Word: bettering
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...plane carrying three U.S. military contractors crash-landed in rebel territory in southern Colombia. The survivors - Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes - were taken hostage by fierce Marxist guerrillas the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, better known by the Spanish acronym FARC. The initial rescue operation fell apart. Instead of finding the contractors, two companies of Colombian soldiers stumbled upon a buried rebel cache of $20 million, then deserted and splurged their newfound fortune on booze, sex and flat-screen televisions. The forgotten hostages spent the next five years in captivity. But with the help of billions of dollars...
...plane carrying three U.S. military contractors crash-landed in rebel territory in southern Colombia. The survivors - Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes - were taken hostage by fierce Marxist guerrillas the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, better known by the Spanish acronym FARC. It would take five years, and the help of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, before commandos of the Colombian Army were able to launch a daring, Mission: Impossible-style sting operation in a bid to save the hostages. Colombian planners of the July 2008 operation were probably keen to avoid the fate of the earliest rescue attempt...
...Over the centuries, obscure dialects and isolated communities have come and gone, dispersed by conquest or ecological disaster. But linguists stress that something vital gets lost with the death of each oral language. Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who spent the better part of the past decade studying the languages of the Andamans, says the speech of hunter-gatherer societies like the Bo carry an intimate, encoded understanding of the natural world and its biodiversity. Though the Bo seldom strayed from the few islands they inhabited, they have at least 67 words...
...Other groups indigenous to the Andaman Islands have fared comparatively better by living in total seclusion. The mysterious Sentinelese - named after North Sentinel Island, their ominous-sounding home - are protected by an Indian government policy barring most outsiders from making contact with them. The few anthropologists who have seen the Sentinelese have gleaned little about their language or culture before being chased away by a hail of arrows...
...merry-go-round of eye doctors in Jakarta, my eye continued to get worse. Weeks later, I decided to leave the country to seek treatment, but by then it was too late. The condition had already damaged my cornea. Doctors in Singapore, where many Indonesians go in search of better care, suggested a number of treatments, including a corneal transplant if the others failed to restore my sight. I opted for another opinion back in the U.S. (See the most common hospital mishaps...