Word: line
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hostages are also pawns in the games played by powerful Middle East states. In Iran, they are part of a domestic power struggle between Rafsanjani and his hard-line Interior Minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, who served as paymaster to Hizballah in the early 1980s. Experts feel that Mohtashami's - ability to sustain the hostage holding will be a litmus test of his power under the newly elected President. Syria, which maintains about 25,000 troops in Lebanon, could improve its relations with the West by rescuing the hostages, but it wields little influence over the Shi'ites who hold them...
...shells conjure images of tiny oceangoing Darth Vaders, pair up, with the smaller male crabs locking themselves atop the females' spiny shells with special pincers. For many less fortunate males, who vastly outnumber the females, the frenzy is more like a wretched high school dance: they form a stag line on the beach. Then, when a female, bearing a suitor on her back, wallows up and begins to burrow in the sand where she will lay about 4,000 eggs, as many as 15 lusty males struggle in the waves to pile on. All the males, their long spiny tails...
...recent sunny morning, plucky Alison Akke, 15 months old and dressed in a dainty blue sundress, is lugging two horseshoe crabs by their spiny tails toward the water. Nearby, her mother Emma, 35, peers at one until it wriggles and then gingerly hauls it away. She and her daughter line up the crabs, side by side, along the beach just above the incoming tide. Besides saving some crabs, they have also tidied the sand, once littered with topsy-turvy animals. Quips Alison's mom: "Instead of mowing my grass, I come out here and clear my beach...
Dave Welsh knows. He's down at Reed's Beach, fishing with his father. For the umpteenth time since he worked these waters as a boy, Welsh, now 42, curses and starts reeling in his line. Nothing biting today except the horseshoe crab. Agitated, he untangles one from his line and tosses it back. He has few kind words for the crabs; the fact is, he finds inanimate objects more provocative. "Each year, you see ten or 20 articles about the crabs, but you never see any about the sandbars," he bellyaches, pointing to the tidal flats along...
Though many of these outlying efforts have been wildly successful, the zoos themselves are still the front line. A child who rubs noses, even through the plate glass, with a polar bear or a penguin may be far more likely to mature into an eager conservationist than into one who sees animals as toys or accessories. It is hard to walk around a good zoo without caring, deeply, about whether this miraculous wealth of lovely, peculiar, creepy, unfathomable creatures survives or perishes. And it will be a great sorrow if zoos are ever the last place on earth where...