Word: welling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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President Virgilio Barco Vargas' four-month-old war against his country's top narcos -- Gacha, Pablo Escobar Gaviria and the three brothers of Medellin's Ochoa family -- has not gone as well as he or the nation had hoped. Since Mob hit men assassinated presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan in August and ignited Barco's offensive, the leaders of Colombia's coke cartels have gone into hiding, forfeiting posh estates and bank accounts; some law- enforcement officials believe that the drug princes have even undergone plastic surgery. Nevertheless, Gacha and company remain immensely powerful, with their pipeline...
...running afoul of laws that professionals have already discovered. The statutes began tightening in 1986, when money laundering became a specific crime. Later it became illegal to evade the $10,000 currency-reporting requirements by making groups of smaller deposits. Banks have begun to exercise more internal supervision as well, prodded by a series of investigations in the mid-1980s in which such institutions as Bank of America and Bank of Boston were forced to pay hefty fines for their involvement in laundering schemes. Yet many major banks are still participants, witting or not, in ever more sophisticated laundering operations...
...close the gap, Bush's offensive against drug-cash handlers is being placed in the hands of a newly created task force that includes the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, as well as a team of drug, tax and customs agents. FINCEN is already at work in a crowded Virginia office littered with discarded coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, computer terminals and maps of the world. "We're going to be a financial think tank to help train cops who are deluged in financial data," says Gene Weinschenk, acting director of FINCEN's research-and-development division...
...Earth Day 1990 headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., 20 staff members are plotting strategy as if the event were a political campaign. "We're organizing neighborhoods, regions and special constituencies," says communications director Diana Aldridge. The group has taken a few marketing cues from Madison Avenue as well. As part of a drive to raise $3 million, Earth Day 1990 is licensing its logo, which will be plastered on everything from coffee mugs to windbreakers. Posters and ads will soon appear carrying the slogan EARTH DAY 1990: WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE WORLD...
...scientist believes lack of computing power -- as well as ignorance about such critical factors as the interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere, and the impact of clouds on surface temperatures -- limits the ability to predict the greenhouse effect. "It's possible that Washington will see 96 days of temperatures over 100 degrees F in the year 2010," he says, "but it's also possible that the U.S. will be economically impoverished because it unilaterally imposed draconian measures in anticipation of a greenhouse warming that never arrived...