Word: cracking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last week a hapless worker, whose name has been withheld to protect him from humiliation, tripped on the tail of his lab coat and piled into the exhaust nozzle of a space rocket that is to ferry an important communications satellite into orbit next February. The accident caused a crack in the heat-resistant carbon nozzle that was too serious to be fixed with a simple patch, and NASA will have to replace the entire first stage of the expensive rocket. Total cost: about $6 million...
...setbacks. The cleanup costs for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster swallowed 8 billion rubles, about $12.8 billion. This year the Soviet budget is already expected to run a 36 billion-ruble deficit. The government has also suffered falling revenues from declining international oil prices and from its campaign to crack down on vodka consumption. Now the country faces a sizable loss of income from Armenia, important for its manufacture of technical and electronic equipment...
...recognize me." The term these refers to a pair of voluminous sideburns, and they make it impossible to mistake the wearer for anyone else, except possibly Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the U.S. New Age inquisitors remain one of the few puzzles Asimov is unable to crack: "I have never found a way to convince them. They tell me there is 'absolute proof' of aliens landing on this planet. They read it with their own eyes. It turns out they read it at the supermarket checkout counter, trying to escape from reality...
...Italy last week, hundreds of narcotics investigators fanned out to collar scores of reputed Mafia drug traffickers. And across the Atlantic, U.S. FBI agents rounded up still more suspects in eight cities. A trail that began in Buffalo and Philadelphia three years ago had led the two countries to crack open a powerful transatlantic drug ring accused of flooding the U.S. with Italian heroin smuggled in wine bottles, tomato cans and the luggage of Sicilian housewives. At week's end the arrests stood at 80, a virtual Who's Who of Mafiosi in Italy...
...overburdened police forces have had little success in breaking the power of the drug gangs, even when they have adopted systematic buy-and-bust tactics or resorted to the dragnet-style crackdowns pioneered by Los Angeles police. Homicide experts predict that the havoc will continue until the demand for crack can be brought under control by better education and treatment programs. Says Washington Police Chief Maurice Turner: "Police alone cannot solve the drug problem...