Word: swords
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. General Sir Miles Dempsey, 72, British infantry officer who commanded the rear guard at Dunkirk, and led the British Second Army when it stormed Normandy's Gold, Juno and Sword beaches in 1944 but later passed up offers of higher command and resigned because "I have spent too much of my life smashing things up"; in Yattendon, England, precisely 25 years after Dday...
...Omaha, the most arduous of the five D-day beaches assaulted (Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold were the others), the sand is a dirty golden color, and the tidal flats reach in for 100 yards to a series of bluffs covered with tamarisk, brambles and wild blackberries. In 1944 the bluffs were ablaze with German fire: in the first violent hours of the invasion, some 3,000 Americans were cut down as they waded in from their landing craft and clung desperately to the perilous band of beach...
Crisis, of course, is as elemental to bullfighting as the cape and sword. Fifty years ago, Spaniards swore that Belmonte was commercializing the fights by breeding his own bulls and using an agent to arrange appearances at the then prime price of $3,300 an afternoon. The bull was no longer the central figure of the confrontation; the cult of the matador had been born. Once, such disputations raged in the comfortable surroundings of a packed arena. Crowds this year have been skimpy everywhere since the season opened in Castellon de la Plana. They have been rebellious too. In Seville...
...more people (instead of the mere 23,663 that can shoehorn into the Plaza Monumental), the bullfights have become a $25 million-a-year jackpot. In order to get a share of the pot, everyone concentrated on providing more fights. But a consumer society, like a matador's sword, is double-edged. More fights meant poorer fights. Aficionados hooted at the new bulls as so many genuflecting mules, praying calves or Hermanas de la Caridad (Sisters of Charity...
...satisfy this demand, breeders fattened bulls in pens on fishmeal and soybean extract instead of allowing leisurely grazing. This process builds fat, not muscle, and animals so topheavy that they stumble and fall before they are weakened with picas and banderillas and finally sword-slain in those moments of truth that are these days less true. Some bulls have even been sent out under the legal fighting age of four years. Last week, by government decree, breeders began to record every birth in an official register meant to end this practice...