Word: flotsam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jarrett approached the site, moving cautiously to avoid any mines, the crews spotted ten Iranians drifting in rubber rafts. Sixteen others, including four wounded sailors, were in the water, clinging to flotsam or still swimming. All were picked up. The survivors claimed that two of their crewmen were missing and that one had sped off in a motorized "Zodiac" speedboat. The Iran Ajr's captain, who spoke English, was among the wounded...
Five years ago, when pro football players walked out for 57 days in a bid for a larger percentage of television spoils, the atmosphere was quite different. No substitutes walked in. Last week the flotsam and jetsam from past N.F.L. camps, the U.S.F.L. and summer Arena Football were bused past jeering and egg-throwing picketers and delivered into the hesitant custody of shell-shocked coaches. At first inspection, Ray Perkins of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers judged, "A few are in poor shape; a couple are in no shape at all." The Washington Redskins' Joe Gibbs said...
...Mexicali, Mexico, then back north into California. But it has made up for lost time. Says Gruenberg: "It's the most polluted water in California, and perhaps in the U.S." The Colorado connection has long since dried up, but a 75-mile river still flows, carrying its poisonous flotsam into California's bountiful Imperial Valley, past lettuce and cotton fields, and finally emptying into the Salton Sea, a popular fishing and swimming site near Palm Springs. Fishermen and residents alike have complained about pollution in the Salton Sea, and the U.S. Geological Survey stopped taking river samples two years...
...last swig of the bottle, and the cheap red wine contained flotsam from the mouths of three men gathered in a vacant lot in northeast Philadelphia. Moments before, a homeless and dying man named Gary had vomited. The stench and nausea were dulled only by exhaustion and the cold. Gary, wheezing noisily, his lips dripping with puke, was the last to drink from the half-gallon jug of Thunderbird before passing it on, but no one seemed to care. There was no way to avoid the honor of downing the last few drops. It was an offer to share extended...
...debris that despoiled Laysan's beaches had been washed ashore by the waters of the Pacific, which like other oceans is becoming increasingly fouled by plastic flotsam. But while the floating and beached plastic is unquestionably an eyesore, the problem goes far beyond aesthetics. At the Sixth International Ocean Disposal Symposium in Pacific Grove, Calif., last month, scientists reported that plastic trash is causing injury and death to countless marine animals that feast on it or become ensnared in it. Says Ecologist David Laist, of the Marine Mammal Commission: "Plastics may be as ! great a source of mortality among marine...