Word: parching
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...regulars are gathered around the bar at Our Place, drinking cold colas to slake the Mojave Desert's midday parch, when somebody finally brings up the subject on everyone's mind: Erin Brockovich. "I remember the night the real Erin Brockovich walked in here," recalls bartender Lynn Tindell. "She was strutting her stuff. She knew all the guys were looking at her." Brockovich, as anyone who has seen the movie knows, was the sexy single mom who helped the residents of Hinkley, Calif., win a record $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating their well water with toxic...
...happens, of course, lawsuits are old hat for the American Indian. Most common are contested land titles-the phrasing itself has the ring of Indian argot: "clouded title." Then there are the occasional contested mineral rights. And now there are the very popular-here the parch in everybody's throat-contested water rights. In a region where you have to drill down practically to the Yangtze River to bring in a well, at a cost of $5 or $6 a foot, water is wealth. You rarely find surface water without finding Indians who found it first. This arrangement begets...
Thus it is hardly surprising that this liquid treasure is being eyed covetously by those less richly endowed, who live in what Michigan Governor William Milliken scornfully dubs the "parch-belt": the water-poor states of the West and the Sunbelt. Milliken and other Great Lakes Governors fear that as the need for water grows in these areas during the coming decade, there will develop a prodigious national thirst for Great Lakes water. Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfus goes so far as to predict that Great Lakes states, along with Ontario, could become "the OPEC of water...
...late. The Governors' group, due to meet again in late June, plans to recommend legislation to Congress by next fall, but thus far inaction is the order of the day. The afflicted states cannot even agree with one another, and unless they all march together, they will all parch separately. -By Richard Stengel...
...Italy being jobless does not carry the same stigma as in Northern European countries steeped in the Protestant ethic. "Let's put it this way," Sociologist Ferrarotti explains. "An unemployed youth in this country is considered to be just waiting for his right chance. He is in parchéggio (in a parking lot). He is not on trial and alone, as he would...