Word: across
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...1900s, a grim closing note to the continent's century. Fewer than 2,000 bodies had been recovered as of late last week, and a reliable death toll was impossible to calculate as soldiers and rescue workers continued digging near the northern coastal town of La Guaira, just across Mount Avila from Caracas. Still, officials said the toll would certainly surpass 5,000 and could even reach 30,000. "There are bodies in the sea, under mud, everywhere," said President Hugo Chavez, as corpses filled the tarmac at nearby Simon Bolivar Airport. "It's horrible." How horrible was evident...
...only Allied leader with military experience in the field as well as experience in government, he was also a superb communicator. Perhaps his finest contribution was his matchless power as a speaker, e.g., his stunning statement at Fulton, Mo., about "the Iron Curtain" that Joseph Stalin was dropping across Eastern Europe, and the unforgettable, even more crucial speech he made before the expected Nazi invasion of Britain: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...
...began to unlock the mysteries of the atom: Max Planck launched quantum physics by discovering that atoms emit bursts of radiation in packets. Also the mysteries of the mind: Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Marconi was preparing to send radio signals across the Atlantic, the Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk to work on their gliders, and an unpromising student named Albert Einstein finally graduated, after some difficulty, from college that year. So much for the boneheaded prediction made the year before by Charles Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office: "Everything that can be invented...
...March 12, 1930, he launched his most brilliant stroke, national defiance of the law forbidding Indians to make their own salt. With 78 followers, he set out for the coast to make salt until the law was repealed. By the time he reached the sea, people all across the land had joined in. Civil disobedience spread until Gandhi was arrested again. Soon more than 60,000 Indians filled the jails, and Britain was shamed by the gentle power of the old man and his unresisting supporters. Though Gandhi had been elected to no office and represented no government, the Viceroy...
From the very beginning, cultural evolution was a social enterprise, mediated by what you could loosely call a social brain. One person invents, say, a flint hand ax; the idea creeps across the landscape, gets improved here and there, and finally, in a distant land, stimulates a whole new idea: axes with handles conveniently attached...