Word: hardness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...PETN), and it is powerful even in quantities as small as a hundredth of a pound. It comes from the same chemical family as nitroglycerin and has a long history of use in terrorist attacks. Though PETN itself is controlled, the chemicals used to make it aren't that hard to find - and Abdulmutallab or any other bombers would likely be able to obtain the explosive on the black market if they couldn't synthesize it themselves. The shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to use PETN to destroy a plane over the Atlantic in 2001, and the Saudi Arabian government...
...TIME's Alex Perry wrote in July 2009, over the past few years, young Nigerian Muslim activists, most of them educated and from the middle class, have aggressively embraced a stricter version of Islam, rejecting anything Western and Christian. In the middle of 2009, the government cracked down hard on one group nicknamed the Nigerian Taliban - officially called Boko Haram - killing its leader and scores of his followers. Boko Haram had begun life in 2001 as a peaceful group focused on the study of the Koran, according to Abdulmumin Sa'ad, a Muslim scholar and professor of sociology...
Chess has had prodigies, most notably Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer, who have been lost to madness. Do you fear that trying to master a game of near-infinite variation can make you insane? It's too hard to predict the future, but right now I don?t see myself going mad. It's easy to get obsessed with chess. That's what happened with Fischer and Morphy. I don't have the same obsession. I love the game, and I love to compete, but I am not obsessed with the struggle...
...have spent two weeks in Thailand reporting on a tsunami that has transformed its famous beach resorts into corpse-strewn ruins. One night, exhausted, my clothes reeking of death, I try calling a colleague in the hard-hit Indonesian province of Aceh. I simply misdial, but the recorded message gives me chills: "The destination you have dialed...
...Indonesian coast on Dec. 26, 2004. It was a truly international catastrophe: the tsunami struck 13 countries, killing 226,000 people of 40 nationalities. Five years later, a first-time visitor to the worst-affected countries - Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand - might find the wave's terrible path hard to detect, thanks to a multinational, multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort. Across Aceh, thousands of houses were built with foreign aid in what were once wastelands. In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, new homes surround a 2,600-ton ship pushed a mile inland by the Tsunami...