Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...This could have been a standard tale of adventure in an exotic land, interspersed with equally routine ruminations on the inner turmoil of the war reporter. It is Mealer's gift that even when he is covering what is, journalistically, well-worn territory - the fog of war, the addictive and atrophied life of a combat reporter - his writing is not only fresh but empathetic. There can be few more obscure battles than the struggle between the Hema and the Lendu in Bunia. However, with Mealer as a guide, the names of those two warring communities become as familiar and accessible...
...Uganda. In fact, precisely because it is so varied, the small east African country is a good example of how WFP's worldwide operations have been hit by high food prices. WFP buys more food in Uganda than in any other country in the world. Most of the land is lush and fertile, and the government is stable; President Yoweri Museveni has ruled since 1986. Last year WFP's administrative center in the capital city Kampala, then responsible for 11 countries in eastern and central Africa, handled some 15 million recipients and about one-third of WFP's annual global...
...fluid that leaks out of weakened blood vessels - that medical staff have trouble finding veins for the IV lines needed to fight malaria or other opportunistic infections. But on the other hand, there has always been the risk that long-term food aid simply encourages populations to stay on land that can no longer sustain them...
...Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns. There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does - and it's delivered the goods...
...those chemicals have consequences far beyond the immediate area. When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land, the chemicals enhance the rapid development of algae in the water. When the algae die and decompose, the process sucks all the oxygen out of the surrounding waters, leading to a hypoxic event - better known as a "dead zone." The water becomes as barren as the surface of the moon. What...