Word: wreaking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eighteenth century Quakers introduced the American concept of prisons as a humane alternative to mutilation and other corporal punishments. Today the presumed goals of prisons are various, and sometimes they conflict. The aims are to wreak society's vengeance on a criminal, to deter other men from violating the law, to rehabilitate a prisoner so that he is fit to return to the open world. Yet far too many institutions make no effort to rehabilitate; they are simply zoos for human animals that society wants out of the way. As a result, criminals are thrown into precisely the environment...
...concerned and knowledgeable student electorate could wreak havoc with the Cambridge political scene if it so wished. The issues are certainly there--an extravagantly mismanaged rent control law, a disintegrating school system, highly flammable relationships between the police and the black community...
...plant's critics, opposing Con Ed's request, charge that Indian Point No. 2 will wreak ecological havoc on the Hudson and decimate its fish population. They say that the company's first nuclear facility, Indian Point No. 1, has been killing striped bass, perch and other species since 1963. According to the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, the nuke was directly responsible for the death of between 310,000 and 475,000 fish in a six-week period last year alone...
Such reversals had already been found to have coincided with the extinction of many species of plants and animals (TIME, Nov. 30). This led Durrani and Khan to speculate about what kind of event could cause the reversals and wreak the other damage at the same time. They concluded that the earth's magnetic field may be so precariously balanced (171 reversals in the past 76 million years) that even a small jolt would be enough to upset it. Such a jolt, they argue in a recent issue of Nature, could easily have been caused by a comet...
...American or an Englishman: it was originally promoted in Britain and the U.S. by toy and game companies, under the patented name Ping Pong. As a competitive sport, it has seldom been taken seriously in this country, and today it is usually relegated to suburban basements, where sons can wreak Oedipal vengeance on their panting middle-aged fathers...