Word: aridity
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...spill endangers marine life as well as industrial installations along the shoreline. The gravest threat is to the huge desalination plants that Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the other arid nations depend on for their drinking water. From Saudi Arabia to the Straits of Hormuz last week, armies of workmen were ringing the shore with floating plastic booms designed to protect the plants' intake valves. Meanwhile, panicky shoppers in Qatar went on a hoarding spree, pushing the price of bottled mineral water to almost $1 a liter-more than five times the OPEC price for crude oil. Officials from Iran...
...entire eastern half of Australia is thirsting through a wasting drought that is in many regions the worst in the history of the world's most arid continent. Already, the "Great Dry" has devastated 90% of New South Wales, which is now in its 45th month of drought, and 95% of the state of South Australia, Dubbo, a typical rural town, averages 25.5 in. of annual rainfall. Last year it had 2.3 in. In many areas seeds cannot germinate; in others the regal Murrumbidgee River is nothing but a stagnant puddle. Dust storms have enveloped Melbourne and, five weeks...
There is no Hitler in today's world, in Helms' view. The adversary is many men, many nations arid many systems. The measures of strength are economic as much as military. But the basic challenge, believes Helms, remains unchanged: how to preserve freedom while preventing war. The world failed with Hitler. It has succeeded for nearly four decades since World War II, largely through U.S. strength and resolve. Now doubt assails us again...
...exercise." With those brusque dismissals, Dirk Mudge, 55, a blunt-spoken rancher and politician, rang down the curtain last week on the latest act in southern Africa's longest-running shadow play: progress, or more accurately the lack of it, toward independent self-government for the vast and arid territory of Namibia. For more than three decades, South Africa has ruled Namibia in defiance of world opinion and United Nations resolutions. For the past four years Mudge and fellow members of his multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.) exercised nominal authority over local affairs in the territory...
...decent human being. Ditto the rest of the staff (exemplary actors all) at the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners. Call it cul-de-sac for short. "Teaching foreigners is a job for failures," says one. Still, in a period of four years, life does seep into the arid crevices of their existence. There are births, marriages, deaths, philanderings and conversions...