Word: amid
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...foresaw chaos and wanted British responsibility for it to be moot by the time the screaming started over the new borders. No preparations were therefore made to control the inevitable havoc. The result was a bloody birthday gift to newborn India and Pakistan as millions of people were uprooted amid massacres and murder. "I am sick with horror," Nehru would write his friend Mountbatten after visiting one affected area. More horror was to come: refugee camps everywhere and, eventually, war with Pakistan over Kashmir, an enmity, potent as nuclear bombs, that lasts to this day. Five months after independence...
Shortly before dawn on Feb. 9, amid some fighting in downtown Tehran, I was hunkered in a bank entrance. Virtually everyone carried a weapon, even children. Armed revolutionaries manned checkpoints at every corner. A boy of about 11 pointed an automatic rifle at my chest, safety off, and asked for identification, which he couldn't read. After considerable vacillation, the military leadership declared its neutrality. The Ayatullah went on radio to announce, "The dictatorship has abandoned its last trench...
...arrests of Mitchell and Barzee concluded the strange nine-month odyssey that began last summer amid a string of high-profile kidnappings that had set an already jittery nation on hyperalert. Smart's abduction was every parent's worst nightmare: she was plucked from the safety of her own bed, with a sister watching and her parents sleeping nearby. Though the 24-hour media vigil had long ago moved on, the family never gave up hope; Elizabeth's uncle Tom was even quoted in the paper on the very morning of her rescue, castigating police for slowing down the search...
...between the private and public markets because Buffett finds most common stocks still overvalued. Meanwhile, private-asset funds are a contrarian's delight: net new investment in venture-capital funds, which mainly seed technology and medical start-ups, plunged to $1.9 billion last year (the least since '81) amid investment losses that roughly tracked the public markets. Yet over three years and longer, these funds have outperformed stocks. "The tourists have all left town," quips Jesse Reyes, a manager at the research firm Thomson Venture Economics. The fair-weather crowd he is talking about piled into venture funds...
...Amid the gloom and uncertainty, there has been some hope. WHO scientists say they are increasingly confident that SARS is one of a family of microbes known as paramyxo-viruses, which includes the pathogens responsible for measles, mumps and the Nipah virus, which killed 105 people in Malaysia four years ago. On March 21, WHO announced that intensive efforts among 11 laboratories had produced the first potential diagnostic test for SARS, which up until now could be identified only by its symptoms. "This is not just some light at the end of the tunnel," says WHO virologist Dr. Klaus St?hr...