Word: began
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...flipped in New Zealand--a place experts believed was so dependent on technology it would surely implode if its computers believed the year was 1900--it was only a little shocking that absolutely nothing happened anywhere on or above the globe. Airplanes stayed in the air. Y2K bunker dwellers began to pack up canned food for the soup kitchens. People, in general, went to bed early...
...year 2000 was not the best of times for tyranny. True, Saddam Hussein began to shake off the shackles of world sanctions, all the while restocking his arsenal with the nastiest of weapons, unfettered and unwatched. Against all expectations, however, Yugoslavia's strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, vanished--poof!--from power after calling an election he felt sure he'd win, and then failing to steal the result from a populace that rose up to guard its rejection of his troublemaking. Another autarch actually took a turn toward benevolence all on his own: North Korea's quirky Kim Jong Il reached...
...earth's rivers, chopped down the forests and depleted the soils. Burning up fossil fuels that had been created over eons, we pumped billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air, altering atmospheric chemistry and appreciably warming the planet in just a few decades. And as our population began the year 2000 above the 6 billion mark, still spreading across the continents, dozens of animal and plant species were going extinct every day, including the first primate to disappear in more than 100 years, Miss Waldron's red colobus...
...continuum. Roman numerals appended to new versions of the Palm Pilot increased as rapidly as scores on a pinball machine, and ever more advanced handheld gadgets debuted at a dizzying speed. As the year progressed, those who didn't crave or couldn't indulge a moment's isolation began connecting to the Internet through cell phones or to instant-messaging systems via the BlackBerry two-way pager...
...University and local officials secured more than $30 million in grants and helped overhaul the district's curriculum and teaching methods. Some schools wiped out uninspired drills and work sheets in the younger grades, and high schools began pushing students to take three years each of rigorous college preparatory math and science. Before UTEP stepped in, just a small percentage of students took Algebra II and Chemistry; now more than half do. Compared with 1994, when just one school in the university-aided districts netted an exemplary rating on state exams, last year 18 did. Most important, the university ascribes...