Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Delayed Warning. The Dutch were understandably furious. Five days before they were warned, dead fish, ducks and rats had been observed below the German town of Bingen. Why had the Germans failed to sound the alarm sooner? The North Rhine-Westphalian state government explained that a warning was issued to all German waterworks along the river. But then along came the weekend, and officials simply took off without passing the word...
...Germans were also slow in identifying the offending poison. Though nearly 50 German laboratories were reportedly making tests, it was the Dutch who first isolated the killer. The substance, they said, was a bug-paralyzing insecticide called endosulvan and marketed as Thiodan. A sulfurous acid ester, endosulvan is described by its manufacturers, the Hochst chemical works just west of Frankfurt, as harmless to warm-blooded animals, including humans, even though one microgram (less than one three-millionth of an ounce) in a quart of water is enough to kill coldblooded fish...
...German officials eventually confirmed the Dutch finding and claimed that probably no more than 300 lbs. of the chemical were involved. Investigators said that the Höchst plant was not directly at fault. They speculated that the poison was dumped, intentionally or not, from a barge...
Died. Willy Ley, 62, German-born author, lecturer and prophet of space travel; of a heart attack; in New York. As early as 1926, Ley was experimenting with rockets and writing about trips to the moon (Trip into Space). When his former countrymen led the way into the space age by firing the first V-2 rockets into London in 1944 he became, almost overnight, one of the most sought-after authorities on rocketry, called upon to advise the Government and writing book after book (Satellites, Rockets and Outer Space, Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space). His death came...
...tale of the siege and sack of Troy. Yet many classical scholars and archaeologists have long suspected that the Iliad and the Odyssey are far more laudable as poetry than as history. The latest skepticism about the poet's recounting of the Trojan War comes from a distinguished German classicist, Dr. Helmut Berve, who has spent most of his life studying ancient Greece. Disturbed by what he calls a "readiness to believe in the historical core behind all myths, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world," Berve argues in a current series of lectures that this great war of antiquity...