Word: breakthrough
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...economic front, the Mexican President took pains to acknowledge Washington's assistance last month in securing for Mexico a $12 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund. The eleventh-hour breakthrough in the negotiations, helped by Treasury Secretary James Baker and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, saved Mexico from defaulting on its nearly $100 billion foreign debt, the largest in Latin America except for Brazil...
...moth in the machine. "From then on," she recalled, "whenever anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." After the war, told she was too old for active duty, she went to work on UNIVAC, the first large commercial computer, and created COBOL, the breakthrough computer language that made the machines accessible to non-mathematicians. She was recalled to active duty in 1967 at age 60. Now 79 and a rear admiral, Hopper is philosophical about the Navy's early slight. "It's just as well to be told...
...strengthened its ties with its closest ally, Israel also scored a modest breakthrough with a long-standing enemy: the Soviet Union. Ever since Moscow severed diplomatic relations with Jerusalem in 1967, the two countries have been on opposite sides of the complex Middle East chessboard. In recent years, however, Soviet officials have hinted that they would like to talk with the Israelis again. After months of elaborate negotiation, the two countries confirmed last week that their representatives will meet Aug. 18 and 19 in Helsinki. The first publicly acknowledged talks between the nations in 19 years will focus on minor...
Robertson takes pains these days to come across as an unthreatening candidate to those who do not share his religious fervor. Yet a fund-raising letter referring to the success his delegate candidates were having in Michigan began with the exultation "The Christians have won! . . . What a breakthrough for the Kingdom!" In addition, he belongs to the charismatic strand of Evangelicalism that discomfits even some fellow Evangelicals. In the TV studio, Robertson has prayed openly for healings and miracles, calling on the power of God to cure maladies in his audience as diverse as cancer and a slipped disk...
Fine. That's the scientists' prerogative, especially if they make it perfectly clear in their write-up, which they did. What isn't fine, however, is for the media to tout the discovery as something it isn't--a major breakthrough. In fact, the media makes this mistake quite often when dealing with medical discoveries. A comparison of the articles that run in the weekly New England Medical Journal and your local newspaper will quickly confirm that...