Word: amid
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Three weeks after Ike swept across Galveston, 74-year-old Francis Sullivan - "I'll be 75 on the 17th if I make it!" - is on her front stoop and eyeing a small triangular wooden trophy case on her living room floor amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island - lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences...
...other, and it hosts the world's two greatest humanitarian crises, Darfur and Somalia. So it may come as a bit of a surprise to many that much of Africa is doing rather nicely, in some cases recording healthier economic expansion than nations in the industrialized world. Even amid the financial meltdown in the West and dire predictions of a global recession, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Africa will post economic growth of 6.5% this year, although the world credit crisis could trim that to 5%. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports that a larger share...
...Others, however, see the decision as one of surrender to the realities of this particular election. Over the past two decades, nearly every presidential candidate at one time or another has claimed the title "education president." This time around, though, the issue has been consistently overshadowed, especially amid the financial crisis that has erupted in recent weeks. "If Bill Gates is throwing in the towel, there's no hope for the rest of us to get education on the agenda," says Arnold Fege, advocacy director for the Washington-based nonprofit Public Education Network...
...Stephen Pound, the Labour MP from Ealing North, will advocate caliginosity (dimness, darkness) on the floor of Parliament. "I shall be drawing the Prime Minister's attention in a fairly obscure and abstruse way to the word: 'Amid the global fiscal turmoil, we sought illumination but found only caliginosity.' " The exercise has already influenced Pound's speech: in the course of a 12-min. interview, he used the word 15 times...
...Piracy declined in subsequent centuries, thanks to increasingly vigilant militaries and the development of the steam engine. But amid a drop in naval patrols and a boom in international trade following the end of the Cold War, it has flourished anew - particularly in narrow choke points such as Asia's Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden, which links the Red and Arabian seas. Buoyed by fast boats, fearsome weaponry and high-tech communications gear, pirates carried off 263 reported heists in 2007 - 28% of which occurred in the treacherous waters off Nigeria and Somalia, where vast coastlines...