Word: drastically
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While banking experts generally praised the deal, they cautioned that executives could find themselves balking at the drastic cuts that will be needed for substantial cost savings. And the banks' underachieving loans, which range from troubled real estate mortgages in New York City to unpaid Third World debt, will erode their profits for years to come. "I hope they didn't just put two boat anchors together," says John McCoy, chairman of Ohio-based Banc One, a regional firm that has been aggressively buying up local banks. "If they did, they'll just go down at the same speed together...
...Weather Service is in drastic need of renovation. The 100-year-old agency has become a technology museum. Its forecasters still launch old- fashioned balloons -- 70 of them twice a day -- to take readings in the atmosphere. They use refrigerator-size computers that have less power than the average desktop machine. And they depend on radar equipment that runs on World War II-type vacuum tubes. This creaking system is dangerously prone to breakdowns. In one notorious instance in the winter of 1988, the radar sentinel in North Carolina was out of service for 10 days, during which a batch...
...kills ticks. On Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, scientists are planning to release large numbers of a tiny wasp called Hunterellus hookeri. Success is uncertain. The wasps do kill some tick nymphs, but may in fact need a large and healthy tick population to maintain their own numbers. Other drastic preventives that householders mutter about while untaping their trousers -- region-wide burning of fields, pesticide spraying or slaughter of deer -- are just not politically or environmentally feasible...
...NATO defense ministers, meeting last week in Brussels, approved a drastic overhaul of the alliance's military structure. They will deploy only about half as many troops as the 1.5 million now stationed in Central Europe; the U.S. specifically will be able to bring home at least half, and possibly as many as two-thirds, of the 320,000 people it keeps on guard on the Continent. Essentially, NATO is giving up its old "forward defense" strategy of massing forces in Germany and is reorganizing its central region into three main groups...
While the fall will bring new perks for graduate students, it will also bring a drastic reduction in the number of undergraduates affiliated with the house...