Word: felling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once a body of water becomes infested with jellyfish, it's not so easy to engineer a recovery. The Black Sea has begun to recuperate, but only after a convergence of several unlikely occurrences: many of the region's fisheries shut down when their stocks fell, the breakup of the Soviet Union sharply cut the amount of fertilizer in the sea, and another alien jellyfish, the Beroe ovata, which preys on the Mnemiopsis, not fish, was accidentally introduced to the water. "It's taken three separate events," Richardson says. "The point is you can't just stop overfishing and expect...
Starting in 2004, China attempted to introduce a "green GDP," adjusted to reflect the cost of pollution. By the time officials computed the costs of tainted rivers, smoke-filled skies, shattered ecosystems and strip-mined hillsides, their growth figures had dropped so dramatically - in some provinces they fell close to zero - that the proposal was quickly scrapped. By 2007 the effort had collapsed completely...
...even so, the lack of foresight seems breathtaking. Bombers were supposed to have softened up the German defenses, but they released their payloads too late - they were worried about hitting the landing parties - and missed the bunkers completely. Rockets were supposed to pound the beach from offshore, but they fell short. The German defenses were practically untouched. "All it's done is wake them up!" one officer remarked. That the assault on Omaha succeeded is due partly to shelling from nearby destroyers but mostly to the courage and determination of the infantry. That's one of the lessons of Antony...
Legend holds that the world's first marathon was run - unintentionally - in 490 B.C. by a Greek soldier, Pheidippides, who ran the 25 miles to Athens from the town of Marathon to announce a battleground victory over the Persians. "Greetings, we win!" he shouted - and then fell to the ground, dead. It would be more than 2,000 years before the marathon would make its return, at the revival of the modern Olympic Games in Greece in 1896. In that event, 17 runners ran 40 km, or 24.8 miles, with Greek runner Spyridon Louis taking the gold medal with...
...Dennis Archer Sr. tried to rebrand the Halloween period "Angels' Night." His police chief at the time, Isaiah McKinnon, recalls getting at least 30,000 people to turn on the lights of their homes and patrol their neighborhood's streets, to deter prospective arsonists. It worked: incidents of arsons fell sharply. "You felt a sense of relief," McKinnon says...