Word: ratting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...packed Hillside, New Jersey, courtroom last night, a judge dropped animal-cruelty charges against Frank Balun, the 69-year-old gardener who became a cause celebre after he whacked a rat to death with a broom for eating his tomato plants. Ironically, Balun got noticed -- and risked a year in jail and $2,500 in fines -- after he called the Associated Humane Societies to get the carcass. The AHS promptly filed charges against him. The judge found a loophole in state law that allows slaughter if vermin damage crops or livestock. But it took a plea-in-verse from local...
Elsewhere, savvy investors might have smelled a rat earlier. But this was postcommunist Russia, where capitalism is wild, woolly and new. The come-on, in any event, had been slick and seductive: pervasive TV commercials that wafted visions of apartments in Paris and vacations in California, and preposterous returns of 2,000% annually with no minimum investment. With those tactics, it did not take long for 5 million Russians to pour money into the offices of the MMM investment firm, the country's biggest and best-known stock fund...
Andrew Jackson Higgins a pivot of history? No doubt, claims biographer Jerry Strahan. Higgins was a hard-drinking, tough-talking swamp rat and boat genius in New Orleans who developed the square-front wooden tubs that ferried Allied soldiers and their equipment onto the beaches. On the morning of June 6, 1,500 Higgins boats nestled aboard the larger transports, the crucial link between sea and shore...
...lung cancer, had filed suit against Philip Morris and other tobacco companies, contending that they falsely represented the health risks of cigarettes. Philip Morris flew DeNoble and Mele to New York City to brief company executives on their research. According to Mele, however, when DeNoble explained that the rat experiment was a strong indication of the addictiveness of nicotine, one executive said, "Why should I risk a billion-dollar industry on a rat pressing a lever?" (In 1992 the Cipollones dropped the case...
...suffered the usual torments of the underground poet moving into the mainstream, and was worried that his band had sold out, that it was attracting - the wrong kind of fans (e.g., the guys who used to beat him up). True, he liked the money that went with mall-rat adulation. But in interviews he exuded a pain beyond standard-issue superstar whining. He said his heroin use was a kind of self-medication for stomach pains, but what he really seemed in search of was psychic equilibrium...