Word: railways
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...ritual as regular as the seasons. On one day every spring and autumn, railway stations across the Soviet Union are festooned with patriotic banners, bands blare stirring martial rhythms, and local dignitaries make speeches praising soldierly virtues. Then, as crowds of tearful friends and relatives wave farewell, anxious young men climb aboard the waiting train: they are the current crop of 18-year-old Soviet draftees?about 1 million a year?heading off to begin their military service. After basic training and indoctrination at the camps, invariably hundreds of miles from their birthplaces, they will take a solemn oath...
...result is a continuous and inefficient scramble for scarce resources, as planners lurch uncertainly from one high-priority project to the next. One such enterprise is the 2,000-mile-long Baikal-Amur Mainline railway across Siberia. This has become an engineer's nightmare, as any study would have shown. Huge stretches freeze solid in the winter and then become quagmires during summer...
That moderation may end when Julien takes charge. Editor of the paper's monthly supplement Le Monde Diplomatique since 1973, Julien is further to the left and more virulently anti-American than almost any other senior journalist on the staff. The son of a railway worker, he was educated in the U.S. at the University of Notre Dame, and joined Le Monde as a foreign news editor in 1951. His favorite editorial litany, honed to perfection in front-page editorials at Diplomatique, concerns the revolutionary struggle of Latin America to escape American influence. Says a longtime rival: "Julien turned...
...investors. Some 1895 bonds promise to pay in gold the interest every year and the face value in full in 1995. While the 1895 price of gold was $20.67 per oz., the precious metal closed in New York last week at $511. For decades the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, the largest remaining ingot bond issuer, dutifully made 2% semiannual interest payments in gold coin. But in 1933, Congress struck the gold clause and restricted the bonds' interest and principal payments to cash...
...could destroy the Olympic Games forever would be a tragedy to be remembered long after Afghanistan and the 1980 elections have faded from mind. If the U.S. is going to deny its citizens passports in order to prevent their participation in Moscow, I hope there will be an underground railway to smuggle out American athletes and spectators who want to do their part to keep the Olympic spirit alive...