Word: ni
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...Niño, a reference to the Christ Child, is a warm current of equatorial water that usually appears off the coast of South America around Christmas. Its impact on annual weather patterns is generally minor. But the present El Niño began late in the spring of 1982, when atmospheric pressure at the western edge of the Pacific inexplicably began to rise, while air pressure was dropping along coastlines in the Americas. The resulting pressure gap reduced the strength of the Pacific trade winds, which normally blow warm surface waters westward, away from the Americas. As air-pressure...
Meteorologists suspect that droughts in India, Mexico, southern Africa and the Philippines are attributable to El Niño, the Pacific current that may also account for this spring's record rains in California. But El Niño does not explain the aridity of northeastern Brazil, where rainfall this year is running at one-eighth its normal rate. In most afflicted areas, paralyzing dryness is, alas, endemic. Explains Roman Kintanar, president of the World Meteorological Society: "What we have right now is just one of the vagaries of weather...
Right now, one of the few things relieving some of the pressure on the Mexican government seems to be a widespread attitude of ni modo, a fatalist mood of "nothing can be done about it." Even labor unions are not optimistic about getting big wage increases. They had been asking for a 50% hike but probably will get only 20% at best, even though inflation has chopped the buying power of the average worker by 60%. Working union members seem happy enough just to have jobs. Two weeks ago, attempts to get a general strike off the ground fizzled. While...
Whatever the explanation for this year's outbreak of crazy weather, scientists feel that the basic puzzle of El Niño and the southern oscillation is worth exploring. Last month more than 100 scientists gathered at Scripps to discuss the meteorological disturbances. The National Science Foundation is already spending $6 million for related oceanographic studies. Under consideration is a major, ten-year international investigation that would call for additional monitoring of Pacific water and atmospheric conditions. Scientists think that the money for the project would be well spent, since the events off South America affect not only local...
...Model, 76, tough-minded, Austrian-born U.S. photographer whose best-known work was of unlovely, often grotesquely fat people whom she caught at moments of great vitality, conferring on them an intense confrontational power; of heart and lung disease; in New York City. Her early photos of Parisians and Niçois, which she brought with her to the U.S. in 1938, impressed American critics and were soon included in a Museum of Modern Art show, the first of many. "I am attracted to enormous forms," she once said of her work. "If I go to an aquarium, I love...