Word: amid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...push to rethink playgrounds comes amid the childhood-obesity epidemic - one-third of American children are now overweight, compared with 4% in 1970 - as well as the movement to make playgrounds more accessible to disabled and autistic kids. About 150 playgrounds in 29 states and Canada have been constructed to the standards of Connecticut-based nonprofit Boundless Playgrounds, which secures grants for some simple improvements - like raising up sandboxes to accommodate children in wheelchairs and installing recliner-shaped swings for kids who need help sitting up - to more complicated ones, such as adding padded nooks for kids who need enclosed...
...there's one thing guaranteed to make news organizations queasy, it's becoming news rather than reporting it. No wonder the BBC, Britain's venerable public-service broadcaster, is looking green around the gills. In the past couple of years, "Auntie Beeb" has rarely been out of the spotlight, amid speculation on the future of the broadcaster's public funding, scandals over mismanaged phone-in competitions and red faces after footage of the Queen was wrongly edited to suggest she had stormed out of a photo shoot. Yet all of these controversies pale in comparison to the storms of anger...
...flags, and targeted schools, hospitals, supply convoys and a U.N. compound where over 1,000 civilians had taken shelter. Although Israel dropped thousands of leaflets and made phone calls to targeted buildings warning of impending bombardments, Palestinians argue that they had no safe places in which to take refuge amid Israel's fierce bombardment...
...brace of movies that should duke it out for Best Picture: the Anglo-Indian Slumdog Millionaire, with 10 nominations, and the all-Hollywood The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with 13. One film cost $15 million, the other 10 times that. Slumdog is about kids who grow into teenagers amid the civil and class chaos of modern Mumbai; Benjamin Button, about someone (Brad Pitt, no less) who's born an old man and ages backward, reaching adolescence when most people are hitting senility. Both pictures have social agendas, but they are more vigorous and less predictable than the Broadway stage...
...Amid a Japanese-style setting of pinewood and granite, Iggy's pushes gastronomic boundaries, but never past the comfort barrier. "I don't serve food that shocks," says Ignatius Chan, the French-trained sommelier who started the cozy 38-seat restaurant four years...