Word: regional
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...region most affected - and the one that affects the most - is the Mekong River Delta in the south. Water levels in the nation's rice bowl have fallen to their lowest points in nearly 20 years, threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of people who depend on the river basin for farming, fishing and transportation. The biggest problem, however, is not the water. It's the salt. During the dry season, when channels and tributaries run dry, seawater can creep more than 18 miles (30 km) inland. Vietnam has installed a series of sluice gates to hold back high...
Washington agrees with this urgency. In 2007, the Bush Administration approved $750 million to be spent in the Northwest Frontier Province over the next five years to catapult the poor, lawless region into the 21st century, creating schools and jobs and repairing the battered civil society. But because of fears that there were no safeguards to keep corrupt officials from siphoning off the funds, and because much of the region has been off-limits to aid workers due to militancy, only a tenth of that amount has been spent. Nor can aid wait: the U.N. reckons that over 1.63 million...
...interview with TIME at Chile's Squadron 10 air force base outside Santiago, where hundreds of troops waited to be shipped to Concepción to combat looting and social unrest, President Michelle Bachelet described how in the hours after the quake, a breakdown in communication in the region may have prevented warnings of a tsunami from reaching vulnerable populations. She said her office was not even aware of the danger of a tsunami until after it had washed ashore in many places. "All the communication was lost," she told TIME. "The first information about a tsunami that I received...
Initially, the death toll from the 8.8-magnitude quake was believed to have been caused by falling structures. But Bachelet said that information arriving from the coastal region suggested that the tsunami, which she said arrived 30 to 45 minutes after the quake in most places, was also responsible for the damage. "It was both," she told TIME. "In Juan Fernández, there was no earthquake, just a tsunami. We don't have exact [figures], but we know that people are dead because of the tsunami." (See how Asia recovered from the 2004 tsunami...
...total number of troops in the Concepción area will soon reach 7,000. Testimony from evacuees returning to Santiago at the Squadron 10 base suggested that looting had become a serious problem in the region. A team of U.S. officials were dispatched from the embassy to search for American citizens. (See why Chile's earthquake wasn't unexpected...