Word: beginnings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...alto-cumulus clouds begin to cast shadows across the truck stops and red-dirt farm lands of western Oklahoma. Moore and his aide, Bill Moyer, another O.U. meteorology student, keep peering at the sky, noting the cloud peaks tilting to the southeast, indicating that jet-stream winds are active. "That's good," Moore notes, "real good." Two essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will...
...Enid, tornado sirens begin to shriek with an otherworldly howl. The sky is now black as night. Only a dim outline of the horizon betrays the threatening shape of the cloud formations. Several cars fish tail dangerously down the flooded streets. From the radio an announcer yells: "Take shelter! Get downstairs!" He adds that a tornado has just destroyed mobile homes west of town...
Soon the rain stops, and the clouds begin swirling in an unfamiliar turmoil, deadly and full of force. They move faster, roiling and dipping over a wheatfield. It is now 7 p.m. Suddenly, 1 ,000 yds. away, a charcoal sky seems to extend a smoky finger that stabs down at the earth, then withdraws. "There it is!" shouts Moore, screeching to a halt. He and Moyer scramble out and hoist their cameras as the monstrous sky, churning and converging, forms a crooked funnel once, twice, half a dozen times. Each time the terrifying funnel snakes earthward and scratches the grassy...
...white ballroom in the sprawling Hofburg, the Habsburg dynasty's Imperial Palace. Vienna officials were taking the summit preparations very much in stride. The Redoutensaal was occupied last week by negotiators at the interminable M.B.F.R. talks on troop reductions in Central Europe. Not until this week could workmen begin erecting bleacher seats for the 1,200 journalists expected to witness the SALT II signing. That the agreement on nuclear weapons will be signed in the Hofburg seemed fitting: the palace was a headquarters of the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which achieved a balance of power in Europe that...
...August 1968, at one of Lyndon Johnson's Tuesday lunches, Johnson was jubilant. He allowed his men a little sherry to celebrate the announcement scheduled the next morning that nuclear arms talks between the superpowers would begin, that Johnson and Kosygin would hold a summit to seal the deal. That afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. The summit vanished...