Word: va
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Regular people are often more comfortable assessing risk than officialdom expects. They may not be perfect at it, but they do it every day. Nancy Bort of Arlington, Va., landed at Washington's Dulles International Airport on the first flight from London Heathrow after the arrests. The plane arrived nearly two hours late, and the passengers emerged clutching plastic bags for their passports and not much else. But Bort was unfazed. "I still think I have a greater chance of being hurt in a car accident than getting killed by a terrorist," she said...
...Once it took off, the seven-and-a-half-hour plane ride did go smoothly. There was even some comedy aboard. "When the flight attendant said to turn off electronic devices, people were laughing hysterically because nobody had anything," said Nancy Bort of Arlington, Va. Bort seemed unfazed, despite having been on a flight dubbed "red" by the Department of Homeland Security. "After seeing what's going on in the world in general, I don't know how you can worry about this," she said later in a phone interview. "I still think I have a greater chance of being...
DIED. Carl Brashear, 75, first black master deep-sea diver for the U.S. Navy, whose triumph over Kentucky poverty, racism and leg amputation inspired the 2000 movie Men of Honor, starring Cuba Gooding Jr.; in Portsmouth, Va. Brashear, a sharecropper's son who finished only the seventh grade, joined the Navy in 1950 and, after four years of pleas, was admitted to diving school--unofficially, it was for whites only--where classmates taunted him with racial slurs and death threats. In 1966, while Brashear was serving on the U.S.S. Hoist, a loose steel pipe careered across the deck and crushed...
DIED. Frederick Mosteller, 89, pre-eminent statistician and founding chairman of Harvard University's statistics department who popularized the application of statistical data to fields from politics to sports; in Falls Church, Va. Mosteller first showed his knack for laws of probability as a teenager, while working on a road crew that played poker during rain delays. In 1952, after mulling over the St. Louis Cardinals' 1946 World Series win over the Boston Red Sox, he published the first known academic paper on baseball statistics. A stronger team on paper would often lose to a weaker team, he proved, simply...
...spite of keeping house, home schooling and a new daughter, Andrea never missed a day of visitation when her father lay dying in the spring of 2001. She took all the children with her to the local VA hospital. She cared for him after doctors sent him home. The man who once taught her to sail was now confined to a wheelchair and could only gargle the water Andrea gave him. The night he died, Andrea insisted on driving to her parents' house. But the sight of her father's corpse devastated her. Rusty still wonders how guilty Andrea felt...