Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Miami. In one of the nation's key drug-smuggling cities, crack addicts are stealing any piece of metal they can to sell for scrap, from awnings to aluminum stepladders. Along State Road 112, only 2% of the lights work, because thieves have ripped off the copper wiring. At one point, Florida had 5,800 addicts begging to get into treatment programs. The number this autumn fell to under 2,000. But experts say that is because many of those who want help most have despaired of getting it and gone back to the street...
...unlike conventional counterparts, the materials are made with extra ingredients that greatly enhance their performance or give them new features. By blending in stiff carbon fibers, for example, modern-day alchemists have developed plastics that are up to 10 times as strong as conventional plastics. And by mixing copper with zinc and aluminum, scientists have produced a metal with a "memory": the stuff returns to its original shape after being bent or twisted...
Salinas' message on economics has been tough talk backed by tough action. He has restored business enterprises largely to private hands, most notably by selling off the national airline and Cananea, the nation's largest copper mine. The national telephone company and Mexico's 18 banks have also been put up for sale. Since 1989, when he set out to liberalize foreign-investment regulations, $5.2 billion in new capital has flowed into Mexico, along with consumer goods once unavailable. Salinas has also rectified a dangerous reliance on oil, which produced 78% of Mexico's export income in 1982. Today...
Prices were not the only issue. Critics of longtime President Kenneth Kaunda accused his government of corruption and poor management, which, combined with the 1974 collapse of copper prices, has made Zambia one of the world's poorest countries. Kaunda, 66, blamed the "power hungry" for the unrest, but he did seek to appease the mobs by scheduling a promised referendum on whether to restore multiparty democracy, abolished in 1972, on Oct. 17. Still, he said, there would be no relenting on the austerity measures, which are intended to impress the International Monetary Fund...
Each year the Treasury Department spends $318 million to shred worn-out dollar bills and replace them with fresh ones. New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici thinks he has a better, if not new, idea. He has introduced a bill to create a dollar coin, stamped mainly out of copper (which, not coincidentally, is plentiful in his state). He predicts the coins will drive paper dollars out of circulation because they can be used so readily in vending machines. Moreover, they will last 20 years, vs. a life-span of only 18 months for paper bills...