Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although this latest act of air piracy followed a grimly familiar pattern, it threatened to surpass other hijackings in sheer brutality. By week's end the terrorists had butchered at least four of their captives, including two Americans. They freed 146 hostages, but for the dozen or so men who remained on board, tied to their seats, conditions were said to be horrendous. There were reports that the Airbus had been disabled late Friday night by bursts of gunfire that shattered windows in the cockpit and cabin. A freed Pakistani passenger said the hostages had tried unsuccessfully to overpower...
...core of David Bowie, as if he were some sort of Amana appliance. This new record has fielded one of Bowie's most infectious Top Ten hits, Blue Jean, but the album has taken some hard knocks for being less a fresh direction than a kind of holding pattern that is good for dancing. Indeed, several of the songs are vintage items from the portfolio of Bowie's pal Iggy Pop; one is a nifty old Leiber and Stoller tune; and another is an unlikely remake of Brian Wilson and Tony Asher's Beach Boys classic...
...advance with the White House and got approval from the National Security Council. A few hours before he delivered it, he gave a copy to Secretary of State George Shultz. The two men have been on opposite sides of national security issues, although there is no consistent ideological pattern to their differences...
...problem was the unpredictable ways in which languages evolve: the panel had to devise forms of communication that could be understood by the next 300 or so generations. One suggestion is a waste repository with a series of raised earth barriers built around it in a triangular pattern. Within this wedge would be monument-like markers, as durable and detectable as England's Stonehenge monoliths. These structures would bear triangular warning symbols or cartoons as simple in design as the 17,000-year-old cave drawings by Cro-Magnon man in France. One proposed sequence of drawings: three human...
Among the prize finds: three elegant ceramic pots made between 3500 and 2500 B.C., one with incised designs, that were placed atop the legs of a buried body; a large vessel with an intricate scroll pattern, dated 3000 to 2000 B.C., that was used to inter a two-year-old child, and a plain cup found near by that might have contained food for the baby; and two iron spearheads with bronze sockets (to hold wooden handles), dated 800 to 400 B.C., which are among the oldest iron objects found in eastern Asia...