Word: givens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...behind NASA's confident facade, reality was beginning to set in. Beset by technical problems and delayed launches, the agency reduced its estimate of annual launches from 60 to 40, then to 24, but was unable to attain even that. Given the shuttle program's tremendous overhead and fewer flights, the cost for each launch rose from a promised $10 million to as high as $300 million. In a frantic effort to accelerate its schedule, NASA began to cut corners. Officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center responsible for certifying the launchworthiness of the external tank, the boosters...
...frustrated mama's boy who spent his life scorning family relations as unhappy when not downright unnatural. A product of a menage a trois who loathed his given name of George because he shared it with both a pathetic father and the self-styled musical genius who became his mother's lover. An eccentric who attributed ill health and body odor to cotton and linen clothing and advocated a wardrobe of unbleached woolen garments. A purported avatar of women's liberation who called himself a "philanderer" and preferred married women for romance. A lectern-thumping socialist who prided himself...
Since August 1987, U.S. Customs officers have found nearly 6,000 lbs. of cocaine on Haitian freighters. Sources say that up to 13,000 lbs. of cocaine is routinely stockpiled in Haiti at any given time. That supply has made Haitian drug prices perhaps the lowest in the world and created severe addiction problems among youths in Port-au-Prince and other cities...
...Jamaican-born sprinter out of Olympic Village, the cockpit of his glory, and checked him into a Seoul hotel under an ignominious pseudonym. There, at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Carol Anne Letheren, chef de mission of the Canadian delegation, stripped Johnson of the medal he had already given to his mother. "He was in a state of shock," said Letheren. "He still did not comprehend the situation." A few hours later he was bound for New York, a runner who had stumbled into a future stained with disgrace...
...party organization, Medvedev since 1983 has headed the Central Committee's Science and Education Department. His appointment as a voting member of the Politburo, over the heads of seven nonvoting members waiting in the wings for such a summons, is little short of astonishing. In effect, moreover, he was given Ligachev's ideological portfolio. Promoted...