Word: stringing
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...insurance-underwriting expertise and the sober assessment of risk. When film star Betty Grable sought to insure her famous legs, Lloyd's came up with a policy and calculated the appropriate premium. But disasters have a way of defying the laws of probability. Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary string: the Piper Alpha oil-rig blowout in the North Sea, the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and America's Hurricane Hugo. Last week Lloyd's announced that it would post a $980 million deficit for 1988 -- the most recent year on which...
...passenger's baggage if he agrees, even if they have no warrant or probable cause to suspect him of any crime. "Working the buses," as the police call it, has become a common method of interrupting the interstate flow of drugs. Last week's ruling followed a string of recent decisions that gave police the power to conduct searches without warrants. The court also decided during this term that suspects who were arrested without warrants may be held for up to 48 hours before police press charges...
Elvis Costello is only 30 seconds into his set before a small audience in a Los Angeles TV studio when -- boing! -- a broken guitar string brings the music to a halt. During rehearsals, Costello has already groused about the lighting and the sound, so the tension in the wings is palpable. But the mercurial rocker calmly accepts a new guitar and starts again, launching into an acoustic rendition of Deep Dark Truthful Mirror. When Costello leaves the stage nine songs and an hour later, the audience is clamoring for more...
Back east, show business is more perilous for producers than for performers. Ben Riller is an impresario with a string of hits behind him and catastrophe in sight: he wants to produce a play in verse. (There actually was a rhyming comedy on Broadway this season, La Bete, and it bombed.) Short on cash, Ben borrows from Nick Manucci, a colorful old mafioso who wants 10% interest weekly, plus 50% of the show. As events hurtle toward opening night, agitations grow and Ben becomes more and more indecisive until, like Hamlet, he begins having conversations with his late father. Fortunately...
...government delivered its latest unemployment report. The figures showed that joblessness rose to 6.9% in May, up sharply from 6.6% in April, but hopeful economists turned their attention to a companion statistic indicating that U.S. companies created 59,000 new jobs last month. That broke an 11-month string of job losses that began last July. (The number of jobs can increase even as unemployment is rising because the two figures come from different Labor Department surveys that are often at odds.) Says Allen Sinai, chief economist for the Boston Co. Economic Advisers: "A strong hint that the recession...