Word: backgrounder
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...point: P. Takis Veliotis, a former executive vice president at General Dynamics, who is alleged to have taken $1.3 million in kickbacks from a subcontractor while he was managing the Quincy, Mass., shipyards in the early '70s. During his security check, few of the claims Veliotis made about his background in Greece could be confirmed. He provided no birth certificate, and his Greek naval service could not be corroborated. Nonetheless, Veliotis was granted secret clearance. Furthermore, since Defense Department rules prohibit immigrant aliens from running top-secret facilities, the General Dynamics shipyards at Quincy and Groton, Conn., were downgraded...
Checking the background of many foreigners--even those who, like Veliotis, are naturalized Americans--can be exceptionally difficult. Sometimes U.S. investigators have language problems; often foreign governments are not cooperative. Subcommittee Staff Investigator Fred Asselin says that frequently when information from abroad proves hard to find, it is simply not checked: "Every time they can't verify something, they say, 'Let's assume he's telling the truth.' "U.S. military contractors now employ 10,675 émigrés from Communist countries who have been cleared by security agencies or are in the process of being cleared. Among those...
...Also without a swimsuit. The May issue of GQ magazine features her both ways. In Key West, Fla., Porizkova, 20, was shooting a men's beachwear picture spread with Model Jeff Aquilon to accompany a story on topless beaches. The plan was for her to be featured in the background. Somehow she moved to the fore. "Her personality came through," is how Photographer Patrick Demarchelier explains it. Porizkova thinks that the fuss she's already heard about the pictures is much ado about nothing. In Sweden where the Czech-born beauty grew up, "there's not a woman...
Drawing upon sources as diverse as long-classified FBI records arid the Wellesley Magazine, Seagrave, a journalist who grew up on the China-Burma border, feverishly ransacks the past. He resurrects old Shanghai and recollects, in passing, such spicy background scenes as the sailors' prison in San Francisco, a "bin full of murderers, cutthroats, sodomists, and mutineers dredged from the leaky hulls that jammed the docks." He also does some riffs on Chinese secret societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce...
...show, organized by several student groups, also intended to educate students on the need to aid children in Southeast Asia. In a dramatic performance piece, students symbolically stripped a boy of his home, clothing, and food as “Somewhere over the Rainbow†played in the background. The actors encouraged students to apply for the 2006 Aid Expedition to Southeast Asia through the Catalyst Foundation, an international volunteer organization dedicated to helping children in Vietnam...