Word: raft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Officials at G.D. Searle must have watched with concern three years ago when a raft of lawsuits forced bankruptcy on A.H. Robins, maker of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine birth-control device. With good reason: from 1974 to 1986 Searle sold in the U.S. the Copper-7, an IUD that, like the Dalkon Shield, has been suspected of causing serious illnesses or injuries in some users...
...officials probably knew they were in trouble years ago, when consumers began to use the terms VHS and VCR interchangeably. The company had made a crucial mistake. While at first Sony kept its Beta technology mostly to itself, JVC, the Japanese inventor of VHS, shared its secret with a raft of other firms. As a result, the market was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the VHS machines being produced. In just the first year of VHS, Sony lost 40% of the VCR business to the upstart competition. By 1987 VHS accounted for more than 90% of the $5.25 billion...
...Ethics in Government Act formalized the terms of the job a decade ago. One day before the conviction, a reluctant Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill extending the counsel provisions of the ethics measure for five years. Meanwhile, Washington was bracing itself for the possibility of a raft of criminal indictments in another probe by a special prosecutor: the Iran-contra investigation...
After the shelling stopped, a Navy SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) commando team in a rubber Zodiac raft tied explosives to the pilings that remained and demolished them. Five miles away, a second SEAL team boarded another oil platform abandoned hours earlier by Iranians and destroyed communications and other equipment...
...focused on the 50% of the nearly $300 billion defense budget that goes for hardware, operations and maintenance. What deserves even more attention than the notorious price gouging by defense contractors on spare parts (one toilet seat: $750) is the wasteful proliferation of large-scale weapons systems. A raft of new, expensive hardware is coming out of research, ready to go into production. One package of eight strategic systems (total cost: at least $250 billion) includes the Stealth bomber and three missile systems: the submarine-launched D-5, the Midgetman and the Peacekeeper (formerly MX). Congress should seriously reconsider whether...