Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harry Towns is a successful screenwriter, but not lately. His half- written play about the Spanish armada has run aground (the problem, he senses, is dramatic confrontation, or lack of it; a storm wrecked the Spanish fleet, so Sir Francis Drake and the Duke of Parma never set eyes on each other). His accountant, sounding increasingly detached, tells him that if he doesn't have a payday soon, he will have to sell his house in New York and move -- has it really come to this? -- to the green tedium of Vermont. He is reduced to pitching an idea...
...done to deserve this? After all, AMR is widely regarded as the best run of the big U.S. airline companies. Under the aggressive leadership of chairman Robert Crandall, corporate revenues have more than doubled in the past six years, to $8.8 billion. Most impressive, the airliner built its modern fleet of 683 aircraft with relatively little borrowing. Against $2.6 billion in assets at the end of last year, AMR held a modest $1.2 billion in long-term debt...
...their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people who had to die in airline crashes in different countries before the crash became newsworthy . . . One hundred Czechs were equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom." Such bias seems widespread. Fleet Street reporters have traditionally voiced, in a blatantly racist and jingoist phrase, the equivalence of "1,000 Wogs, 50 Frogs and one Briton...
...nets. These enormous expanses of nylon mesh, which fan out for miles behind trawlers, are generally intended to catch squid and tuna, but they also indiscriminately trap and kill large numbers of other fish, seabirds, porpoises and other marine mammals. Japanese officials said they would reduce the drift-net fleet in the South Pacific to 20 ships, the same number that worked the area in the 1987-88 season. This season the fleet had grown to at least 60 boats. The restrictions do not apply to the approximately 450 boats that ply the North Pacific, where they allegedly net large...
...most indelible image of the spill is that of dead and dying creatures. The body count so far includes 34,000 birds (among them were 139 bald eagles) and 984 sea otters. (One man also died, crushed in the dumbwaiter of a ship in the Exxon cleanup fleet.) Scientists believe the actual wildlife toll is much higher. Recovered bird carcasses, for example, may represent only 5% to 10% of the victims. Many dead otters disappeared under the water, and searches for other animals were limited to the high-water marks on some of the affected islands to respect the wishes...