Word: breakdowns
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Discovered in 1900, radon is produced by the radioactive decay of radium, which in turn is a product of the radioactive breakdown of uranium. The gas has long been recognized as a health threat to uranium miners, who suffer abnormally high rates of lung cancer. But as a gas, radon can flow for miles underground, often rising to the surface through faults and porous rock far from any source of uranium. In fact, the Watras house is located in a region called the Reading Prong, from which larger-than-normal quantities of radon rise. The region stretches from Reading...
Regan's power has its price, however. Observes one Republican Congressman: "If you are the undisputed boss, you also have the undisputed responsibility when things go wrong." And Regan is indeed being blamed for everything from excessive hyperbole in the President's pre-surgery speeches to a breakdown in the Administration's relations with Congress...
Soweto is atypical, both for its size (pop. 1.2 million) and its relative sophistication. It has a well-established middle class and an unmistakable power elite. But there, as elsewhere, political ferment is accentuated by slum living, lack of amenities, overcrowding, crime and the breakdown of family life. The despair of township life, the prospect of no breakout from such confinement, is felt most keenly by the young. They hold the police in contempt; in Soweto they jokingly refer to patrolling police vehicles as "Zola Budd" and "Mary Decker," who competed at the Los Angeles Olympics, depending on which vehicle...
...BREAKDOWN IN COMMUNICATION
Herzog, his one great commercial success--it sold 142,000 copies and spent 42 weeks on the best-seller list--is his most difficult book but also his funniest. Herzog is an academic in the midst of a nervous breakdown: his wife has left him, he wanders aimlessly from New York City to Martha's Vineyard to Chicago and finally to his ramshackle farmhouse in the Berkshires, composing letters in his head to girlfriends and ex-wives, Heidegger and Willie Sutton, the living and the dead. His last letter is to himself. "This strange organization, I know it will...