Word: backward
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gorbachev needs a respite from all-out competition with the West in order to get on with his program. He wants to transform the Soviet Union from a muscle- bound but backward empire into a modern state able to hold its own in the global marketplace of goods and ideas. The U.S.S.R., says Gorbachev, must become a "real superpower." Implicit in that phrase is a stunning confession: take away its 3.7 million men under arms and its 25,000-odd nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union would be a Third World country. There is a note of alarm, even shame...
...comparatively mild pace of about 5%. Between 1980 and June of this year, for example, the average weekly earnings for U.S. workers increased from $235 a week to $309. But after adjustment for inflation, including a dramatic peak at the beginning of the 1980s, that paycheck actually slid backward over those years, to $227. The rise in productivity among U.S. manufacturing industries, however, was a brisk 4% each year from 1981 to 1985. During most of the previous decade, this measure of output per worker had increased only 1.2% annually. In fact, last year's U.S. productivity hike...
...more than a year, Tess Follensbee had found it easier to start moving her rigid muscles if she walked backward, so pronounced was her Parkinson's disease. In May, all that changed. The 39-year-old mother of four was one of the first half a dozen Americans to undergo experimental brain surgery for Parkinson's at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Last week some 500 medical researchers, gathered at a symposium sponsored by the University of Rochester in New York, watched a videotape of Follensbee in awed silence as she triumphantly, if tentatively, propelled herself forward. Says...
...last-minute adjustment to the motor. When everything was ready, Wilbur tried to release the rope fastening the machine to the rail, but the thrust of the propellers was so great he could not get it loose and two of the men had to forcibly push the Flyer backward a few inches until the rope slipped free. Orville ran beside the machine, balancing it with one hand. In the other hand he held a stopwatch, which he started as the Flyer lifted from the rail...
...officials. Under their heavy hands, the Prague Spring of 1968 quickly gave way to sullen winter as the country became one of the most rigidly orthodox in the East bloc. Party Leader Gustav Husak, 74, installed by former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev as Dubcek's replacement, has symbolized the backward-looking government's unimaginative face...