Word: carli
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Translated to a personal level, this means that day-to-day life in the Soviet Union is as difficult as ever. Not only are big consumer items like refrigerators and washing machines in short supply -- the average wait to buy the cheapest Soviet car is seven years -- but staples of everyday life are also scarce. Long lines snake into the street for such ordinary items as sausage, rice, coffee and candy...
...offices in the Soviet Union. Yakovlev, who last fall visited the U.S. for the first time to learn more about foreign trade, pays himself 1,500 rubles a month ($2,400), five times as much as he made as a journalist. His most enviable perk is a company car and driver. "I spend a lot of money every month on clothes and fancy restaurants," he says. "I have no bank account. No savings." Consumers have little incentive to save because such major expenses as housing and education are subsidized and bank accounts pay interest of only...
Some scam artists pitch legitimate-sounding items over the phone at plausible prices, then send products that bear little resemblance to the descriptions. "Car phones," for example, turn out to be cheap telephones in the shape of a car. One "sewing machine" looks more like a stapler, and the "piano" fits in the palm of your hand. "Home stereo entertainment systems" turn out to be tiny radios, and "satellite dishes" look suspiciously like Chinese woks...
...variation on this con, excited consumers who call to claim prizes after receiving you-are-a-winner letters are asked for their credit-card numbers and card-expiration dates "as verification." The new car or microwave oven never arrives. But before long, mysterious charges begin to show up on the cards. Joel Lisker, MasterCard's vice president for security and fraud control, & estimates that thieves using such methods skimmed at least $105 million from the $120 billion in U.S. credit-card transactions last year...
...everything else pointed to Harris. Both the car and the pistol had been stolen by Harris. The teenager had been in trouble before. Harris even boasted to some friends that he had killed Wood. Still, the prosecution bought Harris' story. Adams' attorney, Randy Schaffer, contends that Harris supplied two things the prosecutors wanted: an eyewitness (Harris) and someone to execute (Adams). Harris was too young for the death penalty...