Word: ruthless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mystery why paparazzi photographs are on everybody's list of guilty pleasures. It's all about passive aggression. We love movie stars and pop idols--but we also happen to resent their beauty, wealth and fame. So it's good to know that there are vile squadrons of ruthless photographers out there making the lives of the famous miserable. Paparazzi are the furies that we dispatch to torment the gods...
...sure, such a lavish tribute seems wholly inappropriate for a ruthless killer who made his living through hijacking, racketeering, extortion and drugs. Yet the virtual lionization of underworld figures is nothing new. During the 1920s, America’s mass media helped transform certain groups of brutal outlaws—namely, ethnic Irish and Italian hoods that operated within highly structured criminal syndicates—into pop culture icons. For many impoverished European immigrants, the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger-like tales of powerful mobsters such as Big Jim Colosimo and the infamous Al Capone seemed to epitomize the American...
...fiction novelist L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, Scientology has been accused of using coercion to keep its members in line and intimidation to squelch criticism of its tactics. (Scientology sued TIME in 1992 for libel over a 1991 cover story's portrayal of the church as a ruthless cult; the case was decided in TIME's favor in 2001, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Scientology's appeal.) Cruise is more than a defender of Scientology; he is a resolute advocate. "It's something that has helped me to be able to live the kind...
DIED. JOHN GOTTI, 61, swaggering celebrity gangster known as the Dapper Don, the ruthless yet always impeccably groomed boss of the Gambino crime family; of throat cancer; in the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo. He had been serving a life sentence on murder and racketeering charges. The former juvenile delinquent from the South Bronx relished the spotlight, favoring $2,000 suits and tony restaurants, smirking throughout his four trials and winning populist-hero status in the tabloids. Although he had always claimed to be a $100,000- a-year plumbing salesman from Ozone Park, N.Y., Gotti was convicted...
Dostum's mercenary troops achieved notoriety for ruthless courage on the battlefield and wild indiscipline off it. Bearing a legacy of 200 years near the bottom of a Pashtun-dominated social order, they seemed to take a special delight in evening the historical score, killing Pashtun mujahedin of the south, and looting and terrorizing the civilians...