Word: maxims
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...more than a week, the 576 passengers aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim % Gorky had been sailing through the North Atlantic near Iceland, marveling at the dramatic Arctic scenery. Just after midnight on their ninth day out -- it was foggy, yet still light in the land of the midnight sun -- the 25,000-ton ship struck a partly submerged ice floe. Three gashes opened in the starboard forward hull below the waterline, one of them 18 ft. long...
...impact there was a thundering shudder, followed by the wail of the ship's siren. In one of the Maxim Gorky's restaurants, as the pianist was playing The Green, Green Grass of Home, a heavy loudspeaker crashed down on the instrument. The passengers, almost all West German pensioners who had boarded in Bremerhaven, stumbled on deck into freezing...
Eventually the passengers, many still clad in pajamas, were taken to Spitsbergen, in Norway's polar Svalbard archipelago, and then flown back to West Germany. Emergency teams kept the Maxim Gorky from sinking by pumping water out of the vessel and plugging the gashes with cement brought out to them by a Russian freighter...
...could the Maxim Gorky, which was equipped with radar and other modern navigational aids, encounter so serious a mishap? Norwegian experts suggested that the ship, commanded by Captain Marat Galimov, who apparently was on his first voyage in the Arctic seas, may have been cruising at excessive speed. When it struck the ice, according to Senja captain Sigurd Kleiven, the Soviet ship was steaming at about 18 knots in an area where Norwegian maritime officials say no more than 3 to 5 knots is advisable at this time of year. Said Bjorn Sorensen, a Lutheran parish priest on Spitsbergen...
...Hong Kong, Sri Lankans fleeing to London, Haitians landing in Miami and thousands of others. -- China metes out swift "justice" following the student revolt. -- After 14 years of civil war, is peace coming to Angola? -- A daring Norwegian rescue saves more than 900 aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky...