Word: aim
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...best play. Shepard charts with savage humor the cruelties exchanged among a grindingly poor rural family. Slaughtering their animals has inured them to violence. Sharing the isolation of farm life has made them eager to sneak off. Knowing one another's sore spots has only rendered their aim more deadly. The plot resembles the save-the-homestead movies released last year: the farm is hopelessly insolvent but is sought by developers. Shepard, however, does not indulge in sentiment about vanishing ways of life. His focus is on familial stealth and cunning, on betrayals of husband by wife, brother by sister...
...river between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Involved were 29 pacifist Americans and 16 journalists. The incident began when members of Witness for Peace, a group established in North Carolina, set sail from the Nicaraguan town of San Carlos, about 130 miles southeast of the capital, Managua. The group's aim: to travel by boat along the San Juan River, which is hotly contested by contra and Sandinista forces...
...scene is a future battlefield. On the ground, driverless tanks advance and fire with deadly accuracy, while insect-like vehicles scurry across all but impassable terrain. Overhead, pilots guide their aircraft by talking aloud in the cockpit and aim missiles with the movement of their eyes. Higher still, orbiting jets blast satellites back to earth. All this is surveyed from computer consoles by commanders who refine their strategies and issue new orders as the fighting rages...
Their optimism was soon dashed. On the first day of flight, the astronauts tried to deploy a new instrument-pointing system (IPS), designed in West Germany, that aimed three of the onboard telescopes at celestial objects. The precision of the IPS is equivalent to focusing on a dime two miles away. The $60 million device, however, had bugs in its computer software and would not track properly. There was a brief moment when Astronomer-Astronaut Karl Henize shouted, "Hallelujah, it looks like it's working!" only to watch it wobble off target. Conceded Henize: "That hallelujah...
...diagnostics package was suspended from the ship's giant remote arm to measure "ripples," or the wake that the shuttle causes in the earth's ionosphere. At several points, the shuttle fired its thrusters to poke temporary "holes" in the ionosphere, allowing radio astronomers based around the world to aim their telescopes through the gaps. Indeed, the experiments hummed along so well that NASA decided to extend the mission an extra...