Word: vital
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Until survivor Lance Armstrong triumphed in this summer's Tour de France bicycle race, testicular cancer didn't get a lot of press. One likely reason is that men hate to think about a malignancy in that vital and exceedingly sensitive part of the body. The treatment--surgical removal of the testicle--is even worse to contemplate. But another reason is that testicular cancer is relatively rare: only 7,400 cases will be diagnosed in the U.S. next year, representing 1% of new male cancers. Prostate cancer is 30 times as common...
...meaning (the "purpose" of our lives). These last two questions--and what more important inquiries could we make?--lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different...
...most violent shot in a creeping war that has been ravaging Dagestan since Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994. Russian federal forces have been continually engaged in action against Chechen raiders eager to see the coastal province of Dagestan annexed into land-locked Chechnya. The province is of vital strategic importance to Russia, representing 70% of the nation's frontage on the oil-producing Caspian Sea. It's a nightmare war: Russian troops and Dagestani cops have also had to tackle local Islamic militants intent on independence, and ruthless criminal gangs armed with world-class weapons. But Moscow insists...
Ford's surprise declaration was part of a strategy by Michigan's president, Lee Bollinger, to recapture the moral high ground that affirmative-action supporters have lost to the likes of California's Ward Connerly. Bollinger insists that for a university, racial diversity is "as vital as teaching Shakespeare or mathematics." Under a color-blind admissions system, Bollinger fears, the proportion of black undergrads would nose-dive from 9% to just...
...that doesn't mean the fish is still abundant everywhere. If commercial fishermen overfish a spot near nursing sea lions, both mothers and pups can starve. That's why the Trustees for Alaska, a public interest law firm, has sued the U.S. government for failing to protect areas vital to endangered marine mammals. The group's litigation director, Peter Van Tuyn, points out that in southeast Alaskan waters, where there is little industrial fishing of pollack, the sea lion population has held up relatively well. And fur seals in the Pribilofs have done better than sea lions, perhaps because they...