Word: vast
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...Taken together, it all makes you think of those wide-brimmed hats that English women wear to the races at Ascot. The stated purpose of the canopy is to act as a vast, three-acre sunscreen, making the plaza a more inviting place to mingle even on hot summer days. The unstated purpose is to give an otherwise highly distilled structure an extra bit of geometric gee-wizardry. Which it does...
When describing Xinjiang, silk road clichés never grow old. China's westernmost region is a vast territory of deserts and mountains, where peaks of black sand descend toward ancient oasis towns. In many of its cities, men still haggle over livestock in dusty markets and purchase blades from blacksmiths whose families have stayed in the craft for centuries. The faces of its Uighur inhabitants, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group, tell of Xinjiang's history as a crossroads for caravans and civilizations: an astonishing array of gray, hazel and blue eyes, fringed by brown or black or even blond...
...West Sumatran capital of Padang - which scientists long predicted would be shaken by a killer quake because it sits astride one of the world's most active fault lines - was crowded with poorly built buildings that crumbled when the earth shuddered on Sept. 30. Similarly, in the Philippines, the vast flooding triggered by Ketsana was largely the result of insufficient drainage. In fact, the U.N. estimates that when equivalent populations in the Philippines and Japan endure the same number of tropical cyclones each year, 17 times more people perish in the Philippines than in Japan. The higher death tolls feed...
...Bhumibol Adulyadej has reached its fecund best. Like many other parts of Thailand, villagers come to this agricultural laboratory to learn from the monarch's Sufficiency Economy philosophy, which bundles together concepts of sustainable development, rural self-reliance and equitable income distribution. But there's a difference to this vast botanical project: unlike others in the rest of Thailand, this one is located in the country's Muslim-majority south, where suspicion of the Buddhist-dominated state has spawned a bloody insurgency that has claimed more than 3,700 lives, both Muslim and Buddhist, since...
...idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail. (See TIME's photo-essay "Vladimir Putin: Action Figure...