Word: almost
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conceived of an ornate "time ball" that would descend just before midnight to mark the exact end of the year. The first ball to drop - an illuminated 400-pound iron-and-wood orb - was lowered from a flagpole. Tradition took root and the ball has heralded a new beginning almost every year since - in 1942 and 1943, during World War II, the ball was temporarily put out of commission by a war-time "dimout." Instead crowds gathered in the square and observed a moment of silence before hooting and hollering...
Mexican insurrections often do coincide with important dates. Most recently, Zapatista guerrillas in the poor southern state of Chiapas started a revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the day the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A big fear now is that Mexico's drug cartels, responsible for almost 15,000 killings in the past decade, are lending their resources and firepower to emerging guerrilla groups. If so, their plan may be to sow bicentennial terror and turn Mexicans against President Felipe Calderón's drug-war offensive. This past fall authorities say they seized an arsenal of large...
...confession, Muna described how she met Rahum in Jerusalem on that day in January 2001, took a taxi with him to the northern suburbs and from there drove him in her car to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. The two cities almost touch. Rahum probably didn't know he had left Jerusalem. Muna told police she intended to hold Rahum as a hostage to prod the Israelis to release Palestinian prisoners. But in Ramallah, one of her co-conspirators, Hassan al-Qadi (a "senior armed terror operative," according to Israeli intelligence), allegedly shot the boy dead at point-blank range...
...music to be played before the curtain went up. But the subliminal connection with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was hard to ignore: "You're the One That I Want," "I Will Always Love You," the theme to the James Bond and Rocky flicks and then - almost inevitably - just moments before the film began, the uplifting bars of the theme to Superman...
...politics. "Lula is very popular, and his political life is not over," says João Augusto de Castro Neves, a political analyst in the capital, Brasília. "He could still be President in 2014 or have another political position. I think the intention with the film is almost to provoke the opposition. Lula is so popular that no one is going to question...