Word: whopper
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...last week came the shamefaced admission that so-called bourgeois economic laws were right, after all, and the Communists themselves perpetrators of an economic whopper. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, in a two-week meeting at the mountain resort of Kuling, formally conceded that nearly every one of it's 1958 production figures had been false (see box). And the errors were no small ones: if the new figures were to be trusted, all the hardship of the communes had produced only a 35% gain in grain, not the 102% Peking had boasted of, and there...
...Senate Appropriations Committee reported out the year's whopper: the $39,594,339,000 Defense Department appropriation-$346,139,000 more than the White House had asked, with the Army getting the biggest bonus. Included in the bill were an extra $380 million nuclear carrier for the Navy, $85 million more for the Air Force's Atlas missile, and $309 million for the Army's Nike-Hercules and for Army equipment modernization. The Defense Department was directed to keep the Marine Corps at 200,000 men instead of the budgeted 175,000, keep the National Guard...
Khrushchev also praised John Foster Dulles as "a great political figure," but of course his compliment had a Communist twist to it. Khrushchev's bare-faced whopper: in his last days, chatting with Mikoyan, Dulles had reversed his policy and accepted Russian domination of Eastern Europe. Dulles was not alive to answer so gross a fairy story,* and Khrushchev added kindly, "To make such a declaration required courage." The State Department noted tartly that Khrushchev's menacing insults to Italy and Greece hardly fitted in with his pre-summit stance of trying to ease tensions...
This year the crop will be a whopper: 481 million bu., double last year's. One reason is a new hybrid seed; another is better irrigation. But the biggest is a wide loophole in the soil-bank law which permitted U.S. farmers to plant more acres in sorghum than ever before and collect price supports on much...
Like fishermen trolling in strange water, atomic physicists send instruments groping through the earth's upper atmosphere to trap whatever happens to come by. Last week scientists at the University of Minnesota reported that they had caught a whopper: a helium nucleus moving a shade slower than the speed of light with a force at least 150,000 times as powerful as the greatest energy produced by man-the 6 billion electron volts whirled out by the University of California's bevatron...