Word: descent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...begun flooding the White House and Capitol Hill with telegrams demanding that NATO enlarge. Bob Dole and the House Republican Contract with America backed expansion. But White House polls during the 1996 campaign showed that enlargement wasn't a litmus test for the 21 million Americans of East European descent. The poll Clinton paid more attention to showed that foreign policy successes improved his re-election chances. "The idea that Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, Bush unified Germany, and Clinton will unite Europe sounded good at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," says an aide...
...touchdown was not without problems. Early pictures revealed that one of the airbags that cushioned the craft during its descent had bunched up in a way that hindered the rover from leaving the lander. In addition, the computer aboard Sojourner and the one aboard Pathfinder were having trouble communicating with each other, which prevented the rover from getting the information it needed to rove beyond the immediate vicinity of the lander. But these problems, which engineers promptly set about fixing, did little to dampen the excitement when Pathfinder sent back its stunning panoramas of the eerie orange site where...
Pathfinder owes much to the trail-blazing Vikings, which snapped the high-resolution pictures that enabled Pathfinder scientists to choose an appropriate landing site. The Vikings also pioneered the heat-shield and parachute technology that contributed to Pathfinder's safe and remarkably precise descent...
...same chance as a blue-eyed blond in America. But racial quotas and set-asides are tearing us apart. They breed white resentment and the suspicion of black inferiority, and they haven't kept pace with our multiethnic society." Connerly, who is of African, French, Irish and Choctaw descent, is married to an Irish-American woman; their son is married to a Vietnamese American. "What racial box on the university admission form is their child supposed to check?" asks Connerly...
Keller's book, Comfort Woman (Viking; 213 pages; $21.95), is one of a trio of powerful debut novels by Asian-American women to arrive in bookstores lately. The others: Monkey King (HarperCollins; 310 pages; $24) by Patricia Chao (of Chinese and Japanese descent) and The Necessary Hunger (Simon & Schuster; 365 pages; $23) by Nina Revoyr (whose mother and father are Japanese and Polish-American, respectively). Although these books share some themes--all of them deal with parents and children in conflict over such issues as cultural and sexual identity--each author has a sharp, specific vision...