(1) To Popovich's credit, the ragtag group of roleplayers and benchwarmers almost pulled off a victory.
(2) In addition to the huge number of different groups fighting on the Ukrainian side, there is also a ragtag assortment of people fighting for the separatists – a mixture of Cossack militias and others from Russia who may have links with Russian intelligence, people representing local business and criminal interests, and ideologically motivated locals who genuinely believe in the cause.
(3) Based on Robert Edsel's book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes , the film focuses on the ragtag group of Americans, played by Clooney, Damon, Murray, Goodman and Bob Balaban, one Brit (Hugh Bonneville – Heslov is a big fan of Downton Abbey) and one Frenchman (Jean Dujardin, who is sweet in the film, even if he clearly only understood about one English word in every five of his lines) who were formed to try to save some of the great works of European art and architecture from being destroyed and pillaged during the second world war.
(4) Something is bubbling under the surface and the ragtag platoon of Ukip activists in Somerset say they feel it too.
(5) That’s where the ragtag bunch of 30 volunteers comes in.
(6) In the centre of town, pockets of armed men in ragtag military gear as well as larger groups of unarmed men congregated.
(7) Coke's critics are largely a ragtag bunch but the company has been unable to drown out the background noise, despite an annual marketing budget of $2bn.
(8) Its ragtag forces, including a high proportion of press-ganged and brutalised children, became notorious for abduction, gang rape and summary execution.
(9) This body is populated by a motley collection of amateurs; leftovers from a bygone age, when Ukip was a ragtag band of volunteers on the fringes of British politics.
(10) But for the first time in the quarter-century since global warming became a major public issue the advantage in this struggle has begun to tilt away from the Exxons and the BPs and towards the ragtag and spread-out fossil fuel resistance, which is led by indigenous people, young people, people breathing the impossible air in front-line communities.
(11) At the moment most of the interventions have been against softer targets – Saudi Arabia targeting guerrillas in Yemen; Egypt against Bedouin in Sinai; or strikes against ragtag armies in Libya.
(12) Even with better weapons and more training, they say, the rebels' ragtag forces are unlikely in the short term to be a match for Gaddafi's men.
(13) Clovis, a professor at Morningside College in Sioux City and occasional talk-radio host, has since been supplemented with a ragtag group of foreign policy advisers recently announced by the campaign, as well as by Stephen Miller, a longtime aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who at campaign rallies has accused Cruz of wanting to start a war with Russia.
(14) Now try to imagine for a moment the excitement of the Cuban people in 1959 when the charismatic barbudo, Fidel Castro, and his band of ragtag rebels managed to pull off the impossible: getting rid of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushering in – or so everyone expected – a new era in Cuba; a Cuba free of the corruption, violence and cronyism that had pockmarked its history since before its Wars of Independence, and radically divided the haves and the have-nots.
(15) But my fondest memory is of The Brass Band, a ragtag bunch of American players who performed classical music brilliantly and with no reverence at all.
(16) Lea says the Northern Territory’s struggle for political representation stretches back beyond 1978 to the start of the 20th century and a “ragtag bunch of mostly blokes” who fought hard – but that’s not what Territory Day is about today, she says.
(17) It’s beyond a place called Jalbire but we’ve heard trucks are being looted, so the villagers come to a prearranged spot: a ragtag bunch of old men and small boys who are thrilled to receive a few basic necessities – a tarpaulin each, a packet of biscuits, some thin foam to sleep on.
(18) Each features a larger-than-life warlord and ragtag followers kitted out in mix'n'match uniforms.
(19) The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.
(20) Here, a ragtag gang of American soldiers (including C Thomas Howell!)
Shabby
Definition:
(n.) Torn or worn to rage; poor; mean; ragged.
(n.) Clothed with ragged, much worn, or soiled garments.
(1) While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.
(2) Given what is now known about the way the case was made for launching an arguably illegal war – this country's biggest foreign policy debacle since Suez – Heywood's refusal to release the conversations smacks of a shabby cover-up at worst, or foot-dragging in a moderately more charitable interpretation.
(3) It is not something you can deal with tactically and this is a tactic, this is a stunt, it is simply designed to distract the house and the public and the people from the shabby tactics of the Labor party.
(4) Alistair Darling 's self-serving memoir only reminds us of his own shabby role when he, more than any other, had the power to do it.
(5) Photographs from inside the flat showed a cramped and shabby home whose contents had been turned over by investigators.
(6) To be fair, that was probably a much better use of Miliband's time, given Labour's shabby showing in the opinion polls.
(7) "I only had two hours sleep after we finished partying before going on breakfast TV this morning," she says, despite the fact she is filling this tiny room, a shabby corner of the new BBC building in central London, with her warp-scale energy.
(8) But here inBritain – crammed into a shabby and overcrowded carriage on your way (thank God) out of your stressful City job – is there any joy to the journey?
(9) The UK chain generates two thirds of group profits and had been milked to bankroll international expansion, leading to shabby stores and deteriorating customer service.
(10) So what if the rooms are tiny, shabby and atmosphere-free?
(11) Appraising his shabby suit, the jeweller suggests he pick up something cheaper from the local bazaar.
(12) San Diego made some gesture towards addressing their shabby offensive line play by drafting offensive tackle DJ Fluker in the first round, but they needed to do more.
(13) In her day this was a gritty neighbourhood and it hasn’t changed much, with a shabby market by the metro station and blocks of peeling townhouses; this is the real, old Paris, the world she sang about, with its desperate cast of thieves and tramps and lovers.
(14) He told MPs he personally objected to having to pay a television licence fee of £145.50, as he attacked the coverage of the jubilee celebrations as "scandalous, shabby and rather unprofessional".
(15) The judge, perched in front of a shabby Russian flag, refused to look at the defence.
(16) Around 40 people crammed into the shabby courtroom, as dozens of journalists were left stranded outside, blocked from entering by burly police.
(17) His B of the Bang sculpture in Manchester was dismantled after it started shedding metal, and his Blue Carpet in Newcastle was late and over budget and in the space of a few years became grey and shabby .
(18) Malcolm Turnbull has launched a forceful defence of his investments in funds registered in the Cayman Islands , while condemning Labor for mounting a “shabby smear campaign” about his personal wealth, based on “the politics of envy”.
(19) When the PM next berates Jeremy Corbyn over a shabby suit, the Labour leader will be able to reply that, unlike Cameron, he isn’t receiving a subsidy for it from the party.
(20) The Senate was less than impressed with that shabby process and the Senate voted last night.” The government announced in the 2015 budget that it would give the Australian tax office greater powers to stop global companies using “artificial or contrived arrangements” to avoid tax obligations – but the Senate passed the legislation only after making an amendment relating to tax transparency.