Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...skidded wildly, at one point rotating 150[degrees]. It slid off the end of the runway, broadsiding a steel tower that held landing lights. When the plane finally came to rest on a bank of the Arkansas River, it had split in three, and a fire had broken out near its left wing. As it erupted in flames, passengers fled for their lives. Nine people, including veteran pilot Captain Richard Buschmann, died--the first fatalities on a major U.S. airline in nearly a year and a half--and 83 were injured...
...nine previous times he was nominated, Randy Newman might feel a strange satisfaction as well: he's been writing about bitter losers and empty hallways since the Beatles had bowl haircuts. Newman's four-CD retrospective collection is called Guilty: 30 Years, as if his career were a near life sentence for the crime of telling the dirty truth in song...
Lourie's Stalin enjoys the occasional note of totalitarian whimsy, as when, late one night, he rides back to the Kremlin from Lubyanka in his limousine, accompanied by "Boss Two," the near identical double who stood in for him at risky public appearances. Stalin has the limo stop alongside a drunk, rolls down the window and lets the drunk see...twin Stalins! "Drink a little less," Uncle Joe advises, and the limo roars off. This Stalin takes in the world with a savage candor. At a meeting with his hatchetman Lavrenty Beria, "I caught a whiff of that hideous cologne...
Stalin's urgency to kill Trotsky revolves around a secret that Stalin fears Trotsky is near to discovering. The reader knows, of course, that the assassin's ice ax will end up, on schedule, embedded in Trotsky's skull. The suspense is in waiting to learn Stalin's unpardonable sin--which turns out to be, historically, an interesting sin indeed...
...spent 18 months probing the moon's surface and interior, Lunar Prospector is running out of fuel, and is expected to crash at the end of July. Rather than just let it go, however, NASA decided to give the satellite a final mission: to take aim at a crater near the moon's south pole and slam into it at 3,600 M.P.H...