Word: aridity
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...serene beauty of the Samarian hills, the sweet-smelling orange groves of Jericho, the mellow light of the Old City of Jerusalem. There is an air of great antiquity about the place, as if history had paused there and left its indelible imprint. Gnarled olive trees cling to the arid slopes, and oxen and donkeys plow the terraced hillsides, much as they did when Jesus walked the paths of Palestine. In the evenings, women still gather at the village well to fill their earthen jugs, while in the thorny Judean hills, shepherds sing the same melancholy songs their ancestors...
...Jordan's monarch rules over an arid, oil-deprived, virtually landlocked country of 2.3 million inhabitants. The forces of history and geography have kept Jordan on the front line of the Middle East crisis for nearly four decades. Those same forces, along with Hussein's instinct for political compromise, have given his country a pivotal role to play in the search for peace...
With its short, catchy melodic fragments, simple chordal harmonies, rock-steady rhythms and virtually trance-inducing repetitions, the minimalist music of such composers as Reich, 45, Philip Glass, 45, and John Adams, 35, is directly emotional in its appeal, a deliberate rebuke to three decades of arid, overly intellectualized music produced by the post-war avantgarde. Although minimal music is often tightly organized, its objective is to create a mood in the listener, not to have him follow a complicated puzzle. Minimal music (the term is borrowed from the less-is-more visual-arts movement...
...reason the unions cooperated was that management shared the burden. During the past year, a number of News executives had their pay temporarily frozen or cut, arid more than 40 of them, including longtime Editor Michael O'Neill, 59, were eased out. More important, nearly all departures by union members were won voluntarily, and were accompanied by "golden handshakes" averaging more (sometimes much more) than $30,000 per person. Some senior reporters walked away with two or three years' pay. Total severance cost: nearly $50 million...
This year, however, many of the diamonds laboriously extracted from the arid Botswana earth will not be sold. They will instead be added to the growing De Beers stockpile of gems. The reason is that there is a worldwide glut of the precious gems. The vaults of diamond wholesalers are overflowing with rough as well as cut and polished stones, and the market for investment-grade diamonds has virtually collapsed. A rare one-carat D-flawless-grade stone that brought $62,000 at the peak of the market in 1980 is now worth only $15,000 or less, a decline...