Word: thunderbolt
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Unlikely Survivor. The same afternoon, General Fawzi tried to enlist the tough commander of Egypt's Saiqa (Thunderbolt) Special Forces troops, Major General Mohammed Husseini Shazli, in a coup attempt. It was to have begun shortly after the joint resignations of Fawzi, Sharaf and three other ministers were to be announced on the radio news. Though Shazli was supposed to take over Cairo and arrest Sadat, in fact he did nothing. (Later, he too was rewarded, with an appointment as army chief of staff.) When the resignations were announced on the air, anti-Sadat demonstrators were expected to pour...
...blow dealt by the Reformation. After Luther's proposal that men could approach God directly by faith through grace, with no intermediaries, the angels were theologically unemployed. The gap they were meant to close had been written out of existence; they were reduced to mere attendant lords, thunderbolt carriers to swell a scene or two. Nineteenth century rationalism seemed to finish them off for good. The remark of a Victorian doctor, that he had never met the soul in a dissection, found its artistic parallel in Gustave Courbet...
...mind and its power to seize what is spiritually relevant. The monk Hakuin Ekaku meditated on a terrifying Buddhist deity and expressed that terror by simply "writing" the deity's name-the heavy strokes conveying a menace beyond what the ideograms spell out: "Blue-countenanced Bearer of the Thunderbolt." A swift sketch of two cackling women gets the inscription...
...Suffer from the predawn blahs-wakefulness and worries at 4 a.m.? Some people take refuge in sleeping pills, or another nightcap. Not me. I simply thrust the unpleasant thoughts from my mind and demidoze about great men and greater deeds. I think about Homer Jones, 220 lbs. of black thunderbolt streaking at a rate of 9.3 sec. per 100 yds. down a football field. Or about Dick Butkus, that splendid savage of a middle linebacker, actually biting an opponent's nose during a pileup. Or about four massive linemen in purple shirts named Eller, Page, Larsen and Marshall, holding...
Politically, the early fedayeen were relatively moderate and undivided. Inevitably, however, as the guerrillas grew more numerous and more prosperous, schisms began to appear. Syria barred the Palestinian guerrillas and organized its own fedayeen, known as Al-Saiqa (the thunderbolt), with "retired" army officers at their head. Iraq did the same with a smaller organization known as the Arab Liberation Front...