Word: orbit
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Last October Ahmed set off for Canada, only to become a refugee in orbit. His journey included catching connecting flights in Cyprus, Cairo and Switzerland. When Ahmed landed in Geneva, immigration authorities found that his passport was about to expire and returned him to Cairo. But Egyptian authorities refused to grant him entry. Ahmed was flown to Cyprus, where he languished in the departure lounge of the Larnaca Airport for a few months...
...anticipation of the fireworks, astronomers scheduled a two-week, worldwide solar-observation period during the second half of June. The project was timed to benefit from the observations of the Solar Maximum Mission satellite (nicknamed Solar Max) before it plunges to its death. Lofted into earth orbit in 1980 to monitor the sun's activity, the satellite is gradually descending and will probably re-enter the earth's atmosphere in November and be incinerated. Solar Max's readings of the sun's activity were coordinated with observations made all over the world by ground-based telescopes and instruments mounted...
...could probably win. According to another article of the dark faith, a denuclearized Western Europe would be "Finlandized": France, Italy and Belgium, but above all the Federal Republic of Germany, would be sucked away from their traditional protector on the far side of the Atlantic and into the Soviet orbit. These countries would end up, like Finland, being allowed to manage their internal affairs as they saw fit but obliged to calibrate their foreign policies to the wishes of Moscow...
Ominously, astronomers say 1989FC will be back. Like the earth, the asteroid orbits the sun, but it takes about 380 days to do so, instead of 365. When the asteroid passes by again next April, it will probably be at a safer distance from the earth. The next time earthlings need to worry, says astronomer Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, who calculated the orbit based on Holt's observations, is 2015. "If our figures are correct," he says, "the asteroid will have made 25 orbits to earth's 26, and we will meet again...
...with Harold Adrian Russell ("Kim") Philby, whose exploits as a Soviet mole inside Britain's Secret Intelligence Service seem breathtaking enough to have been crafted by a master of the thriller genre. The son of an eccentric Arabist, Philby entered Communism's orbit while at Cambridge in the 1930s. Carefully disguising those links, he joined Britain's SIS and rose high enough in its ranks to rate consideration as its potential chief. Yet by the time he disappeared in 1963, only to surface in the Soviet Union a few months later, it was painfully clear that Philby all along...