Word: ransoms
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...closer inspection, however, the Deal is a textbook example of the wreckage that occurs when political imbalance--weakness on the part of federal and state environmental agencies, blustering strength among enemies of land-use regulation--allows owners of private property to hold the environment at ransom...
Speculating in domain names is not new: Enterprising individuals bought hundreds of Internet addresses such as unitedairlines.com and held them for ransom from their namesakes. (In 1996 a court ruled against registering copyrighted names.) But Marshall had his fair and square -- the Alta Vista search engine wasn't launched until November 1995, and was first registered under the name www.altavista.digital.com. (Why they picked a name that was already taken is inexplicable.) However, having a search engine's traffic mistakenly piling into your site daily isn't necessarily desirable, especially next to $3.5 million, and Marshall finally settled...
...will do away with whole categories of cash-based crime. "Paper money is, I hate to say it, the root of all evil," says DigiCash founder Chaum, who argues that the traceability of electronic cash will mean the end of some types of crime. "What kidnapper would take a ransom payment by check? Once you build the infrastructure for electronic cash, the incremental cost of replacing paper money is small. And the social benefits could be amazing...
...added to the list of Pol Pot's victims. In March 1996, British mine clearer Christopher Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, were abducted by Khmer Rouge guerrillas near the famous Angkor temples. Their fate had been a mystery, with reported live sightings as recently as last June, plus ransom hoaxes and all the usual false leads attached to a Westerner's missing in Indochina. But Ke Pauk and Yim Panna, two senior Khmer Rouge leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the Anlong Veng mutiny, told TIME in separate interviews that both men were in fact killed shortly after...
...first-ever elected mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano of the left-center Democratic Revolution Party, had to dump his newly appointed investigative police chief because of his alleged ties to drug trafficking and torture. Police are suspected of heading a kidnapping boom that has grown into a billion-dollar ransom industry. Americans are by no means exempt. On Dec. 15, Peter John Zarate, 40, a real estate executive and father of four living in Mexico City, was shot and killed by taxi pirates in the posh Polanco neighborhood. Just days before, another U.S. businessman was savagely beaten after stepping into...