Word: metrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spoils are huge. "We estimate about 400 metric tons of cocaine are moving through the Central American corridor, meaning most of it would go through Guatemala," says U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, Stephen McFarland. That makes for a business worth over $7 billion, based on the National Drug Intelligence Center's estimated average wholesale price of cocaine in Los Angeles...
Today that statement seems wishful thinking. In the third quarter, for the first time, transactions on eBay's marketplace, a key metric of growth, fell 1%, to $14.3 billion, from a year ago. The strength and popularity of Google's search, Amazon's sales and the sheer number of other Web retail sites have eroded eBay's dominance, making it harder to compete with the same business model that steered the firm through its first 10 years of jaw-dropping growth. Three years ago, eBay boasted 30% more traffic than Amazon, but today its 84.5 million active users scarcely best...
...southern Australia, the heart of the country's $30 billion agricultural economy. Even in good times, Murray-Darling receives as little as 10 in. of rain a year, but 70% of the country's irrigation resources flow to the basin, creating a fertile desert able to produce 1.2 million metric tons of water-thirsty rice, among other crops...
...good times, however, are gone. Last year the government allocated zero irrigation to the basin's farmers, and they produced just 18,000 metric tons of rice, the lowest yield since 1927. "No one around here has ever seen conditions like this," says rice grower Les Gordon, standing on the cracked ground of his 4,000-acre farm near the town of Barham...
While the school collapses have been in the news in the last week, the country is still drowning in the aftermath of the storms. Gonaives, the country's third largest town, was the hardest hit and is still buried under 3 million metric tons of mud. Medecins San Frontiers (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) has set up mobile clinics, distributed water and constructed a temporary hospital in Gonaives, since the government hospital was completely destroyed during Hurricane Hannah in late August. In hard-to-reach areas, however, malnutrition is growing and the food supply shrinks. Daily food insecurity affects...