Word: weaponed
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...Japan's Ricoh, Canon and other new competitors muscled onto Xerox's turf, the company slumped from an 86% share of the world market for basic copiers in 1974 to just 16.6% by 1984. When a shaken Xerox finally studied its competitors more closely, the company discovered their secret weapon: the Japanese firms hewed to rigorous quality standards. Taking a hard-eyed look at its operations, Xerox discovered that it was slowly destroying itself with sloppiness and inefficiency at almost every level...
...between Oak Ridge, Tenn., and two manufacturers in England, a total of five grams (0.175 oz.) of radioactive tritium had vanished without a trace. What made the disappearance especially alarming was that the quantity of tritium involved was sufficient, when combined with other ingredients, to build a small nuclear weapon. The U.S. Department of Energy, sensitive to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, last July halted U.S. sales of the gas and moved quickly to explain the losses and assure the public that the missing tritium had not ended up in the hands of a terrorist state...
Hardly any time elapses between the onset of a political scandal in Washington and the search for the smoking gun. No one is culpable until such explicit proof is found, and it hardly ever is: the cagey Washington player wipes off his fingerprints and heaves the weapon into the river...
...brief time of peace, photojournalism waged war against privacy. A decisive weapon appeared in 1924: the Ermanox, a miniature glass-plate camera with a wide-aperture lens. The camera could operate in dim light and without great intrusion. Erich Salomon, a German with a talent for discretion, stalked diplomatic salons and private railway cars with his tripod-held model. In the U.S., a New York Daily News photographer, Tom Howard, strapped a miniature camera to his ankle and violated the mystery of Ruth Snyder's electrocution...
Years ago, Wakamba tribesmen poached in Tsavo, using arrows tipped with poison. Now Somali gangs, including many former soldiers, spray whole families of elephants with automatic-weapon fire. Not all Tsavo's poachers have been outsiders to the park. Some who are paid to protect the elephants -- wardens and rangers -- are also suspect. The evidence: Woodley and others have extracted .303-cal. bullets from carcasses. "The only people who use .303s are the rangers," he says. Numerous carcasses have been found near the rangers' headquarters. And when the park's patrol plane is grounded for inspection, the poachers quickly appear...