Word: sprawling
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Three casualties sprawl in the mud, unnoticed amid a confusion of gunfire and sweet, choking smoke. "Get a move on! They're bleeding to death," shouts commanding officer Major Emily Greenwood. The assault - against a nest of "Maliban" insurgents - is a simulation in Wales, the wounds faked. But Greenwood's urgency is all too real. Within a year of completing their training this month, some 60% of these officer cadets from Britain's élite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst will deploy to Afghanistan. There, says Greenwood, "the pace of operations is so fast and there's constant enemy contact...
...good day, it takes 12 hours by bus to get to Yushu from the provincial capital, Xining, which is itself about a 1,000-mile drive from the national capital of Beijing. As you climb south and west across the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, urban sprawl cedes to empty steppe. Just north of Tibet, the road opens into a small town tucked in a river valley. Its main street is lined with vendors selling yak butter and tea; its low, brown hills are lined with rows of brightly colored courtyard homes. Those homes - and the town - now lie in ruin...
...miles (1,200 km) east of the Indian mainland, the Great Andamanese evolved in isolation for millenniums until the 1850s, when the colonial British began to settle the Andamans. Since then, the population has plummeted, from at least 5,000 to just 52 people now lumped together in a sprawl of cottages on one island. For most of those left, especially children, specific tribal tongues have given way to a pidgin Andamani dialect of Hindi. Boa Sr was in effect their last link to the olden days. "It's the end of thousands upon thousands of years of history," says...
...never-ending debate between residents of Shanghai and Beijing about which city is superior, one Beijing trump card has always been proximity to the countryside. In Shanghai, Beijingers point out smugly, you can drive for three hours and still be trapped in urban sprawl. In the capital, not much more than an hour on the road gets you out into the stark, sparsely populated beauty of the Western Hills, with the Great Wall thrown in as a bonus. Sadly for Beijing partisans, they will be less able to rely on that argument in future, because from now on Shanghaiers will...
...Making of a (White) MegachurchWillow Creek Community Church's main complex, in South Barrington, does not tower so much as sprawl: eight low-slung buildings, landscaped on a swampy and thus underdeveloped grassland amid Chicago's bustling, affluent northwest suburbs. As the church has grown - especially with the 2004 completion of a new sanctuary building with an escalator and interior waterfall - it has become more self-consciously handsome. But like Hybels himself, it abandons pious overstatement for corporate efficiency: church as conceived by Jack Welch. (Read "Church Group Attacks Christmas Commercialism...