Word: pit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...struts, blocking many of the girls' view of the blackboard. The fierce desert wind howls through the holes and threatens to tear the class's one textbook from the students' hands as they pass it around for reading lessons. There is no playground or running water. The toilet, a pit latrine located at the far corner of the school compound, serves 1,500 students. Only two of the 23 female teachers have graduated from high school. Half the second-grade students, ranging in age from 7 to 12, can read; the rest just recite from memory. The freedom to study...
Sixty-four years have passed since Kushta stood by the roadside with her teenage friends, watching Nazi soldiers day after day as they led some 5,000 Jews from the town to the rim of a giant pit, and shot them in the back at point-blank range. Kushta, now 78, says she still replays in her mind the moment when a close friend of her mother's passed by and pleaded with her for help. Drawing her woollen scarf around her head in the frigid December morning, Kushta asks: "How could I save her? I was only a child...
...Desbois pored over translations of documents from 1944 when Soviet officials went to Vysotsk to question villagers. Their report, now housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, makes grim reading: in 1942, the Nazis gathered all of Vysotsk's 2,000 Jews and marched them to a giant pit, where they shot them in groups of five. The report estimated that 1,864 people died on a single day, with children buried alive in order to save bullets...
...hurdle for Johnson is to prove that he can do deep as well as droll. In a revealing jest about his party's candidate for mayor, Tory leader David Cameron remarked, "Inside Boris there is a serious, ambitious politician fighting to get out." The London election this May will pit Johnson against another colorful maverick, the incumbent Ken Livingstone, a wily and resilient left-winger who has introduced tolls for cars entering central London and is promising to boost the capital's stock of affordable housing. Johnson has not yet revealed a detailed manifesto but speaks of increased "financial rigor...
...father Stanley Johnson, an environmentalist and a former Member of the European Parliament, calls this "the fight against crooks and nannies looking into nooks and crannies." Like son, like father. Both Johnsons make a humor pit stop every few minutes. But, says Johnson senior, beneath the comic exterior, his son has a "solid, philosophical outlook" and a "real, substantial core of belief...