Word: droughts
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...North America. Hailstones the size of tennis balls last week bombarded France, a country whose precious vacation time has been marred of late by blazing springs, cool summers and snowless ski slopes. Farmers in western Queensland, Australia, are currently suffering through the state's longest and most widespread drought. New Delhi recorded ^ its hottest day in more than 40 years in June; Rome last week had its hottest day of this century. Torrential rains have become so severe in Hong Kong that meteorologists coined a new term -- black rainstorm alert -- to signal their approach. Weather-related losses at Lloyd...
...this year may actually be a return to conditions that seemed quite ordinary only a few years -- or a few decades -- earlier. The heavy precipitation that fell in the West last Christmas, for example, seemed like a return to the rainy winters of the early 1980s, before the recent drought set in. Similarly, hurricanes like Andrew may hark back to the storms that lashed the East Coast in the 1940s and '50s. As strange as the weather may seem this week, it hasn't produced anything like the tale of the tornado that traveled over a Southern lake...
...month, under threat of increasing federal intervention, the Texas legislature passed a bill empowering the state to regulate and manage the withdrawal of groundwater in Edwards Aquifer. The state will now devise a plan for equitable water distribution that will enable the springs to flow even in times of drought, while protecting the delicate ecosystem that provides that water. "This is a spectacular success," says Babbitt, "a really remarkable evolution in which a small fish facing extinction triggered a lawsuit, which triggered a legislative response that is now going to work for the benefit of everybody in Texas...
Forcing Mandela and De Klerk to compromise is the recognition that time is running out for South Africa's once mighty economy. Apartheid cost the country millions in lost investment. Since 1990, some 500,000 jobs have been wiped out by recession, drought and violence. With South Africa heading toward its fourth straight year of zero growth, the repair task will be that much harder...
...Barbara Humberger of Austin began going native in 1989 after an unusual cold spell killed many of the nonnative shrubs that surrounded her lakeside home. Her property shimmers with blackfoot daisies that bloom from early spring until the first fall frost. UCLA neurologist Andrew Charles wanted an attractive but drought-resistant cover for the steep hillside behind his house. His solution was to plant deep-rooted California lilacs punctuated by the orchid-like blossoms of sticky monkey flowers...