Word: discern
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Just where the hijack fallout left the Middle East peace process was harder to discern. After all the grief and travail of the previous two weeks, the U.S. might feel like excluding the P.L.O. from the peace process. Israel strongly supports such a stance. For very different reasons, Syria's Hafez Assad and, for the moment, Jordan's King Hussein are content to use this opportunity to hammer Arafat...
Peking Bureau Chief Richard Hornik found particularly valuable his five years of experience as a journalist in the Soviet bloc, including an assignment as TIME's Eastern Europe bureau chief (1981-83). Says Hornik: "That background was really useful as I tried to discern how far its economic reforms have taken China from orthodox Marxism-Leninism." Stationed in Peking since April, Hornik has traveled widely: to Shanghai twice, to Canton and to Shenzhen, one of China's foreign trade and export zones. Perhaps his most absorbing trip was to the huge heartland province of Sichuan. Says Hornik: "It gave...
...Soviet correspondent in Washington. That information is based on what is written by the American media. Or here is a report about some statements made by (U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Michael) Armacost and (U.S. Strategic Weapons Negotiator John) Tower in interviews. Some other statements. We can discern that some of these statements are actually designed to make the product look better, or designed to hide the actual true meaning behind the words. But the main thrust of what they want to say is that it is essential to do everything possible to ward off, even to prevent...
...astronomers used radio telescopes, which can peer through the clouds of interstellar dust that hide the galactic center from the glassy-eyed view of optical telescopes. Still, the enigmatic source of radiation was an enormous distance away -- 30,000 light-years, or 180 quadrillion miles. The only way to discern its size and shape accurately was to employ a technique called VLBI (very long baseline interferometry). In 1983 the astronomers observed Sgr A* with six giant dish-shaped radio telescopes, one each in Massachusetts, West Virginia and Texas, and three in California. "In effect, the configuration of the telescopes gave...
...diligent morning, no matter how he had misspent the night before. That poignant fact confers dignity on what was otherwise the pathetic wreckage of genius. Unlike Eugene O'Neill, his chief rival for the laurel as America's greatest playwright, Williams left no posthumous masterpiece. Indeed, unless future generations discern something more than glimmers of incandescence in the murky, forgettable plays of his last two decades, his effective career may be said to have stopped after the production of Night of the Iguana in 1961, when he was 50. He staggered on, sometimes crazy and always outrageous, until his strange...