Word: semiarid
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...photograph that has caused the most excitement among scientists shows a 250-mile-long valley that resembles an arroyo (a water-cut gulley common in semiarid regions on earth). The valley is 3½ miles wide and has branching, streamlike tributaries that seem more likely to have been formed by water than by lava. "We are hard put to find a mechanism other than running water for these features," says Harold Masursky of the U.S. Geolog ical Survey. Although scientists agree that there is no free-flowing water on the Martian surface now, the sharp and uneroded features...
...last week, it teetered on the brink of civil war. The cause of its problems is the age-old struggle between three dominant tribal groups: the ambitious Ibos of the oil-rich Eastern Region; the ebullient Yorubas of the cocoa-growing West; the feudal Hausas and Fulani of the semiarid "Holy North." Their differences are basic and, unfortunately, all too typical of the tribal divisions that plague other African nations. The Northerners are rigid Moslems, suspicious of outsiders, wary of progress, ruled by reactionary emirs whose palaces are made of mud and whose law is adamantine...
With victory in their grasp, the Northerners' first idea was to secede and form their own independent state. After a flurry of long-distance telephone conferences, however, and heavy diplomatic pressure from the West, they were persuaded that the backward, semiarid North would be hard put to go it alone without the natural resources of the South and the skills of the Southerners. Agreeing to one more try at nationhood, they named a 31-year-old lieutenant colonel, Yakubu Gowon, as Nigeria's new supreme commander...
Enter a Mongol. On the fifth day of T. V.'s mission another visitor suddenly arrived from the East: Marshal Kharloin Choibalsan, Premier of the Mongolian People's Republic (Outer Mongolia), the vast, semiarid, herd-rich heartland of Central Asia. Like T. V., Marshal Choibalsan deplaned at the central airport. Like T. V., he was greeted by Molotov, a guard of honor and national music. Like T. V., he conferred with Stalin...