Word: skies
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...ARMY HELICOPTER CAME IN over the marketplace at noon one day last month. Machine-gun fire ripped from the sky, pounding into the dirt, ricocheting off roofs and sending hundreds of Hutu men, women and children scattering for cover under rickety stalls. Suzanne Nyahimana, 45, was hit almost immediately, her forearm shattered. Frantically rounding up her five children--her husband had been killed in fighting several months earlier--she fled with them from the northwestern Burundian village of Nyabitaka into the hills, eventually crossing the Rusizi River to a refugee camp in neighboring Zaire. "I will never go back," Nyahimana...
WRITING HIS NATURAL HISTORY IN THE FIRST CENTURY A.D., Pliny the Elder reported that when water rises into the atmosphere to form rain clouds, it sucks up with it shoals of fish and sometimes quantities of stones. Fish and stones hover above us in the sky. Elsewhere, Pliny offered an item about a woman who gave birth to an elephant. He was, occasionally, a supermarket-tabloid sort of Roman...
...shouldn't be. Man's fascination with other worlds is as old as Western civilization. Galileo's discovery that they actually existed--that at least some of the pinpoints of light that wandered throughout the night sky had mountains and moons--set off a centuries-long quest to discover new planets. The first great success came in 1781, when William Herschel found Uranus. Then came the discovery of Neptune by Johann Galle in 1846. Eventually, the notion of otherworldly life made the transition out of the pages of philosophy and fiction: in 1894, the wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell built...
...lands on Mars as planned on July 4, 1997, it would be the first time since two Viking missions landed there in 1976. "Mars has always had this romantic hold on us," says TIME aerospace correspondent Jerry Hannifin. "It's one of the brightest stars in the sky and has been the subject of speculation about life there for many years. We know, for instance, that there is enough moisture there to have ice deposits on its north and south poles and temperatures, though very cold, somewhat similar to those on earth. And you can see canyons on its surface...
...predict it. This is welcome--a kind of ideological relief--in a rather stupidly politicized society living under the delusion that everything in life (and death) is arguable, political and therefore manipulable--from diet to DNA. None of the old earthbound Marxist Who-Whom here in meteorology, but rather sky gods that bang around at higher altitudes and leave the earth in its misery, to submit to the sloppy collateral damage...