Word: avert
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This week, as the cry "Play ball!" heralds America's ode to spring, how tempting it is to avert our eyes from the business side of baseball. How we want to believe the game on the field is what counts, not the internal problems of a $1.6 billion entertainment industry...
...have a commissioner," Selig insists. "We have a search committee in progress. But it's hard to say when." A shrewd guess is not until there is a new baseball labor agreement. The owners fear that a new commissioner -- no matter how limited his formal mandate -- would try to avert a spring-training lockout in 1994 as Vincent did in 1980. "The owners have decided that they get along better without a commissioner," theorizes the unrepentant Vincent. "Any commissioner with any strength is going to cause trouble for them." Fans view a charismatic commissioner, like the late Bart Giamatti...
Second, the president sincerely wanted to avert a "humanitarian tragedy at sea." Though he hadn't thought of it when he was on the campaign trail, Clinton suddenly realized that thousands of Haitians could die if they attempted the treacherous sea passage in their shabbily constructed boats...
...ANOTHER WEAPONS-INSPECTION TEAM WAS DISpatched to Iraq last Friday, one more reminder of the International Atomic Energy Agency's failure to spot and squelch Saddam Hussein's budding nuclear warfare capability long before the Gulf War even began. Now, hoping to avert a similar embarrassment, the agency is headed for a different showdown with North Korea. The IAEA has warned the insular communist regime that if North Korea does not open its doors this time, the agency will bare its teeth and press for an unprecedented U.N. Security Council-backed "special inspection" of two buildings suspected of storing nuclear...
...scientists calculate that for objects having diameters of 100 m or more that are spotted late in the game and intercepted at a distance any closer than about 150 million km (93 million miles), only nuclear explosives pack enough wallop to avert disaster. At that distance, the energy needed to deflect a 2-km-wide (1 1/4-mile) object enough to spare Earth is about the equivalent of a 1-megaton nuclear explosion. If the object gets to about a tenth of that distance, the energy required is 100 megatons, more powerful than any nuclear device yet exploded...