Word: aridities
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...than other biofuel crops. Even better, the government said, jatropha needed little tending. All you had to do was stick it in the ground and watch it grow. Best of all for Kibwezi, a place that's frequently stricken by drought, scientists believed that the plant thrived on arid land. Convinced they could reap large profits from the plant in the global craze for alternative energy sources, hundreds of farmers turned over acres of their small farms to jatropha. But it didn't take them long to realize what scientists have come to realize in recent months: what was once...
...Imperial is practically the size of the territory it describes: Imperial County, in southwestern California, right on the Mexican border. It's a bizarre book, but then, Imperial is a bizarre place. Home to such oddities as Slab City and the Salton Sea, it's an arid region caught in a cycle of convulsive agricultural booms and busts driven by massive irrigation projects and abetted by copious supplies of undocumented immigrant labor. A combination history book, documentary, autobiography and topographical survey, Imperial is Vollmann's obsessive, strangely engrossing attempt to articulate the whole twisted truth of this scrap of cursed...
However, such programs are scarce in Mexico's many provincial prisons, where inmates have almost no help to kick the habits. Most of the 43 riots and 22 escapes this year were in prisons in the arid north of Mexico where the drug trade is concentrated. With thousands more cartel soldiers flooding into these same jails, pundits fear the worst may be yet to come. "Mexico's prisons are a powder keg," wrote syndicated Mexican columnist Hugo Sanchez Gudino. "Sooner or later they are going to explode...
Stunning changes in scenery, from savanna to kopjes (small hills) and rocky ridges, were one of the highlights of the journey, the landscapes all the more forbidding and arid because of the late arrival of the rainy season. Even though wildlife was relatively scarce, we still saw a wealth of fauna including greater kudu, the agile klipspringer antelope, fish eagles, the voracious ant lion and shy pancake tortoises. Added drama came from following elephant tracks, hearing a leopard grunt across a riverbank, speculating as to the whereabouts of a lone crocodile near our camp and scrambling up the rocky...
...Western diplomats worry that the security vacuum may allow foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda to move in. Osama bin Laden is widely admired in the arid north. It has become fashionable for Muslims to name their sons after him, while his picture adorns T-shirts and posters. In a speech in 2000, bin Laden named Nigeria as among "the region[s] most qualified for liberation." "Clearly there is a lot of concern in Washington with the idea that al-Qaeda can gain a foothold within the 65 million-strong Muslim population in northern Nigeria," says the U.S. official...