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...flight into the U.S. of a plane carrying Colombian marijuana or cocaine is a dramatic but far from unusual event. "Several hundred come in every day," says Tom Stuckey, an FAA official in Louisiana. Most flights from Colombia are bound for Florida and Georgia; a DC-7 with twelve tons of marijuana was discovered at an airfield in Georgia last spring. Countless other "pot planes" take off from Mexico for the deserts of the Southwest, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has found more than 40 small aircraft abandoned this year. The trafficking is a high-profit operation: a single...
...this year. Even in absolute numbers, union membership has changed only slightly through the 1970s. And much of the membership is concentrated in mass-production industries, where union jobs are threatened both by more efficient manufacturing techniques?it takes fewer workers every year to make a car or a ton of steel?and by a transfer of some operations to the largely nonunion Sunbelt. For example, General Motors has opened nine plants in the South since 1973?and kept the United Auto Workers...
Using Einstein's equations, astronomers determined that after all of the nuclear fuel is consumed, gravity eventually would cause the star to contract into a white dwarf, a sphere only about as big as the earth but so dense that each cubic centimeter would weigh a ton. Their calculations finally made sense of a dim companion of the star Sirius that was first observed in the 1860s and had puzzled astronomers for decades. Though the star was apparently small, it exerted an inexplicably great gravitational pull on Sirius. The dense little companion?like others that have been observed since?...
...have revalued their gold holdings from the old official rate of $35 an ounce to the prevailing market price, thus multiplying the value of their reserves with the scratch of a pen. The U.S., which has not joined the revaluation trend, still reckons the worth of its 8,516-ton gold hoard at $35 an ounce, or $ 11.5 billion...
Because the value of pre-Columbian art spirals upward faster than California real estate, even the largest treasures are not safe. Last month a quarter-ton stone figure of an ancient priest chewing coca, known as El Coquero and dating back some 3,000 years, vanished from its site in San Agustin in southwest Colombia. Ecuadorian officials are trying to retrieve an entire 11,000-item collection of Andean treasures that somehow managed to turn up in Milan and Turin, where they were being put up for sale...