Word: lax
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NASA at last appears to have pulled itself together after last January's damning revelation that a special commission had charged NASA and its contractors with routinely criticizing or ignoring employees who spoke up about lax shuttle safety. Agency officials now insist that safety, and not a prescribed timetable, is its No. 1 priority. NASA knows it is fighting for its life. "If it's anything short of picture perfect, the shuttle program is going to be at an end," says John Pike, space-policy director for the Federation of American Scientists. "NASA will be chopped up into little pieces...
Like their generation, David and Harriet engage in a rebellion, but it is a reactionary one. They disapprove of the lax morality of their era and the feeling that "the spirit of their times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them...to diminish their best selves...
...stake, it is no wonder that Texas, already a major corridor for narcotics from Central America, is turning into a principal source of guns for drug gangs around the U.S. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms figures that Texas trails only Florida as a black-market weapons supplier. Lax firearms laws require no waiting period or investigation of a buyer; gun smugglers send ordinary-looking shoppers, often women, from gun shop to gun shop, acquiring a weapon at each stop. Within a day, ATF has found, the firearms can turn up in such cities as New York and Washington...
...Airlines accident, in which the roof blew off a worn Boeing 737, has heightened doubts about management and maintenance. The Aloha episode is only the most dramatic of mechanical snafus that have ranged from clogged fuel filters to cracked turbine blades. For at least one airline, Eastern, accusations of lax upkeep are scaring away some customers...
...years after Reactor No. 4 spewed fatal clouds of radiation from the Chernobyl power station, the Soviet public was jolted last week by another blast. The Communist Party daily Pravda charged that sloppy workmanship, mismanagement and lax safety standards -- the very conditions blamed for causing the accident that claimed 31 lives -- continue to plague the Chernobyl complex. Fumed the newspaper: "It is as though there hasn't been an accident...