Word: desertion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nearly 20 years on, the crisis is far from over. Eight hundred thousand acres (2 million hectares) of grassland continue to turn into desert every year, and climate change, bringing yet more drought to dry land, hasn't helped. Still, if there hasn't been sweeping progress, there has been -for better and for worse - a lot of action. Beijing has sunk millions of dollars into the effort to stop the advance of the desert and has set up a system of laws to manage the land from afar; herders are being relocated and it's now forbidden to graze...
...also finding ways to generate income and create green solutions for the grasslands and, perhaps, for the rest of China - a country that needs clean energy more than any other. A team at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University is working in parts of the province near the Gobi Desert, planting sweet sorghum, a kind of grass that can be harvested by locals and sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy percent...
Wally's cooking method is designed to minimize the amount of water and wood needed to render the grains to perfection, but couscous is still an extravagance in the desert. And for Parisian couscous seekers, Wally Le Saharien is a rare oasis. 36, Rue Rodier...
...land from small decks and fly far inland to drop off combat-ready troops. As the Marines' Vietnam-era CH-46 choppers became obsolete, commanders started to dream of an aircraft that would give them more options when considering an amphibious assault. The dreams intensified following the failed Desert One mission in 1980 to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. In the course of the operation, three helicopters broke down, leading to an order to abort the entire endeavor, and a fourth chopper collided with a C-130 aircraft at a desert base, killing eight U.S. troops. That sent Pentagon bureaucrats...
There's also been controversy over a sandstorm test for the craft. The V-22's tendency to generate a dust storm when it lands in desert-like terrain wasn't examined because "an unusually wet spring resulted in a large amount of vegetation that prevented severe brownouts during landing attempts," the Pentagon's top tester noted. But the program continued, albeit with a caution about the aircraft's ability to fly in dusty conditions...