Word: probe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...similar to a cruise missile," quips Sagdeyev -- and drop an instrument-bearing minilander to record data on the moon's soil. One experiment involves a laser that will emit short bursts of energy, each vaporizing a square millimeter of surface into a cloud that can be analyzed by the probe's spectrometer. "You can pick up such exploded material from many different places," says Sagdeyev. "In the end you have a chemical map of the surface of Phobos -- if you are lucky...
...General, he fired Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to do so. At his judicial confirmation hearings nine years later, Bork said he acted to prevent chaos at the Justice Department and moved quickly to assure continuation of the independent probe. That seemed to settle the matter. But in recent weeks, some Massacre witnesses have quarreled with portions of his sworn story and suggested Bork was in fact acting to help Nixon defy a lawful court order for his tapes...
...report, written by a Manhattan law firm and titled Investigation into Sales of Propeller Milling Machines to the Soviet Union by Toshiba Machine Co., Ltd. But its 45 off-white pages portray an industrial intrigue complete with disguised machine tools, secretive meetings, stifled whistle blowers and burned records. The probe, which was commissioned by Tokyo's Toshiba Corp. and released last week, describes for the first time in detail the conspiracy behind the covert sales made to the Soviet Union by Toshiba's subsidiary, Toshiba Machine. It was a crime that the Pentagon claims has helped Soviet submarines elude detection...
...when a disgruntled Japanese trading-company employee who helped with the sale wrote a whistle-blowing statement that found its way to MITI. The agency's initial probe made no headway, since Toshiba Machine's executives stuck so uniformly to their phony story. Inside the company, a full-scale cover-up was under way, in which employees incinerated documents by tossing them into factory furnaces. When the allegations were finally leaked to the press last March, MITI was compelled to send the police, who grilled employees until the truth emerged...
Despite all the tawdry details, the report may help Toshiba quell anger in Washington, since the probe concludes that the subterfuge was confined to the company's machine-tool subsidiary. Congress is considering several proposals that would impose sanctions, the most severe of which would ban Toshiba's exports to the U.S. for as long as five years (potential annual loss: $2.8 billion). Other companies may soon join Toshiba in the spotlight, for the increasingly vigilant Japanese government is said to be investigating some 20 firms it suspects of violating the country's technology-export laws...