Word: desert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Living virtually without rain in a country that is 97% desert, Egyptians depend on the world's longest river for irrigation, electric power, drinking water and transportation. Now, after a decade of drought that has left parts of central Africa on the brink of starvation, the Nile is running perilously low. For the first time since the Aswan High Dam was finished in 1970, serious shortages of water and hydroelectric power threaten Egypt...
...hazy desert morning near Las Vegas, growling high-performance engines warn of unseen jet fighters. Images of war darken the imagination. Moments later four slender U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter-bombers are framed against a hot blue sky. From a distance they are lethal mosquitoes: stiletto nose, ! bulging belly, tightly angled wings. Passing over their target area, the fighters roll out into a curved line, vanishing behind a range of mountains. They are preparing to drop bombs on American soil, but groundlings needn't worry. The object is to dominate a point spread, not an enemy...
...water-skiing career by providing flying lessons at 16, is up. Circling a mile high around the mountains, Anderson suddenly dives to 200 feet to avoid "enemy" radar and screams at 600 m.p.h. toward the intended victim, an Army surplus M-47 tank having a bad day. The desert is a Jackson Pollock abstract, and Anderson is so low that when he is just four miles away, he can't see the tank. He searches for a clump of bushes named in briefings as a pretarget landmark. Reaching it, he tugs slightly on the F-16's stick...
...into a geyser. There's no sure way of telling. In social terms, the eruption of that sort of hatred could be ugly, violent, divisive. In practical terms, blatant anti-Semitism could result in a withdrawal of American tax dollars, leaving the nation that made a garden from a desert as vulnerable to its enemies as a flipped turtle...
...test tubes? Dyson issues a warning: "Genetic engineering must stop short of monkeying around irresponsibly with the species Homo sapiens." Beyond that restriction, beneficent marvels proliferate: "There are no laws of physics and chemistry which say that potatoes cannot grow on trees or that diamonds cannot grow in a desert...