Word: rains
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...past the egregious humiliations of the Cultural Revolution. Because the main characters who reflect and endure these tumultuous times are performing artists -- two stars of the Peking Opera, stalwart Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) and comely Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) -- the movie conjures up dozens of American movies, like Singin' in the Rain and For the Boys, in which popular entertainers put aside their differences before they put on the greasepaint. There is, of course, a pretty woman to fight over, Xiaolou's girlfriend (Gong Li). There is the elegance of stage art compromised by the humility of life beyond the footlights. There...
...United Nations and World Bank sponsored the Tropical Forestry Action Plan to sustain forests, but instead the plan spurred further deforestation. When asked by an environmentalist what he meant by sustainable, a World Bank agronomist replied, "Fifty years of timber production." Even the rubber tappers of Brazil's Amazon rain forest, who along with their martyred leader, Chico Mendes, became symbols of the sustainable use of tropical forests, overexploit their ecosystem. Writing in the journal BioScience, John Browder notes that in search of food and sources of cash, these seringueiros can kill off wildlife and cut forests as much...
...sustainable use. "If you are interested in development, you cannot get there by doing conservation, simply because the most diverse ecosystems are usually not the most productive in human terms." This means that development almost always brings losses of biological diversity. Instead of preserving the variety of a rain forest, for example, humans have the urge to chop down the trees and plant uniform crops...
...qualify as peace in the Balkans. The focus was on ethnic Serbs battering ethnic Muslims. No longer. Muslim residents of Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, are not preoccupied with Serb attempts to seize the eastern part of the once graceful city. Brutal street battles now flare as the Croats rain artillery fire on the Muslim districts, killing scores of residents and forcing thousands of others to flee for their lives...
...woodland garden, resurrected an old pond and created a wildflower meadow. Author of the new book Noah's Garden, Stein decries "the vast, nearly continuous and terribly impoverished ecosystem" consisting of copycat lawns and gardens from coast to coast. "We cannot in fairness rail against those who destroy the rain forest or threaten the spotted owl," she says, "when we have made our own yards uninhabitable...