Word: condors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Department of Agriculture credits extended to Iraq in the 1980s for food purchases. In an internal memo dated Feb. 23, 1990, administrator F. Paul Dickerson warned Under Secretary Richard Crowder: "In a worst case scenario, investigators would find a direct link to financing Iraqi military expenditures, particularly the Condor missile." Despite Dickerson's warning, the department was still considering $500 million in additional credits when Saddam invaded Kuwait...
MacCready's own thinking skills have served him well. He first won national acclaim in 1977 when his Gossamer Condor, a kitelike affair propelled only by a furiously pedaling cyclist-pilot, flew in controlled flight for more than a mile around a figure-eight course. For that feat, unsuccessfully attempted by dozens of others over the previous 18 years, MacCready won a $95,000 prize from British industrialist Henry Kremer. Two years later the same pilot pedaled an improved version of the ephemeral craft, the Gossamer Albatross, all the way across the English Channel to earn MacCready a second Kremer...
...months later, with the help of his sons, friends and a few colleagues from AeroVironment, MacCready had assembled the first flimsy version of the Gossamer Condor out of aluminum tubes, piano wire, Mylar film, a propeller and bicycle parts. With a wingspan of 96 ft., it weighed only 55 lbs., and MacCready's two older sons, Parker and Tyler, were soon flying it for short distances, rising a few feet above the ground. After another ten months and many crashes and revisions, Bryan Allen, a bicycle racer and hang-glider pilot, successfully flew the Condor around the Kremer course, ensuring...
...Gossamer Condor now hangs in a permanent spot next to the Wright brothers' first airplane at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, where the Solar Challenger and the pterodactyl have been displayed. The Smithsonian has also acquired the Gossamer Albatross and the Sunraycer...
...Italy BNL officials attempted to pin the blame on a rogue branch manager in Atlanta. But the trail has also led to accusations that BNL credits were used to finance sales by Italian and other Western firms of equipment for Iraq's Condor 2 missile, an intermediate-range nuclear-capable missile. But uncovering the full details about how the loans were used has proved extremely difficult: as much as $500 million of the credits that BNL Atlanta approved, say Italian sources, do not carry the names of specific companies, making it impossible to determine what they financed...