Word: begun
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...millenniums, China hardly touched the mighty Mekong, content to let its raging headwaters flow unimpeded from the Tibetan plateau down through Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But over the past few years, the emergent superpower has begun turning the world's 12th-longest river into a highway for regional commerce and a source of hydroelectric power. For many Indochinese entrepreneurs, increased China trade and investment has allowed a backward region to participate in their upstream neighbor's remarkable economic expansion. Southeast Asian governments hope China will share the electricity it will harness after a series of massive dams...
...inland waters worldwide come from this generous river, while 90% of the basin's residents are subsistence farmers who largely depend on the Mekong's nutrient-rich waters to feed their fields. Yet Chinese dams, along with engineering projects to make the river navigable by larger vessels, have begun to ravage the river's ecology by blocking sediment and producing unnatural water flows that dissuade fish migration and spawning. The nonprofit Southeast Asian Rivers Network estimates that fish stocks on the Thai-Laos border have already declined by half because of Chinese activity. Farmers, too, complain that the once-predictable...
...vast web of waterways that serves as a giant rice bowl, providing the nation with half of its total agricultural output. Yet in part because of the increasing number of dams reducing the flow of the river, salt water from the South China Sea has begun traveling up the Mekong. The influx of brackish water over the past few years has ravaged farms and fisheries. This spring in the delta's Mo Cay district, Nguyen Thi Hong and her husband watched helplessly as salt water infiltrated their fish farms and fields. During the worst 10-day stretch, 100 catfish died...
...those investors have turned shy, and banks and thrifts, which sell some loans and hold on to others, have begun regaining lost market share. Countrywide, the biggest mortgage lender in recent years, is trying to join them by moving more of its business to a bank it bought...
Traditionally, Castilla-León is Spain's breadbasket, its dry flatlands covered with wheat, barley and other grains that require little water. But in recent decades, farmers have begun switching to more profitable irrigated crops, unwittingly creating an alluring new habitat for the vole. "Since the late 1980s we have seen occasional cycles in which large numbers of voles, drawn by these new food sources, have appeared in the northern part of Castilla-León," says biologist Juan José Luque, a rodent specialist at the University of Valladolid. "What's extraordinary this year is that, instead...