Word: setback
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prohibition is a huge setback for the polygraph industry, which is expected to lose about 85% of its $100 million in annual revenues. But the new law is a boon for firms that offer two other character tests: pencil-and-paper quizzes and graphology, or handwriting analysis. Says Eric Zorn, senior vice president of the Jamesway discount-store chain: "I'm very unhappy about the new law, but I'm thankful we can still use written tests...
...people, not comets or volcanoes, are the angels of destruction. Moreover, the earth is suffering the decline of entire ecosystems -- the nurseries of new life-forms. For that reason, Wilson deems this crisis the "death of birth." British ecologist Norman Myers has called it the "greatest single setback to life's abundance and diversity since the first flickerings of life almost 4 billion years...
...more immediate importance for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev are the domestic effects of the quake. The enormous costs of rebuilding Armenian towns and villages will be a serious setback to perestroika, his program of economic restructuring. The political aftershocks are already severe. Even before the tragedy, Armenians distrusted Gorbachev because of his rejection of their territorial claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, a largely Armenian enclave embedded in neighboring Azerbaijan, a blood enemy of Armenia. The earthquake only heightened the Armenians' anger, and that prompted a furious Gorbachev to describe the airing of nationalist grievances at such a time as "immoral...
...small misstep for a technician and an expensive setback for the next mission of the space shuttle Discovery. Last week a hapless worker, whose name has been withheld to protect him from humiliation, tripped on the tail of his lab coat and piled into the exhaust nozzle of a space rocket that is to ferry an important communications satellite into orbit next February. The accident caused a crack in the heat-resistant carbon nozzle that was too serious to be fixed with a simple patch, and NASA will have to replace the entire first stage of the expensive rocket. Total...
Despite that setback, Mitchell still travels to Scandinavia as often as he can to do field research, the aim of which is to analyze folklore theory and the history of that genre in Northern Europe, he says. "My life is split in two halves, but there is a synergism between them," says Mitchell, who just received tenure from Harvard after eight years of teaching here...