Word: functional
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Montserrat residents who stubbornly refuse to go are living in appalling conditions. Two-thirds of the island lies under a blanket of ash. Just a couple of restaurants and one gas station still function, and the hospital, now housed in a school, cannot care for the seriously ill. Nearly 1,500 people are consigned to the shelters that occupy every remaining church and school. At Gerald's Park, small children and adults are crowded in, 30 to a tent. In some shelters, there is one toilet for 50 people...
Sharks play a crucial role in keeping aquatic wildlife in balance. Scientists now understand that the ocean ecosystem has been evolving over hundreds of millions of years as an integrated whole--a biological machine in which each component has a vital function. For most sharks, that function is to serve as what biologists call an apex predator, the ocean equivalent of a lion or tiger or bear. Not only do they keep prey populations in check, but they also tend to eat the slowest, weakest and least wily individuals. In so doing, they improve the target species' gene pool, leaving...
...most basic function of government is to secure the liberty and property of the governed, a government that can't even implement the rule of law is hardly worthy of the name. So, at least, writes Stephen Holmes in his American Prospect article "What Russia Teaches Us Now: How Weak States Threaten Freedom." New Yorkers like their persons and property to be secure. You can't argue with that. I didn't like getting mugged at gunpoint either. But the flip side is that a lot of people still haven't got any property to secure...
...became a stockbroker. The youngest of four children, Cunanan grew up in middle-class Rancho Bernardo, Calif., a San Diego suburb. At the elite Bishop's School in La Jolla, he was popular and a little outrageous. Openly gay as a teenager, he once showed up at a school function in a red patent-leather jumpsuit that he said was a gift from his much older date...
...over the planet. Sojourner is scheduled to conduct these studies for up to a month, depending on how quickly the extreme temperatures (from -15[degrees]F by day to -125[degrees]F at night) at last claim it. The Pathfinder lander, with instruments and cameras of its own, could function for as little as a month or as long as a year. Even after it winks out, it will continue to serve an important symbolic function. On Saturday NASA announced that it would rename the spent lander the Carl Sagan Memorial Station...