Word: aridity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...read the newspapers, hoping to learn something more about this war, this total war, this war against terrorism, that we are fighting. But only two images haunt my waking and sleeping; the smoldering tomb of 2,905 souls (at the latest count) at Ground Zero, and the arid Afghan landscape, starkly beautiful in my mind (and in the words of the press). In both my images, there are no people, in one because they are interred in concrete, in the other, because Afghanistan has been described to us so many times as a harsh, inhospitable land...
...Before the productivity miracle of the mid-nineties, Greenspan himself was used to catching hell from politicians who always felt that the economy could grow faster - and employ more voters - without fostering inflation. Behind supposedly arid terms like "sustainable growth" is the assumption that for the economy to work at peak efficiency, a certain amount of people must be out of work...
...pegged features, and shoe-leather research pieces like the New York Times' barrage of census stories. One of those landed so high on the page last week that Scott Shuger, longtime author of Slate's Today's Papers, dubbed it "an August news drought classsic." Television, meanwhile, scours the arid landscape for naturally sprouting (and hopefully telegenic) phenomena like the heat, sharks, or Al Gore's beard. On a good day, says Washington Post media maven Howard Kurtz, "they're hoping for a tropical storm that turns into a hurricane...
People can relocate; an endangered species cannot. It is arrogant and incredibly stupid for people to move onto arid land and then assume they can basically steal the water from any source, at any cost, for their own selfish interests. GLENN M. SCOTT Newport News...
...almost legendary in the West: pure opium. The drug is grown mainly by the hill tribes who came south from Yunnan, China, in the last century and brought a taste for the black, inebriating tar with them. Tribes like the Aka and Hmong cultivate the crop in the otherwise arid highland climate, and bring it down to sell to Vietnamese dealers in the main towns. Ton pays about $20 for a wax-paper sheet of opium, 6 mm thick and as wide as his hand. Broken down into the individual pipe loads he prepares for foreigners, that nets...