Word: slakes
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...poem "Ode on Venice," Lord Byron prophesied a time "when thy marble walls/ Are level with the waters." By 1969, after nearly two decades of economic boom, the 19th century English poet's prediction seemed to be coming all too true. To slake the thirst of new industries on the mainland, some 20,000 wells were dug, tapping the water table that helps cushion Venice's more than 100 canal-cut islands. As a result, the fabled city of palaces and churches, frescoes and piazzas, began to sink at a frightening rate, gauged by scientists...
Sponsored by Prince Mohammed al Faisal, a nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, the conference demonstrated that there is no shortage of ideas for using icebergs to slake the world's growing thirst. Prince Faisal's own company, Iceberg Transport International, is considering a plan to find a 100 million-ton iceberg off Antarctica,* wrap it in sailcloth and plastic to slow its melting, and then use powerful tugboats to tow it to the Arabian peninsula, where it would supply enormous quantities of drinking water. The journey would take about eight months and the project would...
Perhaps the most famous Rhodesian military unit is the Selous Scouts (named for British Explorer Frederick Selous), a secret, mixed-race tracker group of about 300 men who are renowned for their ability to survive in the bush. If water is not available, they will slake their thirst by sucking moisture from the stomach of a slaughtered kudu, the graceful spiral-horned antelope. Black members of the Scouts have masqueraded as guerrillas in order to discover the political leanings of black villagers. Consequently, whenever the Salisbury government charges that innocent civilians have been tortured or murdered by guerrillas, the nationalists...
...decided to teach a moral lesson, a touching presumption. What his sermonette comes down to is that the wages of sin are sex, a lesson that he preaches with cloying sobriety and lengthy illustration. Spevlin employs all manner of props and partners (including a rather amiable snake) to slake her desires, but she pays for it all in the end. She is imprisoned in a windowless room (Sartre will surely be pleased to know that Damiano has dipped into No Exit). Her only companion is a jabbering paranoid who is too thoroughly spaced out to respond to her pleas...
...irrigation networks on the rivers feeding the landlocked Caspian and Aral seas have diverted so much water that the sea levels have dropped alarmingly over the past decade-by 10 ft. in the Aral alone. A scientist says that the only way to restore the Caspian Sea and to slake the "colossal thirst" of users along the way, is to turn rivers now flowing north to the Arctic Ocean southward. Some international scientists fear that without the usual supply of easily frozen fresh water reaching the northern seas, the polar icecap will recede-and the consequent melting will flood...