Word: aridity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Some of the letters' authors are as young as nine. Several have been locked up for three years or more, and their writings depict an arid dystopia of razor wire, beatings, attempted suicides and surveillance cameras?hopelessly remote from the great Australian dream of a swimming pool and backyard barbecue for all. A letter from an Iraqi embodies the pathos: "I am half dead... I am ashamed to tell you I really need some warm clothes and shoes if you please. They never give me anything in this three year [sic]." A 14-year-old Syrian wrote, "I am maybe...
...while the U.S. hunt for Saddam remained furious in the cities of Baghdad and Tikrit, American commanders told TIME they had picked up a rush of new intelligence that suggested Saddam was moving through the arid plains outside the northwestern city of Mosul, seeking sanctuary with Bedouin loyalists he hoped would defend him to the death. Locals have approached U.S. troops with so many unsubstantiated reports of Saddam's presence in the area that commanders refer to them as Elvis sightings. "He's out there in the desert," a powerful sheik in the town of Sinjar, 60 miles west...
...familiarizing more adults with language and liturgy, the trend helped fuel liberal Judaism's escape from a somewhat arid buy-Israel-bonds communalism into greater ritual and spiritual engagement. A case in point was Reform Judaism's 1999 public recommitment to the use of Hebrew in its services: "You've learned how to pray in Hebrew," says Rabbi Sue Ann Wasserman of Reform's Union of American Hebrew Congregations. "Why shouldn't you use it?" The women's group Hadassah periodically celebrates the ascendant rite with mass Bat Mitzvahs of as many as 122 women...
...forces continued to charge forward through the arid plains of central Iraq, but they were forced to defend their positions every step of the way. A fierce and somewhat unexpected enemy was the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Saddam's brutal son Uday that was dispatched by the regime to hide in cities and pick off invading forces. The militants stunned the allies with their will to fight, inflicting dozens of casualties on coalition troops. Allied commanders said late last week the coalition had killed hundreds of Fedayeen and had begun rooting them out of the cities. Early...
...King of Saudi Arabia, Abd-Al-Aziz ibn Saud, had authorized a team of American engineers to explore the trackless desert bordering the Persian Gulf, an arid landscape marked only by the occasional palm-fringed oasis. He hoped they would find water. A tribal leader with precarious finances, Ibn Saud believed the Americans might discover places where he could refresh his warriors' horses and camels. But the team, from Standard Oil of California, had something else on its mind. Oil had been discovered in other countries in the region, and the engineers thought they would find more in Saudi Arabia...