Word: trapdoors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sides remain far apart. The Croats are insisting on forming a separate, strong entity within the union, which the Muslims fear will serve as a trapdoor for eventual secession to Croatia. There are also disputes over where internal borders should be drawn -- and whether Muslim refugees could return. One Croat official said there was so much mutual hatred that Washington's idea of confederation was "applying Madison Avenue standards to a Bronxlike situation." But the pace of discussions accelerated as Christopher brought the key players together in Washington to work out a deal...
...Bader Ginsburg was about to graduate from Columbia Law School, where she had transferred after two years at Harvard to be with her husband Martin. She had been an oddity at Harvard, one of only nine women law students in her class. She remembers wanting to drop through a trapdoor when the dean at Harvard asked her to justify taking up the place where a man could be. Still, she was surprised when being on law review at both Harvard and Columbia and first in her class at Columbia did not make her a sought-after hire. She remembers...
...months ago beneath his home, a converted garage behind the house where he grew up. So well concealed that police posted on the property did not suspect it was there, the room could be reached only by using a block and tackle to lift a 200-lb. concrete trapdoor hidden beneath a carpet. Then it was necessary to climb down a 7-ft. ladder to a narrow passage that led to the mini-dungeon. Though it had only a camp toilet, the room was equipped with ventilation and a closed-circuit TV that enabled Esposito to keep...
...anxiety behind the phrase "family values" may derive from an intimation of such breakdown, a flicker of the instant when the moral slippery slope may swivel like a trapdoor to right angles. Americans see the inner Ik all the time these days. They glimpsed it out of the corner of the eye for a moment when an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease was abandoned at the dog track in Post Falls, Idaho, last March. A cautionary scene -- and it turned into a morning talk-show joke: "It's dog-track time for you, doofus!" the host with...
...dozen ducks they keep in two ramshackle wood shacks on their 15-sq.-yd. plot. In fact, the couple seem to be settling in for a long siege. "Around here, they steal," says Torzhenko, so he has dug a cellar with concrete walls and a heavy metal trapdoor to store pork and the potatoes he grows on a parcel of rural land in this rich, black-earth region. "I trust Mikhail Gorbachev when it comes to one thing," he adds. "He said there would be famine -- and there will...