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...highlight of the seven-day flight of Discovery, which ended in triumph last week after a halting, tension-filled start. Proclaimed NASA Official Jesse Moore, after the five-man shuttle crew made a predawn landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California: "It was a beautiful mission from the outset." Well, not exactly. Discovery's launch had been postponed twice at the last minute, first by bad weather, then by a faulty backup computer. The third try seemed doomed to failure too when the storm system that later spawned Hurricane Elena darkened the sky and began pelting Cape Canaveral with...
Sports manufacturers and retailers got on the wagon at the outset, of course. All it took to jog was a good pair of shoes. Triathlons require racing bikes, cycling shoes, crash helmets, running shoes, a swimming pool or an ocean and all manner of attire. In Chicago, a hotel ballroom was jammed with expensive wares, from high-powered energy drinks to "tri-suits," one-piece jobs that can be worn in all three events. The professional athletes make their money endorsing these items (first place in Chicago paid $2,000; the total purse was $15,000), holding training camps...
Coverage of the recent hijacking was no exception. At the outset, the media and the perpetrators shared a common cause: both sought an audience. As the terrorists and the terrorized took center stage, Americans turned to television for their front row seats...
...History occurs twice," Stefan Kanfer writes at the outset of The International Garage Sale, quoting Karl Marx, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Some 200 pages later, many of them stingingly funny, Kanfer ends his novel invoking the same message. Yet the novel itself lies somewhere on the continuum between tragedy and farce. Ostensibly it is a sardonic burlesque of the United Nations (here thinly disguised as the World Body) and its present-day cast of characters, but underneath runs a current of sadness that the ideals of the 1940s have been overrun by the travesties...
...bidder because of various seemingly insoluble tax and legal problems. It turned to the Wall Street firm of Morgan Stanley to handle the auction. "The Russians would have been happy to make the highest bid," quipped Joseph Perella, a managing director of First Boston, a Hughes adviser. From the outset, GM seemed the most likely buyer. Detroit's recovery had left the largest U.S. automaker with some $9 billion to spend, even after the E.D.S. acquisition, and Smith badly wanted Hughes...