Word: vast
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that Coleman, now 22, is an exception to the rule is a vast understatement. Few black kids have made the same choices as him. Even fewer face this decision in the first place, since most African-American kids ignore hockey altogether. "I just never thought about playing that sport," says DeQuanta Higgins, 14, after a game of pickup hoops with his brother and cousins in Atlanta. "It's just fun playing basketball...
Iraq's civil war has made more than 2 million Iraqis refugees in foreign lands. The vast majority are stuck in limbo in neighboring Syria and Jordan, not allowed to work, unwilling to go home and denied visas to go anywhere else. U.S. and Iraqi officials say some of those refugees have begun returning home, spurred by the reduction in terrorist attacks and sectarian violence, especially in Baghdad. But that amounts to a small trickle compared with the numbers still seeking a way out. Though 66,000 Iraqis have applied for asylum, just 14,000 of them have been granted...
...after Baghdad fell. Late in the afternoon, I made my way to Saddam's main palace in the city: There had been some silly rumors that the Americans were preparing to blast it into rubble. I found a small group of American soldiers combing through the vast palace (it would later house the U.S. embassy), looking for documents. Many Iraqis - who were never allowed near the palace during Saddam's reign - had gathered at the main entrance. Many were there out of idle curiosity, and some were cheering the Americans...
Meanwhile the vast majority of Americans watch from the sidelines and long for cease-fire, because the good news about falling abortion rates only illuminates the bad news underneath: Close to half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and 40% of those end in abortion. The U.S. still has one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the developed world - nearly twice as high as England and Canada, eight times as high as the Netherlands and Japan - and in December, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the teen birth rate rose for the first time...
...Magnet for Tourism It's customary now for cities to use the arts as an engine of growth. Dallas is in the process of completing a whole arts district. Abu Dhabi is planning a vast one. But long before there was a Bilbao effect - the revitalization of that scruffy Basque port by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum there - New York had learned to use a cultural institution for urban renewal. In the 1940s and '50s, large areas of Manhattan's Upper West Side were slums, the turf of the warring street gangs that Leonard Bernstein made famous in West Side...