Word: patches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...January 1996, journalists found two freshly graded areas of soil straddling a dirt track in the village of Glogova, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.The larger patch to the south, 20 yd. by 50 yd. (46 m by 18 m) in size, revealed the shattered remains of human beings: a splintered femur amid rubber boots; a broken skull, barely distinguishable from the smooth white stones surrounding it; a jawbone still holding nine teeth. The patch to the north held its own evidence of atrocity: a torn, stained bandage; a split limb still bearing flesh; the rich, sweet smell of human decay...
...product wasn’t flattering. My nascent beard and reedy mustache refused to link, as if both feared whatever small parasites the other scraggly patch might have harbored. But when I woke up on my birthday and looked in the mirror, my bleary, hungover visage had hair on it. I was damn proud...
...fixed; when a Boston flight had a stuck landing gear, the plane was diverted to the Washington area, but on the way, the landing gear started working again, so the crew continued to fly without taking the plane in to be serviced; mechanics used duct tape to patch planes; a mechanic wielded a hammer and chisel to fix a sensitive engine part, and later that engine had to be shut down in flight...
...bodies, there's no doubt that cutting down on the material will help the environment. Plastic makes up nearly 12% of our trash, up from 1% in 1960. You can literally see the result 1,000 miles (1,600 km) west of San Francisco in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris twice the size of Texas. The rising cost of petroleum may get plastic manufacturers to come up with incentives for recycling; current rates stand at less than 6% in the U.S. But the best way to reduce your plastic impact on the earth...
...snakes roamed the bush. Yet for 6-year-old Doris Lessing, this inhospitable environment offered a welcome refuge from her parents: Alfred, a soldier whose leg had been shattered by shrapnel in World War I, and Emily, a wartime nurse who helped to amputate it. Crouched in a patch of brush, Lessing would cover her ears and shout, "I won't listen," in an effort to drown out her parents' incessant talk of tanks, howitzers and death. "The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me," Lessing recalls in her riveting new book Alfred...