Word: conundrum
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...central conundrum confronting designers was this: how to make a telescope mirror that could hold its shape against gravitational sag and gusting winds yet retain the capacity to make rapid adjustments to fluctuating temperatures. As mirror size increases, these two requirements begin to dictate different, and quickly contradictory, solutions. Very thick mirrors resist physical deformation extremely well, but because they retain so much heat, they tend to generate shimmering currents in the cold night air that play havoc with astronomers' observations. Very thin mirrors, on the other hand, have ideal thermal properties but a daunting physical handicap: as the telescope...
Facing the facts in the Middle East is often a game of saving face. So how to get around this conundrum: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir insists that he will not sit at a negotiating table that includes a Palestinian representative from East Jerusalem; Faisal al-Husseini, a leading Palestinian activist and Jerusalemite, insists that any Palestinian delegation must include a Jerusalem resident. The face-saving route around the impasse may lie in a house that al-Husseini has just completed in Ayn Siniya, a West Bank village 15 miles north of Jerusalem. Shamir, who has already rejected al- Husseini...
...especially hard to solve a mystery if all the people who actually know the truth are either accomplished liars, adamantly mute, or already dead. Such a conundrum is facing investigators who are still trying to unravel the Iran- contra scandal and other baroque plots that American officials may have hatched in the Middle East over the past decade. Last week, as yet more charges came to light, there was no shortage of fingerprints, plot twists or stool pigeons. But there was a desperate shortage of certainty, perhaps because when truth is stranger than fiction, the two are harder to separate...
Coincidental or not, the timing symbolized a foreign policy conundrum. Eager to prop up Gorbachev, the Bush Administration previously had pretty much ignored Yeltsin. Now, the U.S. and other Western powers can no longer put off cultivating contacts with him and other rising leaders of a rapidly decentralizing Soviet Union. Yet they must try to do so without alienating Gorbachev, who still determines Soviet foreign policy. The question of how far to go is already causing some dissent in the West. British diplomats last week were privately but sharply critical of the White House invitation to Yeltsin; one called...
This is not an exam question in a college philosophy course but a moral conundrum at the core of perhaps the most intriguing case facing the U.S. Supreme Court, Payne v. Tennessee. Justice David Souter, the court's swing vote, asked during oral argument last month whether "it really is legitimate to value victims differently depending upon the circumstances of the lives that they have chosen to lead." Tennessee Attorney General Charles Burson's response was unequivocal: "There can be no doubt that the taking of the life of the President creates much more societal harm than the taking...