Word: goldings
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Tucked deep in a tangled warren of dusty alleyways, the golden dome of the Imam Ali shrine gleams in the afternoon sun. Its shining twin minarets reflect light on the ornately painted tiles that cover every surface not faced with gold. But the Old City ringing the glorious shrine, where millions of Shi'ite faithful come on pilgrimage, has been battered by three weeks of savage battle into a blasted warscape of empty, broken buildings. With the dramatic intervention last week of the Shi'ites' most revered leader, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, 74, the domed shrine was saved...
...crude materials that constituted the early solar system developed into the discrete planets that exist today. For 27 months of its three-year mission, Genesis trolled through space beyond the orbit of the moon, gathering solar wind on five 4-in. hexagonal collector plates--each coated with silicon, gold, sapphire or diamond--and then stowing them back inside the body of the spacecraft. What's there could be a cosmic treasure: "A billion billion molecules for us to study," says Don Burnett, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for the Genesis mission. But first...
...when the U.S. men's basketball team played. The players were booed lustily--though, as Spanish star Pau Gasol suggested, that may have been because they were bad. Coach Larry Brown's team went 5-3 on its way to becoming the first NBA-stocked bunch not to win gold. For the most part, America's athletes were treated courteously, though geopolitics probably kept retiring medalists Rulon Gardner and Mia Hamm from getting the stadium-size love that enveloped Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj. When El Guerrouj, perhaps the greatest middle-distance runner ever, hauled in the 1,500-m gold...
...went to those who made national history, however small or troubled their nation. Women sprinters from Afghanistan and Iraq, Somalia and Bahrain--whose Rokia Al Ghasra ran in full hijab--were treated with special reverence by the crowds, as was windsurfer Gal Fridman, who sailed Israel to its first gold medal in 52 years of competition. The victory was made all the more fascinating with the revelation that his first name means wave in Hebrew. Competition, empathy and entertaining minutiae--it should be the Olympic slogan...
...possibly drug-tainted predecessors. (It was their coach, Trevor Graham, who sent in a syringe of human growth hormone to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, saying he hoped to save the sport for clean athletes.) Even when Americans weren't supposed to win, they won, like Paul Hamm, the gold-medal gymnast who prospered by a judging error. Gifts from judges don't tend to win hyperpowers many friends...