Word: rafts
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...masterminded by former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff punctuated a miserable year for Wall Street in the worst possible way: by underlining, yet again, that savvy market-makers can harness arcane financial instruments as weapons of mass destruction. Left in Madoff's wake are bankrupt investors, mortified regulators and a raft of unnoticed red flags. Madoff's methods previously had been investigated by the SEC, and in 2001, a prescient article raised questions about his inscrutable strategies: "Madoff's investors rave about his performance - even though they don't understand how he does it," wrote Barron's Erin Arvedlund, who quoted...
...says that earlier this year, 19 teenagers went missing from her neighborhood. They had made a pact to leave Cuba by raft. Months later, not one of them had called to say they had arrived in the States. The mothers in the neighborhood knew their children had drowned...
...sailors, who wears plastic gloves and a headlamp, speaks to the men in broken English. "Where you from?" he asks. Eventually, one softly responds. "Afghanistan," he says, and the others repeat the word. None have identity documents. It's past 1 a.m., and the coast-guard captain estimates the raft left the Turkish coast four hours earlier. The men have rowed more than halfway across the strait, a few hundred yards into Greek territorial waters. They've made it into Europe alive. Five minutes later, the radar picks up another dinghy nearby with five more young men, and the drill...
...Navy inspections of the San Antonio have found a raft of problems so baked into its design that many Navy officials fear it can never be made right, despite its price tag's having risen from $644 million to $1.8 billion. "Some significant fraction of the welds in that ship were flawed and had to be redone," John Young, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, told Congress in June. "I shouldn't be forced to pay on behalf of taxpayers any price for any level of deficient performance." Still, that's just what the Navy did, forking over an additional...
...same time, the election and technology bred another, kinder-and- dorkier group of stars: the geekocracy. CNN's John King broke down election returns and poll figures on a touchscreen "magic wall," while NBC guru Chuck Todd crunched numbers on what resembled an electronic Risk board. Meanwhile, a raft of bloggers used the Web's strength--indulging obsessiveness--to create temples of poll analysis. Chief among them was Nate Silver, a baseball-statistics nut at whose FiveThirtyEight.com habitués debate weighting averages and tracking-poll internals until the wee hours...