Word: happen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Events like these happen so often that Americans' sense of horror and outrage has been numbed. Death by gunfire has become nearly as banal in the U.S. as auto fatalities; shootings are so routine that they are sometimes ignored by the local news. Only by coming face to face with the needless victims does the wastefulness sink...
Deeply traumatized by China's bloody crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong has been looking back to London for reassurance that the same thing won't happen there when Beijing assumes control of the crown colony in 1997. At the least, Hong Kong's 5.7 million Chinese want the option of moving to Britain. Last week British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe was dispatched to the colony to allay fears, but his visit only managed to make a bad situation worse...
...modern engineering achievements, few are as complex as the nuclear submarine; only manned space vehicles come close. And as is the case in space flight, accidents are bound to happen in a global armada of about 367 N-subs -- 195 Soviet, 133 U.S., 19 British, nine French and at least one Chinese. In the 1980s alone, according to a recent report by Greenpeace and Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, about 60 -- the number is a minimum due to spotty disclosure records -- nuclear sub accidents have been logged, including fires, collisions and leaks of radioactivity...
...nuclear reactors and atomic weapons lost at sea is small. Reactors are contained in casings so strong that they remain intact even under the tremendous pressure of very deep water; missiles crumple at great depth but will not detonate unless they are electronically "armed" -- something that would only happen in wartime. NATO intelligence has confirmed that nine reactors and 50 nuclear weapons of various sizes are resting on ocean floors. Said one Danish official: "Nuclear things don't just go off, but the idea of these weapons and reactors rusting away on the seabed does not seem...
Environmentalists fear that the same thing will happen in Sarawak and Sabah, which contain some of the oldest rain forests on earth. Chin estimates that careless, wholesale cutting will denude the remaining forests of their commercial timber within as little as seven years. Local officials have given loggers access to an estimated 95% of Sarawak's forests that are outside existing or proposed parks and protected areas. Even those tracts are coveted by corrupt politicians. According to Harrison Ngau, a Sarawak native being held under house arrest for taking part in antilogging protests, some forests have been excised from protected...