Word: last-ditch
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...last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock. Governor Sir Hugh Foot flew to London with a new plan to bring back Archbishop Makarios, the bearded, 45-year-old Greek Orthodox Ethnarch of Cyprus and leader of the Greek Cypriot movement for enosis (union with Greece). This would give Foot a Greek Cypriot with whom to negotiate. And Makarios might be persuaded to restrain EOKA's gunmen, he argued. Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, who had a hand in Makarios' expulsion from the island in 1956, did not agree. He admitted that Makarios would have to be allowed...
Author Heinrich is at his best as he describes the last-ditch stand of decimated German regiments against Russian divisions led by a hundred tanks. Towns burn, civilians are blown to bits, whole battalions are destroyed as they try to carry out orders from an incompetent division adjutant. Over the ghastly scene the snowy Carpathians loom like symbols of nature's indifference. But Heinrich neither needs nor uses literary symbolism. With a spare, brutal directness of language, he is able to show how men fight and die, convey the pressing of a trigger, the spreading stain of blood...
...neutrons in the reactor rise above a critical level, showing that an excursion has started, the uranium fissions at a rate that creates enough heat to melt the solder. Then high-pressure gas will shoot neutron-absorbing poison into the reactor. Even if other controls have failed, this last-ditch nuclear fire extinguisher will keep the reactor from exploding or melting itself into radioactive...
South Dakota's Karl Mundt, who has long since jumped the Eisenhower team on farm policy, began by urging a last-ditch plea for the President to sign. Nebraska's Carl Curtis backed him up, and North Dakota's Milton Young remarked tartly that President Eisenhower had certainly not been talking about farm-prop cuts during the 1956 campaign. Quite the contrary, claimed Young, and added portentously: "Explain that to your farmers." Colorado's Gordon Allott suggested that the caucus might take advantage of the recession by casting the farm freeze as one of the antirecession...
...another, having made their show of getting the Post Office Department along toward paying its way in the world, the Republicans immediately afterward broke ranks in voting on another part of the same bill. The issue: a last-ditch amendment offered by Kansas' Senator Frank Carlson, ranking Republican on the Senate Post Office Committee, to limit a postal pay raise to 8½% (v. 12½% in the bill and 6% recommended by the President). The limitation was snowed under 54 to 29 when 15 Republicans, many regular Eisenhower supporters, deserted to the Democrats. Net result: the ungainly bill...