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Mitchell Atalla was a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Florida in 1967 when he wrote to the U.S. Department of State for an application to the Foreign Service. To pin the Foreign Service was his lifelong dream.But when he received a detailed questionnaire from the department listing the physical requirements, he dejectedly gave…
It was a routine, uneventful Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year on the successful confirmation of Richard L. Dunham (a Ford appointee and former associate of Nelson Rockefeller) as chairman of then Federal Power Commission. But there was nothing routine or uneventful about what Dunham and two of his fellow FPC commissioners did in late…
Gobbledygook is a growth industry. Verbal obscurity, gigantic, intertwined sentences, semantic blahs, bureaucratese and legal esoterica put people to work. There are people who produce Gobbledygook, people who interpret Gobbledygook and people hired to help other people adversely affected by insensitive Gobbledygook. It’s all part of the GNP. There are even people working to make…
Seventy years ago, Judge Benjamin Cardozo rendered his now famous decision making Buick Motor Company liable for a defective wheel which fell off one MacPherson’s Buick and resulted in MacPherson’s injury. Since then the court-made law of “products liability” has evolved into a wide array of legal liabilities for manufacturers who design or construct defective…
If defrauders of consumers were relieved when the Pennsylvania State Senate rejected Herb Denenberg’s nomination in 1975 by Gov. Shapp to be head of the Public Utility Commission, they need only turn on WCAU-TV in Philadelphia for the daily 6 p.m. news to get agitated all over again. For there on the screen appears their…
It started with a police corruption inquiry in Indianapolis and ended with the formal launching of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) group last month in the same city. Myrta Pulliam, reporter for the Indianapolis Star, wanted some advice on how to go about probing a police scandal. She called up a veteran of such…
When British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was telling his fans 30 years ago that satellites would someday connect all homes and neighborhoods around the world via telephone, radio and television communications, few believed it could come so soon. Well, the technology is almost ready to fulfill Clarke’s vision — if the giant corporate Luddites…
Of the millions of words written about celebrating the Bicentennial, very little space has been devoted to the valiant Americans who have been actively exercising their citizen rights and duties for better communities. They are not national celebrities. They are only our domestic patriots using their constitutional rights to make democracy work. There is 73-year-old…
It is invisible until needed in a collision. It can save over 10,000 lives and nearly a million injuries a year. It has been proven as reliable, effective and economic in about 300 million vehicle miles of travel. There is a 1973 General Motors film applauding its life-saving excellence. Nonetheless, this system, called the air…
Well, General Motors, Volvo has done it to you again. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has announced that Volvo successfully certified four different versions of its fuel-injected vehicle scheduled for sale next year which far exceed the advanced federal statutory air pollution standards. Moreover, Volvo, in achieving what GM executives continually said could not…