Word: unraveler
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Loan guarantees could also upset the hostage negotiations at a delicate moment. In 1990 kidnappers threatened to harm American hostages if the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel continued. A favorable vote on Capitol Hill could unravel months of careful diplomacy by U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Last week the prospects for an end to the seven-year- old hostage insanity looked more promising than ever. In exchange for the release of 51 prisoners and nine bodies, Israel received firm confirmation from the pro-Iranian Hizballah of the death of one of its seven missing servicemen and inconclusive...
...moment last week, it seemed possible that the Senators might unravel the tight bundle of polite obfuscation that is Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court nominee. Delaware's Joseph Biden, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, jabbed him with questions and snappy comebacks on Thursday morning, and Thomas was briefly thrown off his monotone. But his Republican handlers called for a break, and both Thomas and his Democratic inquisitors returned to a harmless game of parry and dodge...
Bagmen, thugs, arms deals and B.C.C.I. Common ingredients, it turns out, in the murky world of international arms sales, where experiences like that of the American dealer quoted above are common fare. While prosecutors and auditors from governments and regulatory bodies continue their scramble to unravel the role of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International in the world's first truly global financial scandal, TIME has learned that what looked like a bank was in fact a multipurpose, multinational enterprise. In the past two decades, the organization created by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi has become, among other things...
...course of the coup was surreal. Has television, which helped unravel the putsch, come to enforce its own brief attention span upon history? Recent great events -- the breakup of Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf war, the failure of the coup -- seem to be enacting themselves in shorter and shorter time frames. Three days last week undid 10 centuries of civic dormancy. It is possible that the world is dividing between blood feuders and channel changers. The blood feuders, like zealots in Ireland or the Middle East, cannot forget revenge, even over many years; the impatient channel changers of the electronic...
...skins in natural-history museums and from the frozen remains of woolly mammoths. Among the unresolved questions that PCR may eventually shed light on is whether the Neanderthals were an unsuccessful offshoot of the evolutionary tree or the direct ancestors of modern humans. It may also be able to unravel the mystery of what happened to the ancient Celts, who once populated most of Western Europe. "Now," says University of Leicester geneticist Alec Jeffreys, "there is a genetic time machine for looking back into the past...