Word: towns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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LONDON: It's a game of numbers. As many as 30,000 British soccer fans will arrive in the French town of Lens Friday for England's match against Colombia -- 10,000 of them without tickets. Meanwhile, 640 known German hooligans are at large in France, many remaining in Lens, where they battered a French policeman into a coma Sunday. If this convergence of soccer's worst louts seems coincidental, it ain't: A leaked French intelligence service memo, published Wednesday in Le Monde, says the Germans have chosen the spot "to battle for the title of 'hardest hooligans...
...Lens itself (population: 30,000) is certainly taking the threat of thug war extremely seriously. Pubs and supermarkets in this little mining town have already shut down on the advice of its mayor. "Better a town dead for a day or two than a town destroyed," one barman told reporters. So will the hooligans leave their murderous mark on the World Cup once again? "Hopefully, it'll be an anticlimax," says TIME correspondent Wendy Steavenson, who will be at the match. "The lesson of Toulouse" -- where England played its last game -- "is that a blanket alcohol ban helps defuse violence...
Delusions about sinister aircraft are among the milder symptoms of the Billings area's mounting crank plague. East on Interstate 90, in the town of Livingston, the body of a young woman, Angela Brown, was found rotting in a river, and local law-enforcement officials are investigating a Billings meth connection. A few months earlier, south of Billings, in Hardin, an admittedly cranked-out 17-year-old, Jonathan Wayne Vandersloot, whose head hadn't touched a pillow in days, allegedly shot dead his sleeping grandparents, scooped up some jewelry, guns and cash, and took off in their pickup. Vandersloot...
Farther south, crank has decimated the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, populated by descendants of the warriors who routed Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. "Crank will do to the reservations what Custer couldn't," says Bonnie Pipe, clinical director of a tribal recovery center in the town of Lame Deer. When James Walksalong, chairman of the local school board, brought in a team of drug-sniffing dogs last year, kids climbed out of classroom windows, and by the end of the day the dogs had detected 30 instances of drug residue. On reservations throughout Montana and Wyoming...
...Across town, at a table in the modest apartment where she supposes she'll have to go on living until she finds a job, Alicia is quitting crank. Once an upwardly mobile employee of a FORTUNE 500 company based in a large Southwestern city, Alicia is in her mid-30s but looks 50. Her face is pocked and pitted from her attempts to pick out the crystals of methamphetamine that, she swears, used to form under her skin. Alicia moved to Montana several years ago in hopes of escaping the bigger city's crank scene. She says the subcutaneous crystals...