's National Palace, the Sandinistas took 1,500 hostages and forced Tacho to ransom them back for $500,000 in cash and the release of 59 political prisoners. Next, the well-armed Marxist guerrillas staged a pitched battle against Somoza's National Guard in the coffee and cattle town of Matagalpa. Finally the Sandinistas raised the stakes to civil war by launching coordinated attacks against...
...English, "Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation." Fighting was supposed to be conducted according to the chivalric code, but actually it was a business, entered into for the purposes of seizing loot, capturing prisoners to ransom, securing bribes in return for mercy shown, and, it would seem, as an excuse to extract additional taxes. Yet the levying mechanism of the emerging nation-state was still not refined. In Paris, for example, heralds on horseback would announce yet another impost, then gallop for their lives. Violent revolts...
...Begin] is like a man who steals your cow. You ask for it back, and he demands a ransom." ?Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
...Belfast, while reluctantly acknowledging that a new outbreak of violence has left nine dead in the preceding ten days. "A lot of it isn't political any more," observed Rodgers. "It is sheer gangsterism." Murphy concurs: "It only takes a few thugs to hold the whole community at ransom...
...travel, watching for suspicious strangers and carefully checking one's car. A group of 50 heads of small-and medium-size businesses in northern Italy have organized themselves into a modern version of the tontine, a primitive 17th century insurance company. They have put together a mutual-benefit ransom society so that if any member is held hostage, all participants will put up cash to buy his freedom...