Word: aridity
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...Western officials have been concerned about for some time. Furthermore, the oil-rich yet impoverished sub-Saharan African nation sits on a religious fault line, its 150 million people split almost evenly between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south. Bin Laden is widely admired in the arid, Muslim north. It has become fashionable for some Muslims to name their sons after him, while his picture adorns T-shirts and posters. (Read "Terror on Flight 253: Does It Fit al-Qaeda's Pattern...
...west and northwest borders with Iran and Afghanistan, comprises more than 40% of Pakistan's landmass but less than 5% of its people. Its unforgiving deserts nearly annihilated the armies of Alexander the Great as they marched home. The native Baluch, descendants of nomadic tribes who roamed these arid wastes, number around five million and have for years complained of marginalization and mistreatment, particularly at the hands of the Pakistani military...
...Thakare, like nearly all the farmers in this arid region of Vidarbha in the state of Maharashtra, is dependent on India's annual monsoon to provide the water necessary to grow his cotton and soybeans. A failed monsoon meant disaster. Without the rain, the crops withered, and so did his primary source of income. Every year, all Thakare could do as the midyear planting season approached was wait and hope that the monsoon would deliver enough rain so he could support his family. (Read "Hungry? How About Some Protein-Rich Cotton...
...this is a novel about people who have wasted massive chunks of their lives--Duncan in sterile rock-critic hermeneutics (he's like the worst-case-scenario future of Rob Fleming from High Fidelity); Annie in a dead romance and a dead-end job; and Crowe in sulky, creatively arid seclusion. They're trying to make the best of what's left, but what's left just isn't that great. Juliet, Naked is a bleaker book than Hornby's A Long Way Down, and that was about four people trying to kill themselves...
...combination of international hype and local organizations who were ... selling seeds at very high prices claiming that they were special certified seeds when really they were just seeds collected from old trees in the wild," Newman says. The plants also did not do well in arid conditions. "[The plant] was more fragile, especially in its initial establishment phase, than we thought," says Jan Van den Abeele, executive director for Better Globe Forestry, a Nairobi-based group that studies optimal conditions for planting trees in dry areas. And many farmers had no buyers for their seeds. Some began giving them away...