Word: plastics
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...Customs officers found 2,270 kg of cocaine encased in 1,200 blocks of chocolate shipped from Ecuador. The cocaine bricks had been wrapped in lead to thwart X-rays, but the lead set off metal detectors. The next time, Customs found, the smugglers had switched to heavy plastic wrapping...
...chunk! Ka-chunk! Every day more than 200 million credit cards slide in and out of charge machines across the U.S. Ka-chunk! Americans used plastic to charge $480 billion last year, at a rate of about $1 million a minute. The typical American charge customer carries nine cards and owes more than $2,000 on them. Despite interest rates averaging close to 19%, many cardholders are blase about paying hundreds of dollars a year in interest, plus an annual fee for the privilege of doing...
...issuers covet the rich profits that can be reaped from installment credit. Banks that issue general-use credit cards, like the 420 million Visa and MasterCards in circulation worldwide, have been borrowing funds in the U.S. at 9% to 10% interest and loaning those funds out on plastic at as much as 22%. For banks stuck with Third World loans and rancid real estate, that spells salvation. At the 10 largest banks in the business, which hold 48% of all outstanding card debt, credit cards account for 25% of profits. Citibank, the largest issuer, cleared $610 million in profits...
...than $800 annually per citizen, vs. $700 for the U.S. But with a dissident playwright as President and a mandate to undo the past, Czechoslovakia's postcommunist government is determined to dismantle the country's arms industry. President Vaclav Havel has ruefully noted that Czechoslovakia sent Libya enough Semtex plastic explosives in the '70s and early '80s to keep the world's terrorists supplied for the next 150 years. Just two months after the November 1989 revolution, Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier announced that Prague would "simply end its trade in arms," without regard to economic consequences...
Even sheets and diapers are lacking, so the famished babies lie naked on plastic mattresses. Each day the hospital admits another 10 cases of marasmus -- an advanced state of malnutrition that causes the child's face and body to become as shriveled and haggard as those of a wizened old man. Other children have grotesquely swollen bellies -- a symptom of the starvation syndrome known as kwashiorkor. Before the war, says the hospital's director, there was barely one such case a year...