Word: shafting
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...town consisted of little more than a rundown general store and a couple of bootleggers who sold illicit liquor to passing trappers. Then, with little fanfare, Campbell Chibougamau Mines Ltd. in 1952 sewed up a U.S. Government contract for its output, the next year started to sink a shaft. Last year it went into production, hauling concentrates laboriously by truck to the railroad at St. Felicien, 125 miles to the southeast. With a world shortage driving copper prices towards records (last week's U.S. price: about 40? a lb.), other companies holding long-neglected Chibougamau claims decided to have...
...heard a chilling announcement cut into the Belgian broadcasting system's light-music program: there was trouble at the Bitter Heart, and fire engines, asbestos suits, fire extinguishers were needed. Outside, a 300-ft. plume of bilious-looking yellow smoke was already rising languidly above the mine shaft...
Firemen set to work. "If you use water they may drown," said one. "But if you don't the fire will suffocate them." Fire hoses proved ineffective. Then rescuers equipped with oxygen masks, steel helmets, rubber boots and courage went 400 ft. down one of the shafts, returned with eyebrows singed, rubber boots half melted, and crying, "It is a furnace down there." Other rescuers broke out of a new and untouched shaft into one of the old galleries, brought out three bodies and one injured man. As the ambulance bore the injured man off to the hospital, women...
Last year construction workers digging foundations on the Via Latina, an ancient street branching off the Appian Way, noticed small holes in the earth. The news was passed to the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which ordered Engineer Mario di Santa Maria to excavate further. Entering through a shaft bored in the ground, he and his colleagues penetrated an elaborate catacomb, but found that all loose objects of value had disappeared. Fact was that the catacomb had been discovered 20 years before, and covered quietly by the landowners to avoid an official veto on building over...
Fritz Winter left his job as a miner in a Westphalian coal shaft when he won a scholarship at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis clamped down, Winter scraped together enough money to buy a hillside farmhouse in Bavaria. As a front, he set up shop as a maker of wooden knickknacks. His real work he did at night, painting abstractions that reflected the grimness of the times. Says Winter of one typical painting, which shows four heavy, black hammer forms relentlessly assaulting a doomed crystalline structure: "I was a seismograph; I was under a heavy weight in those years...