Word: omen
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...part of the city. Pulling up to 50 huge wooden kegs behind them, they managed to slow traffic through Munich's narrow streets to a clippety-clop, but the townsfolk rarely seemed to mind. Encountering a horse-drawn beer wagon had become a good-luck omen, on a par with seeing a chimney sweep. The chesty Belgian-Rhenish geldings, however, have fallen victim to the city's foul air-which a Ludwig Maximilian University study in Munich ranks second only to Tokyo's in pollutants. For their own sake, all 16 of the current crew have been...
...Contingency plans for commando search-and-rescue missions into North Viet Nam already existed, and a number of similar raids had been carried out in enemy-held areas of South Viet Nam over the years. (Significantly, none of them had ever found a single live prisoner either, but the omen was discounted.) Eventually, Laird told the President that his intelligence people had recommended a P.O.W. camp at Son Tay as a likely target for search and rescue. Nixon was enthusiastic. On Aug. 11 he gave a go-ahead for planning the operation without actually authorizing the mission. The Pentagon assigned...
...rejection? During the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in St. Louis last week, college presidents and administrators discussed a dramatic case in point: City University of New York and its new open-admissions policy. To some it seemed a triumph of democracy; to others, an omen that colleges may soon be overwhelmed with the "wrong" kind of students...
...succeeds Kenneth Pitzer, a quiet, introspective chemist who served only 19 months and was rebuffed at every turn. Pitzer was partly done in by vindictive student radicals who went to the extreme of drenching him with red paint. His low profile also irked key alumni donors, a bad omen when Stanford was contemplating a major fund drive. Last June, to the trustees' obvious relief, Pitzer resigned. Search committees of faculty, students and alumni took only three months to reach a consensus favoring Lyman...
...seems to be scraped from the bases of monuments. "I have studied at Harvard," says Yamamoto, "and I know that Americans are a proud and just people." When the clouds break during the flight to Hawaii, the squadron leader exults: "The sunburst reminds me of our flag-a good omen...