Word: blunderer
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...equally unsettling implication is that the universe is pervaded with a strange sort of "antigravity," a concept originally proposed by and later abandoned by Einstein as the greatest blunder of his life. This force, which has lately been dubbed "dark energy," isn't just keeping the expansion from slowing down, it's making the universe fly apart faster and faster all the time, like a rocket ship with the throttle wide open...
...decade later, though, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding after all. Einstein immediately and with great relief discarded the cosmological constant, declaring it to be the biggest blunder of his life. (If he had stuck to his guns, he might have nabbed another Nobel...
...director George Tenet may have brokered the beginnings of an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire, but only because both sides reluctantly embraced it as a diplomatic necessity. Realizing that he'd made a colossal PR blunder earlier in the day by nixing Tenet's proposals, Yasser Arafat announced late Tuesday that, like Israel, he would accept the deal - but with plenty of reservations and outright rejection of some clauses. And that was quick thinking by the Palestinian leader, after his earlier rejection had prompted Tenet to blame Arafat for the failure of his peace mission, and plan his departure...
...just as the FBI is having to defend itself against charges that it is capable of brutal indifference to individual rights if it feels justified by some larger goal. It's hard even to say which was the worst of the recent crop of federal offenses, though the McVeigh blunder probably doesn't make the top five. Two weeks ago, officials from the Boston FBI field office were hauled before the House Committee on Government Reform to explain why they had allowed Joseph Salvati to spend 30 years in prison for a murder they knew he didn't commit, just...
...officials blamed an antiquated computer-database system: "Our technology is so old and unreliable, we don't know what we know," said one. Yet a former senior Justice official called it "beyond amazing" that the FBI would commit such a blunder in its most high-profile case in years--especially after similar charges of mishandling evidence were leveled during the investigation of Clinton's campaign-finance scandals and led to a sweeping internal probe. "It's a problem the bureau has had for a long time," the official noted. "Agents are great at acquiring information; they're not great...