Word: delay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They used to be small businessmen, griping in obscurity about government red tape. But now they're big-time Congressmen whose real-life horror stories are making a big impression on Capitol Hill. House majority whip Tom DeLay, a former exterminator, says the Environmental Protection Agency has allowed fire ants to trample the South. Georgia dentist Charles Norwood says federal regulators have made it hard for children to believe in the tooth fairy. And Cass Ballenger, a North Carolina plastic-packaging manufacturer, says labyrinthine EPA rules have cost his business more than $1 million. Now, in the name of regulatory...
...Fire ants are taking over the entire South," says DeLay, who until last year was the owner of Albo Pest Control in Houston. DeLay studied biology in college and went to work at a pesticide-formulation company in the early 1970s. There he learned that the EPA was banning Mirex, a pesticide that kills fire ants, aggressive interlopers from South America with a painful bite. DeLay, who believes Mirex is harmless, says this was his first exposure to the EPA's blundering ways. He claims that the delicensing of Mirex and another pesticide, chlordane, severely affected his extermination business, costing...
...stars to scrap their players union. (Their agents think they can get better contracts by pursuing an antitrust lawsuit against the league.) "This is a clear repudiation of an agent-orchestrated revolt," says TIME sportswriter Steve Wulf. The losers may challenge the election results with legal roadblocks that could delay the opening of the season. But Wulf doubts the players will risk the enmity of NBA fans: "Basketball players are very intelligent people. They did not want to risk losing their season like the baseball players...
...after a college student joked to a ticket agent that her luggage contained guns, grenades and a bomb. Technological glitches wreaked havoc not only in Fremont but also in Miami, where an air-traffic-control center lost power for an hour because of a lightning strike. Both sorts of delay no doubt enraged stranded passengers; but slowdowns are usually proof of caution. Says Linda Hall Daschle, the FAA deputy administrator: "In every case, priority No. 1 is the safety of the flying public. We will sacrifice efficiency for safety's sake...
...fact, terror-driven stoppages may be a sign that the regulatory system is working. The New York delay, for instance, could be seen as an appropriate reaction to an ever more hostile world. Two weeks earlier the Federal Aviation Administration, citing worries about increased terrorist activity, had put all the nation's airports on Level 2 of a four-level terrorism-alert system developed after the Gulf War. New York, where an alleged terrorist was recently arrested, had reason for special concern...