Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the mission ended, South Africa had at least bought some time for itself. Backing away from earlier threats that they would not oppose economic sanctions, the Big Five envoys now agreed that they would veto any such proposal put to the U.N. Security Council until Pretoria's internal settlement is proved beyond doubt to be a sham. The Western powers hope eventually to persuade South Africa to accept a U.N.-supervised vote that the Third World countries could also consider legitimate. But, as one Western diplomat ruefully admitted as he left Pretoria last week: "The talks have left...
Figueiredo's first big test will be the congressional elections next month; polls already indicate widespread protest support for the opposition MDB. In addition, as part of Geisel's political reforms, Figueiredo will be the first President to govern since 1968 without benefit of Institutional Act No. 5, which gave Brazil's chief executive the power to shut down an unruly congress and deprive citizens of their political rights. Thus the new Brazilian President could conceivably find himself facing a legislature controlled by the opposition-and, embarrassingly, Figueiredo would have no clear legal authority to do anything...
...Poland. Of the country's 35 million people, 33 million are Roman Catholics, most of them still churchgoers-including, on the sly, a number of party officials. A popular joke tells of a district Communist chief reporting to higher-ups that his drive to instill Communism is a big success. "After all," he boasts, "only 85% of the people in the district attend church regularly...
...Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., were using a hornlike antenna to "listen" to the faint background hiss created by stars and other radio sources in the Milky Way galaxy. What they picked up was a faint echo of the creation, the remnant of the cataclysmic fireball, or Big Bang, that gave birth to the universe 15 to 20 billion years...
...background static picked up by their antenna, they considered a number of causes, including the effect of what the German-born Penzias whimsically called "a white dielectric material"-pigeon droppings -in their antenna. But soon they learned from a Princeton group that was trying to detect evidence of the Big Bang that the radiation picked up by their antenna was of far greater significance: its temperature was remarkably close to what scientists had been predicting for radiation left over from the primordial fireball. In theory, this radiation should be equivalent to what would be emitted by a so-called black...