Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...biggest Hollywood blockbuster can't compare to rainy season in Asia. The air around you suddenly thickens. The sky blackens and crackles with lightning. Then comes the rain, humbling in its ferocity, crashing earthward as a near-solid wall of water. I live in Bangkok, where the monsoon is now reaching a crescendo, and every day I watch the greatest show on earth through my office window...
...Three Asian capitals - Bangkok, Jakarta and Dhaka - are currently fighting what feels like a rearguard action to keep the water at bay. Their efforts will be watched in other cities waking up to a climate nightmare after years of unplanned growth. The threat of sea-level rise and flooding makes Bangkok a "climate hazard hotspot," says a May report by the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) in Singapore. I prefer an older description: "the Venice of the East." Most early Bangkok residents moved by boat between floating houses; it was not until 1863 that the city...
...Bangkok feels high and dry compared to Jakarta. This year, in January, when the rainfall is heaviest, the U.S. embassy in Jakarta advised its citizens to stock up on food and water, keep cell phones charged and gas tanks at least three-quarters full, and exercise caution when driving through "small rivers." It's the sort of travel advisory you'd expect for negotiating an untamed wilderness, not a city of more than 12 million souls. Damage from a deadly 2007 flood cost Jakarta half a billion dollars - ironically, roughly the same cost as an unfinished project designed to prevent...
...with the flow, suggests Habib. Don't erect futile barricades against the water; instead, control its path through the city. "You can't fight nature," he told me. "It fights back." Until the 1960s Dhaka had many lakes and waterways that stored and drained floodwater, but - as in Bangkok and Jakarta - these were filled in and built over as the population exploded. Protect the surviving waterways and re-excavate historic ones, says Habib, and Dhaka will flood less...
...Teaming with lyricist Tim Rice (who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita with Andrew Lloyd Webber), they produced Chess as a two-disc album in 1984. The stage version spawned three Top 10 hits - "One Night in Bangkok," "Nobody's Side" and "I Know Him So Well" - and impressed many listeners as having the richest score of the decade. Or, he added defiantly, any decade since. Andersson, who had shown a mastery of the pop idiom as composer of the music for the ABBA songs (Ulvaeus wrote the words), tapped a symphonic romanticism that wedded Richard Rodgers to the brassier...