Word: shaping
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These islands are extremely dynamic, continuously changing shape in response to shifts in the monsoon winds. Each year, in fact, sand swirls around with the waves; beaches grow in one season and shrink in the next; and this process has been going on for a very long time. Geographer Paul Kench of New Zealand's University of Auckland has collected evidence suggesting that the islands of the Maldives emerged from the sea when their reefs were quite a bit lower than today, meaning that larger, more energetic waves would have slammed into them during a critical formative period. In their...
Other ambitious projects are in the works as well, says Hamdun Hameed, Minister of Planning and National Development, pulling out a map of the islands, each one a dot on a ring of reef--an atoll--that traces out the shape of the mountain on which it formed. Here, Hameed notes, is the island of Kandholhudoo, whose residents experienced chronic flooding whenever high tides coincided with heavy monsoon rains. The last straw was the tsunami, which rendered all but eight of some 500 homes uninhabitable. Now, at the request of village leaders, the government is drawing up plans to move...
...accumulated effect is not to mock human behavior as in-authentic but to acknowledge a yearning for dignity and order. Mydans' work springs from that same benign instinct. Through decades when each year put forward new varieties of suffering, he recorded the world's dislocations and helped to shape the heart's reply. --By Richard Lacayo
...pontiff is still 10 days away, much of the media here is hard at work searching for signs of what kind of man the cardinals may be looking for. I've been sounding out my Vatican sources on how the race to replace John Paul II may shape up, and that has meant meeting in trattorias and cafes further and further away from St. Peter's Square - some Vatican sources don't like talking when other journalists or clerics might walk by. What I learned was that the discussion of a new pope has not really progressed since John Paul...
...John Paul II's chief theological enforcer. Tettamanzi would probably be the leading Italian contender; Hummes would represent a turn to the developing world where the Church continues to grow; and Ratzinger would represent a concern to appoint a pontiff capable of whipping the Church's vast bureaucracy into shape...