Word: crescent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...influx of white heroin is perverse testimony to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's success in persuading Turkey and Mexico to crack down on their illicit poppy growers. Succeed it has, and so the drug suppliers have turned to the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where government control is too weak to keep the poppy fields from blooming. U.S. narcotics officials estimate that the Golden Crescent is producing about 1,600 tons of opium a year, nine times the output of the rest of the world. Says DEA Chief Peter Bensinger: "It dwarfs anything we have known...
...drug pipeline from the Golden Crescent has few leaks. Raw opium is converted in makeshift laboratories near the fields into a more compact morphine base that is smuggled aboard freighters in Syria or Lebanon for shipment to Mediterranean ports, mainly in Sicily. There it is converted into heroin in secret laboratories controlled by Mafia dons with close family and business ties to their counterparts in the U.S. Almost all of Sicily's heroin-as much as three tons a year-is infiltrated into the U.S. by couriers on ostensibly legitimate flights, usually from Palermo to New York...
Frenchmen in the mass, alas, have succumbed to American fast food. McDonald's has hamburger dispensaries all over Paris, and Burger King has opened a shop on the Champs-Elysées. But the French have launched a spirited counterattack. Their ammunition is the croissant, the flaky, crescent-shaped roll that is as dear to French palates as scones to the Scots or Mom's apple pie to Americans. Gourmands are lining up for McCroissants at American-patterned restaurants rapides from sleazy St. Denis to the Boulevard St. Germain...
...what one work-shopper calls a chance to make a "one-inch contribution to mankind" begin their mornings at 5, when they and Supervising Architect Tony Brown, 43, decide how the day is to be spent. At present, the crew is building the foundations for Arcosanti's East Crescent, a residential and theater complex. While the blueprint reading and the blasting are entrusted only to experienced hands, workshoppers do the heavy jobs like pouring concrete. "We were flower children," says Maria Gonzalez, 30, "and we had our vague ideas about praying and meditation and 15,000 relationships. But most...
...problems of inflation and recession. As if those dual difficulties were not sufficient to twist minds from Washington to Cambridge, the latest productivity figures show an alarmingly small rise--indicating that the most jaded and chronic criticisms may in fact be borne out. It's crisis time, and the crescent encompasses a region less foreign than the Near East...