Word: countdowns
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...owner of the tiny cell, a government worker, acquired it through a bribe and maintains it with the extra money he has made surreptitiously taping and transcribing each week for five years the American Top 40 Countdown, broadcast on a commercial station in Florida. By day he serves his country; by night, like many young Cubans, he dreams of escape. "If ever I get to the U.S.," he says with a wistful smile, "I could get a job in Hollywood. All my life I have learned how to act. Sometimes I smile inside, it is so crazy...
...countdown started around midnight at Baltimore's University of Maryland Hospital. At that hour doctors began the delicate task of removing the heart and lungs from a 32-year-old victim of a car accident declared brain dead several hours earlier. Working swiftly, they excised the organs, chilled them to 45 degrees F and transported them across town to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Clinton House, 28, a refrigeration mechanic whose lungs were ravaged by cystic fibrosis, had been summoned from his home and was being wheeled into the operating room. He had waited a year for this moment. In a room...
...Kidder Peabody. The blinking number on his computer screen, which will signal him when it is time to unleash his electronic firepower, is advising him to wait. But suddenly the stock market begins to move downward, and the telltale digit on Schmuckler's screen starts changing like a countdown at Cape Canaveral. The trader and his two assistants erupt in a frenzy of shouted telephone conversations as they advise colleagues in New York City and Chicago to get ready for a blast of trading orders. "Strap on your seat belts, folks," says Schmuckler. "It looks like it's going...
...countdown had been proceeding smoothly since January of last year, when former Astronaut Donald (Deke) Slayton announced that Houston-based Space Services, his private rocket-launching company, would soon begin sending aloft the cremated remains of customers who want to be buried in space. He said that for a fee of $3,900, the deceased would be reduced to an ounce or less of ash and placed in a 2-in. by 5/8-in. aluminum capsule. A drum containing 5,000 of the capsules would then be shot into orbit in a Conestoga II rocket...
...while others tried to hide in the darkness. Recalls Michael Goldstein, a physician from Los Angeles: "The stewardesses were using megaphones, asking passengers to be very quiet amd not to panic." Then, with scores of people crouching in the middle of the plane, the terrorists shouted out an ominous countdown: "One . . . two . . . three!" On the count of three they began firing machine guns from the forward part of the craft and exploding hand grenades at the rear. Some of the passengers broke open the emergency doors, which automatically inflated escape chutes. During this moment of horror, says Goldstein, "I literally...