Word: nile
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...white European supremacy. Paleohistorians agree that intelligent human life began in the Rift Valley of Africa. The Afrocentrist goes further: the African was the cultural father of us all. European culture derives from Egypt, and Egypt is part of Africa, linked to its heart by the artery of the Nile. Egyptian civilization begins in sub-Saharan Africa, in Ethiopia and the Sudan...
...enter a world of claims about technological innovation so absurd that they lie beyond satire, like those made for Soviet science in Stalin's time. Afrocentrists have at one time or another claimed that Egyptians, alias Africans, invented the wet-cell battery by observing electric eels in the Nile; and that late in the 1st millennium B.C., they took to flying around in gliders. (This news is based not on the discovery of an aircraft in an Egyptian tomb but on a silhouette wooden votive sculpture of the god Horus, a falcon, that a passing English businessman mistook some decades...
Such a disturbance of the monsoon would cause a major disaster. For instance, rains over the Ethiopian highlands supply 80% of the water that feeds the Nile. If those rains fell offshore, the tens of millions of people in that already drought-stricken region would suffer even more grievously. Parts of Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India could be similarly affected...
...seized power in 1952 and had vowed to unite the Arab world under his leadership. The Soviets encouraged him with arms and money. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles retaliated by canceling his promise to help finance the Aswan High Dam, which Nasser hoped would harness the Nile. Nasser struck back in July 1956 by seizing the Suez Canal, still legally owned by the Franco-British Suez Canal...
...safe from the effects of the water crisis, Egypt, in particular, faces hard times. The country's population of 55 million is growing by 1 million every nine months. Already the people must import 65% of their food, and the situation could grow far worse. The flow of the Nile, Egypt's only major water supply, will be reduced in coming years as upstream neighbors Ethiopia and Sudan divert more of the river's waters. Egypt's only practical course is to brake population growth and reduce the enormous amount of water wasted through inefficient irrigation techniques...