Word: porto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clearing land for crops and livestock by burning the rain forests of the Amazon. Unusually heavy rains have slowed down the burning this year, but the dry season could come at any time, and then the fires will reach a peak. Last year the smoke grew so thick that Porto Velho, the capital of the state of Rondonia, was forced to close its airport for days at a time. An estimated 12,350 sq. mi. of Brazilian rain forest -- an area larger than Belgium -- was reduced to ashes. Anticipating another conflagration this year, scientists, environmentalists and TV crews have journeyed...
...finally launched its "Moses project," the building of a giant seawall designed to part the waters and save the city from the sea. Last week, exactly 22 years after the great flood, a 200-ton steel box was towed across the Venice Lagoon and dropped in place at the Porto di Lido, one of the lagoon's three entrances. If the device works as planned, it will be the first of 60 to 70 sea gates that will eventually stretch 1.2 miles, sealing off the lagoon from the Adriatic...
...when Porto took the witness stand at his trial on Long Island last month, he made a stunning recantation. He had invented the murder story, he tearfully claimed, because he was ashamed to tell the truth: Holland had begged him to wrap a rope around her neck to produce a state of near suffocation, called sexual asphyxia, that is said to heighten erotic pleasure. In his excitement, he said, he pulled too hard. Nassau County Prosecutor Kenneth Littman derided the new story as the "oops defense." But the jury found Porto guilty on only the lesser charge of criminally negligent...
Holland's family was outraged. Last week her brother made public a 6,000- signature petition demanding that Porto get the maximum penalty. "Rough sex?" scoffs her father Denis, a retired policeman. "That phrase wasn't even part of my daughter's vocabulary." It had, however, become part of the public's vocabulary earlier this year during the "preppie murder" trial of Robert Chambers, who claimed to have killed Jennifer Levin accidentally during an unbridled sexual episode in Manhattan's Central Park. Last week Levin's father Steven held a press conference to protest such defense tactics. "It's become...
Much of the controversy surrounding the Porto trial hinged upon whether sexual asphyxia would have been part of a teenage girl's erotic habits. Porto Attorney Barry Slotnick, who defended Subway Gunman Bernhard Goetz, put an expert on the stand who testified that the practice was far more common than people realize, though deaths occur mostly among males engaged in solitary...