Word: atop
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Before hitting the beach, some lucky crabs, whose tough, circular shells conjure images of tiny oceangoing Darth Vaders, pair up, with the smaller male crabs locking themselves atop the females' spiny shells with special pincers. For many less fortunate males, who vastly outnumber the females, the frenzy is more like a wretched high school dance: they form a stag line on the beach. Then, when a female, bearing a suitor on her back, wallows up and begins to burrow in the sand where she will lay about 4,000 eggs, as many as 15 lusty males struggle in the waves...
Sometimes the boys intervene. They comb the beach looking for a female, and once they find one, they pull an unattached male from the water and place him atop the female. Explains Zack: "If he goes off, just push him back on and say, 'Mate!' Then they'll do it." Easy -- but then it should be, after 200 million years...
...relative obscurity, doing legwork on stories that rarely made it on the air ("They called me queen of the stakeouts"). Her big chance came after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. She broadcast live reports from the damaged reactor -- borrowing a producer's tennis shoes so she could stand atop the microwave truck in the rain without slipping off -- and got her first major exposure on the CBS Evening News. After a stint covering the 1980 presidential campaign, she was assigned to the State Department, where she impressed her bosses with her hard work and excellent sources. Says former...
Last week the Soviet leader managed to keep his balance atop a couple of spectacularly unpredictable waves. The last of some 300,000 striking coal miners, whose walkout at one point threatened to spread to rail workers and paralyze the vast Soviet Union, returned to their pits, mollified by a package of raises, consumer goods and political reform carrying no official price tag but estimated at $8 billion. In a dramatic bow to the intense nationalism of the Baltic republics, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Supreme Soviet, led by Gorbachev, approved a resolution endorsing plans...
...What is atop the summit if Foreman manages to conquer it again? Money? "A lot of it," Foreman acknowledges. Not for lavish houses in California, or Mercedes and Corvettes. Foreman has had those. "For the kids," he explains. "I want to give them the same shot I had." The ninth-grade dropout got his rebirth in the Job Corps. Since 1984, he's dispensed his own good deeds at the George Foreman Youth and Community Center on Houston's north side. The small gym with its boxing ring and exercise gear is an after-school haven for 400 youths, some...