Word: swoopings
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...huge, lumbering towers of flame and smoke as primitive, brutal and notoriously unreliable. Before the next millennium is very far along, humans will get their lift from space planes that take off and land like conventional jets but are powered by "scramjets" that, once aloft, will enable them to swoop into orbit or go halfway around the world in two hours. Cargo will be shot into orbit by electromagnetic rail guns that ramp up the sides of mountains, or will be flung upward by looping orbital tethers, sort of like David's slingshot...
...long swoop from Africa's year 1500 to European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In 1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . . Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a glorious and dignified history...
...mission, so sensitive that only the pilots and base commander knew, was to rescue President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- and, later, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- in the event of a nuclear attack. Posted outside the blast range of an atomic assault on Washington, they were to swoop down onto the White House lawn when an attack seemed imminent and spirit the President away to one of several hollowed-out mountain sites or to the heavily reinforced communications ship, the U.S.S. Northampton, off the Atlantic Coast...
Clerical work is the classic example -- a once prestigious occupation for males that was rendered female and unremunerative in one fell swoop roughly 70 years ago. Even child rearing may be a case in point. The courts started favoring mothers in child-custody suits soon after the turn of the century, which was about the time child labor was outlawed. Women got to keep the kids, in other words, just as they ceased to be moneymakers and became the tiny parasites clamoring for Nintendo that we know so well today...
...ultimate package deal, a grand compromise designed to clean up one of the world's messiest piles of financial wreckage. Bank liquidators, acting on behalf of the moribund Bank of Credit & Commerce International, marched into a crowded Manhattan courtroom last Friday and settled, in one unexpected swoop, all U.S. criminal charges outstanding against B.C.C.I. as a corporation. The bank, which in the U.S. is now essentially just a hollow shell, pleaded guilty to federal and state charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering. The liquidators agreed to surrender virtually every penny of B.C.C.I.'s assets in the U.S., a total...