Word: culprit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...public tends to be generously tolerant of the withholding of material when it concerns military affairs. Such tolerance gives Pentagon bosses a lease to play games that are not always strictly tied to military security. In one glaring example, the Pentagon went into a culprit-hunting mode a few months ago when somebody made public certain classified information: a budget figure, as it turned out, and a blue-sky one at that, interesting (and embarrassing) not because it endangered the nation's security but because it suggested that coming deficits would be much bigger than the Administration...
While the crisis atmosphere provoked by structural damage to Harvard buildings caused by ivy plants has abated in Cambridge this fall, other college administrators across the country have begun to follow Harvard's attack on the leafy culprit--most recently at Northwestern University in Evanston...
Despite mounting evidence that Viet Nam is using Soviet chemicals in its battle against anti-Communist insurgents in Laos and Cambodia, there has been little international outcry. A chief culprit, U.S. State Department officials complain, is the U.N., which had been conspicuously reluctant to investigate the U.S. charges vigorously. In a speech in West Berlin last year, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig charged the Soviets and their allies with violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical warfare and the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. One month after Haig's charge in West Berlin, the first U.N. team...
...culprit is the Walsh Bros. Co., signed on by Harvard to retool Lowell and Winthrop Houses, which were secretly falling to pieces. Somehow, Walsh's fire alarms, installed in mid-summer, have managed to be triggered by just about anything--footsteps, sneezes, running water, sunrise. The one thing these smoke alarms don't seem sensitive to, oddly enough, is fire. One student tells of accidentally failing to open his fireplace flue, seeing his room fill up with smoke, and never hearing a peep out of his detector...
...daily. Says County Supervisor William Wallace: "If your dog got loose and went down to the beach, it would take you an hour to clean his feet." Still worse, the putrid smell of hydrogen sulfide often hangs over the area like vapor from a truckload of rotten eggs. The culprit is not a leaking oil well, but nature. The ocean floor is spilling large quantities of oil and natural gas through fissures that geoloists call seeps. Says Petroleum Geologist Robert Gaal of the California State lands commission: "There are thousands of them down there. It's like a sieve...