Word: ashli
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more pressing worry for the people of the gulf region is the unknown health effects of the pall of pollution. Not only have black smoke and ash darkened Kuwait's midday skies, but unburned and partially burned oil is also spewing from the wellheads. Someone standing near the al-Ahmadi oil field will find his shirt quickly covered with malignant black droplets that fall like an epoxy rain. The heat of the fires pushes much of the unburned oil high into the sky; it has rained down as far away as Qatar, 645 km (400 miles) to the south...
...border into Kuwait is like getting a preview of the apocalypse. In the distance greasy smoke spurts from torched oil wells, sending up dozens of black funnels that look like infernal tornadoes. Overhead the plumes merge to form a charcoal cloud that blocks out the sun. Flakes of white ash tumble from the sky like dry, malignant snow. "Some days are so dark," says a photographer who is covering the fires, "I have to use a flashlight at nine in the morning...
...plot revolves around two young British academics who seem ill suited to adventure. Roland Mitchell does plodding research on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash; Maud Bailey, a dedicated feminist, is interested in another 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte. (Neither Ash nor LaMotte existed, but Byatt creates excerpts from their imaginary poems and journals that bring them vibrantly alive.) Roland stumbles across a tantalizing fragment of evidence that the respectably married Ash and the spinster LaMotte may have had an illicit affair; such an event, if proved, would set the scholarly world on its ear. Before long, he and Maud...
This journey proves far more exciting than either anticipates. Competitors appear, with vested interests in the poets' reputations, who want Roland and Maud to fail. What is more, the investigators are drawn into a pattern that eerily resembles the story they are trying to piece together. Questions about Ash and LaMotte become questions about Roland and Maude...
...California, Juana Gutierrez and her 400-member Mothers of East Los Angeles are fighting a proposed toxic-waste incinerator slated for nearby Vernon, which every year would spew some 19,000 tons of potentially health- threatening ash on their community. Why, she asks, should East Los Angeles, poverty-pocked and largely Hispanic, be subjected to this environmental atrocity? "Why not Beverly Hills...