Word: desertic
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...Tuesday: Some 29 people, including at least eight Americans are reported to have been killed in three coordinated suicide bombing attacks on heavily-guarded compounds housing foreigners in Riyadh. The attack was not wholly unexpected. On May 1, the State Department had warned Americans to stay away from the desert kingdom, citing intelligence reports of a terrorist attack in the final stages of preparation. Just last week, Saudi security officials uncovered a cell comprising some 19 al-Qaeda members allegedly planning attacks on the royal family (the suspects managed to elude capture after a shootout). Also last week, self-styled...
...targeted with great precision. Then as U.S. ground troops approached, the Republican Guard generally fled. Many of them appear to have acted on their own, motivated by fear and self-preservation. In Baghdad, according to a high-ranking Republican Guard officer interviewed by TIME, troops were actually instructed to desert. This may help explain why the members of the Special Republican Guard, deployed within Baghdad as the Iraqi regime's ultimate defenders, put up virtually no resistance to the American takeover of the city, as they felt the entire elite-forces structure collapsing around them...
...before the first Gulf War. Back then, the U.S. had maintained a close military relationship, in terms of training, arms supply and so on, that stretched back decades without causing the sort of domestic political problems that have accompanied the stationing of U.S. troops inside the kingdom since Operation Desert Shield. Now they can revert to that relationship, because the demise of Saddam means the official reason for the U.S. troop presence no longer exists...
...range the raw and diverse geography created by erosion, volcanism and shifting tectonic plates. If you start at Zabriskie Point (a setting for Michelangelo Antonioni's film and the best place in the valley to watch the sun rise), you can trek down 2.8 miles past pale blue-green desert holly shrubs, sun-drenched yellow badlands, the fluted walls of Red Cathedral and the pinnacle of stately Manley Beacon and end up at the base of Golden Canyon--named for its radiance in the morning light...
...change of scene, you can saunter along the lengthy peaks of the Sand Dunes near Stovepipe Wells, where desert winds have deposited grains of mountain quartz in a beach-like expanse that covers 15 sq. mi. Or you can visit Devil's Golf Course, where wind and rain have shaped the silt of ancient saltwater lakes into surreal crystallized salt pinnacles. And there's no place better to observe the tectonic forces that shaped Death Valley than at Badwater, the lowest place in the valley (and on the continent), where a salt-and-silt bog hundreds of feet below...