Word: swathe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began badly for the team of American biblical scholars who had been granted a rare opportunity to examine and photograph a precious manuscript in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book. Hunched over a swath of darkened and decomposing parchment with a powerful magnifying glass, they were barely able to discern a single letter. But that night, as they reviewed photo negatives still wet from the developing tank, their luck changed dramatically. Passages that had been invisible to the naked eye jumped out at them from the film. "It was a moment of exploding consciousness," recalls James Charlesworth, professor...
...from the airport. But this is Campaign '88, in which the strength of a presidential candidate's political machine is closely tied to the sophistication of his technological tools. This year's race involves an oversize field of candidates who are scrambling to gain recognition across a wide geographic swath in just a few weeks. That puts a premium on any technology that will increase a campaign's reach -- even if it leaves less time for pressing flesh and kissing babies...
...violence began two weeks ago in Gaza, the squalid swath of poverty along the Mediterranean that is home to 600,000 Palestinian Arabs. Rumors spread that an Israeli truck had deliberately rammed two cars carrying Arab workers, killing four of them, in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli merchant. By the next morning much of Gaza was covered with smoke from burning tire barricades. Thousands marched through the dirt streets carrying photocopied pictures of local youths who had died in the unrest. In the following days, troops attempting to disperse the demonstrators were greeted with showers of stones, iron...
...were reported as early as 253 B.C. In the great drought of 1888, a third of the population is said to have died from malnourishment and disease. This latest calamity is part of a 30-year pattern that has seen the rains repeatedly fail along the Sahel, the wide swath of land that cuts Africa in half just below the Sahara. After the 1984-85 drought, which killed an estimated 2 million people in Africa, there was a brief period of uncommon optimism in Addis Ababa. In 1985 and 1986 the rains were good for the first time since...
...mainly black and Hispanic) urban neighborhoods -- is neither the cause nor an effect, exactly, of the historic renovation boom. But the two trends have abetted each other. The original '60s militants of the preservation movement were the shock troops of the upper middle class, and it was a broader swath of the same class who in the '70s made living amid urban antiquity seem both virtuous and stylish. Restored carriage houses and pressed-tin ceilings have seduced more children of the suburbs back to the city than mean, shiny apartment towers...