Word: commons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What do Consolidated Cigar and the Richmond Screw Anchor Co. have in common? Both were once owned by the quintessential conglomerate of the 1960s: Gulf & Western. The diverse mix of businesses proved so unmanageable by the early 1980s that G&W Chairman Martin Davis launched a campaign to spin off more than 100 subsidiaries. Last week the company once known as Engulf & Devour said it will sell one of its few remaining divisions, Associates First Capital Corp., a financial services company. Davis hopes to use the estimated $3 billion in proceeds to assemble a world-class media and entertainment giant...
...bleak, brown plains of Mexico's Rio Grande valley, drug smuggling is nearly as common as a coyote's yowl. Thus Mexican police were not all that surprised last week when a search of a cattle ranch 20 miles outside the town of Matamoros turned up 75 lbs. of marijuana. But the investigation took a darker turn when the authorities showed the ranch's caretaker a photo of Mark Kilroy, 21, a University of Texas senior who had vanished a month...
...fear of being parodied in Doonesbury enough to account for a statewide charisma deficit? Deukmejian, who established an organization called Citizens for Common Sense, is so unadventurous that George Bush makes jokes about him. The most exciting thing about Pete Wilson -- dubbed one of the more anonymous people in American politics -- was his showing up on the Senate floor straight from the hospital in his pajamas to cast an important vote. Wilson was so unremarkable during his first term that one-third of California voters were unable even to rate his performance...
...Hernandez Galicia, known as "La Quina," the powerful and widely feared leader of Mexico's oil workers' union. A month later Eduardo Legorreta Chauvert, a top businessman with ties to the Salinas government, was jailed on charges of stock fraud. What La Quina, Legorreta and Felix Gallardo have in common is that they are renowned for using patronage and corruption to put themselves beyond the reach of the law. By tackling such formidable figures head on, Salinas has given notice that he is willing to uproot the status quo to enforce his policies. "There is not a single taboo that...
...Corvette, and he gave a designer team jacket to the fellow who jockeys his offshore-racing boat. But Bernard is not some Johnny-come-lately cook with a jailhouse recipe in his jeans. He is a second-generation outlaw who at 16 learned how to extract pure methamphetamine from common industrial chemical solutions in a laboratory hidden on an Indian reservation. He was tutored by two German chemists flown in by his father. Bernard can't pronounce methylmethamphetamine, but he knows how to make something very like it and how much to charge. "I've worked hard for everything...